Thursday, November 15, 2012

Where have I been

We had a fire a week ago. Woke up at 3:45 am to people running down the hall banging on doors and yelling fire. Jumped up threw on some pants and shoes to find a blaze roaring across a couple of buildings down the row. A couple of soldiers trying to fight it with fire extinguishers, not making any progress. We don't have a fire department, had some fire fighting equipment but no training. The little fire mule spent its load in minutes with no measurable effect. We did have a small fire truck but didn't have much luck getting it to work. By this time the ammo in the building started to cook off and we had to pull back. Had several vehicles parked in front of the building but their keys were in the building. They started to melt, so we tried dragging them away from the flames. It was a constant battle, thought we were going to lose the entire row of buildings, but we got crews working on all 4 corners and I was running to each station to direct traffic. We got in touch with the afghan unit and their fire truck. They got up here and the truck was empty so had to send them to get water. We were able to keep the adjacent building wet down and started pulling down the inter-connector to stop the spread. We got a water tanker from the afghan army about 6 in the morning and used it to suppress the fire. I was pretty horse by the time we got it under control, I didn't even tie my shoes for the first hour. The fire mule was smoking, too close to the fire, I jumped on it and drove it out of the way, it wasn't until the next day that I realized how hot it was, melted one side, lucky I didn't stick to the seat. It took 5 days to restore power, just got the site cleaned up today. Don't know how long it will take to rebuild. I could have went the entire deployment without that excitement.

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