After Fire

The first time I went into a burning house, I still believed I was a hero. It was a two-story family home close to our station. I remember stepping off the engine, shouldering the hose load, kneeling in the front yard as I tightened my face mask and the hose line swelled with water. Then I was at the top of the stairs, water blasting through insulation that dropped onto our helmets in a gray slurry of smoke and steam. Under the roar of water hitting drywall at 150 gallons per minute, I could hear the deep snapping of the fire eating through bedroom furniture and the tongue-and-groove ceiling. 

An obstacle barred us from pushing forward any further. I reached out with gloved hands and felt something soft: a hip, a belly, an elbow, pajamas. A man, unconscious. We quickly dragged him to the stairway landing, where another crew met us, pulling him into the yard. 

After knocking down the fire, my partner and I emerged from the house soaked and sooty. Our elation quickly churned under as we saw the still form on the lawn. We had gone from being asleep in our station dorms to entering the front door of the house in less than five minutes, and tonight that was not fast enough. Not enough is a feeling you come to know intimately as a firefighter. It is our deepest collective fear: to be inadequate in the moment when someone else needs you to save them. 

I first knew I wanted to pursue a career in public service in my teens, when I imagined I would teach high school civics. Later, disillusioned by the echo chamber of my liberal arts college, I grasped for something more concrete and stumbled across a weeklong firefighting camp for teenage girls at the Washington State Fire Training Academy. At nearly twenty years old, I barely squeaked in. They really let us rock at that camp: running chainsaws, cutting open cars, fighting live fire, crawling through blacked-out search mazes, climbing a hundred-foot aerial ladder. When I stood feet from a roaring fire, protected only by a plastic face mask and a curtain of water, I knew this was it: immediate satisfaction. I wouldn’t need to wait for five, ten, or twenty years to know if I’d made an impact on young folks in the classroom. I’d work outside and use my hands. The days would be unpredictable and sometimes perilous. This was the ultimate way to serve: to give to the community and myself. 

When people find out you’re a firefighter, they often ask the same question: What’s the worst call you’ve ever been on? Their eyes shine in anticipation of tales of decapitation, jumpers, self-immolation, or the hot tangle of a car crash. For me, that sort of call is not the most heartbreaking. Much worse is hearing the howl of a parent who has lost their child, stopping CPR on someone years younger than you, or having someone ask with a world of fear and hope in their eyes if their loved one will be okay and having to respect them with an honest answer. Those calls make you want to crack open, as one more ghost invites itself into the box you carry. You know this is a moment you’ll relive, unbidden. And yet even these are not the worst things I have seen. 

The worst calls I have been on are the ones where we bear witness to the slow grind of poverty, chronic disease, mental illness, unimaginable loneliness, and the chaos of years scrambled by drugs. The worst calls are the ones where a year of intensive training and ten years of response experience still leave me empty-handed, solutionless, and knowing we will return to this person time and time again. 

Lifting someone off the floor who has lain there for hours, unable to stand on their own and wet with old urine. Placing them onto their deeply yellowed bedding and leaving them to fall again after changing them into a dry diaper. Smelling the sweet rot of food, the eye-watering tang of cat urine, the fruity smell of high ketones, or the bite of an undiagnosed urinary tract infection. Following a frail voice to a bedroom or bathroom to assist someone racked with chronic pulmonary obstructive disease, type 2 diabetes, and congestive heart failure as their breath rattles shallowly through oxygen tubing. Knowing where to find the peanut butter, bread, and knife because you’ve made a sandwich to boost blood sugar in this kitchen before. Watching someone slowly lose parts of their body to the ravages of diabetes, whittled away amputation by amputation. Being able to offer only a crinkly metallic space blanket in response to a plea for shelter from 40-degree rain. And always, the slow assisted shuffle out to the ambulance, an endless ritual of hope—hope that a solution to decades and generations of destitution might lie at the end of the transport, like a pot of gold. 

Firefighting can be exhausting work. A fire hose can take you off your feet if you let it. We go up stairs or vertical exterior ladders with enough gear that, for some of us little ones, we’re carrying over half of our body weight in equipment. Most of us have some combination of carpal tunnel syndrome, a bad back, and knee and hip pain. All of us have nightmares from time to time, and none of us truly know the long-term effects of chronic sleep deprivation. We have higher cancer rates than many other occupations, which seems obvious considering our exposure to toxins. Our protective equipment leaches PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals,” when it heats up or gets knocked around—that is, in the course of regular use. A house fire really opens your pores, rolling out the welcome mat for carcinogens. But these risks go along with the job, and we prepare for them to the extent that we can.

We did not know to prepare for the grind of desperate calls for help getting up off the floor; requests for assistance in managing chronic disease in conjunction with a lack of housing or health care; or wrangling someone in the throes of psychosis, organic or chemical in nature. Each shift, the same cries for help come from a different home, a different street corner, a different apartment. Even the truly time-sensitive emergencies—house fires, people hit by cars, cardiac arrests—clearly burden some parts of the city more than others. Over time, seemingly unpredictable emergencies reveal themselves to be both preventable and predictable. 

I was never comfortable with the frequent thanks we received for our service or the occasional roadside salute as we drove by. I wondered whether people understood that so much of our work was to bear witness to suffering that we could not meaningfully affect. My own desperation to understand the origins of this suffering eventually led me to public health school. 

School taught me that the work of first responders is intertwined with our nation’s history: with which communities have been supported to live peaceful, healthy lives, and which have not. The fire service exists because, in the past, a candle in a window that set a pair of curtains alight could take down entire city blocks. It was a selfless answer to a very real collective problem. The emergency medical services owe their existence to Freedom House Ambulance, which emerged in Pittsburgh in 1967 as one community’s answer to the city’s insufficient and often racist first-aid response. With all-Black crews, Freedom House served its community with dedication and elevated in-street medical care nationwide and around the world, creating the template for the modern paramedic. 

The work of first response is deeply necessary, and firefighters earn their wages honestly. Houses burn, cars crash, people fall, and people hurt each other, both intentionally and inadvertently. Firefighters train relentlessly their first year, and regularly throughout their careers, to hone the skills necessary to show up and offer hope where it’s needed. The devotion to respond capably to mechanical crises is the foundation of the fire service. Yet not all of our crises are mechanical in nature. 

Addressing addiction, poverty, neglect, and discrimination is not as simple as putting water on a fire or knowing how to cut and bend a car to remove a person without further crushing them; how to transfer a broken body to an ambulance as swiftly and safely as possible; or how to use compressions to create a vacuum in the chest that enables circulation when the heart is not beating. These problems have known solutions, yet we are also asked to respond to older and deeper problems that have nowhere else to go but a 911 operator.

I feel grief as I move further away from my identity as a firefighter—an identity I spent much of my adult life pursuing and take immense pride in. Our identities weave us together, telling us who and why we are. The latter shapes the former: my reason for becoming a firefighter was to serve as one small piece of the public safety system, to make our community safer by showing up when asked. I still very much believe in that. But I have learned to listen better and not to expect the most downtrodden people in our communities to be able to rise up out of the ashes. It became impossible for me to separate public safety from public health. The mark of success in public health is the absence of a collective catastrophe. Prevention isn’t as sexy as heroism, but being a public servant doesn’t mean choosing how, when, or who you serve; it means addressing the crisis that exists.

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