At 1:30 AM the other night at the fire house, our
engine was dispatched on what is called a service run. Basically, that means we
have a call that isn't an emergency, but the person who called 911 didn't know
how to handle whatever fix he found himself in. This call, we soon learned, was
a water problem. And by water problem, I mean water was pouring through the
ceiling into this guy's apartment from the apartment above.
Yes, people call 911 for everything.
Anyway, we told the guy to call his landlord and he
said his landlord didn't answer. He also said that the upstairs resident didn't
answer when he pounded on her door.
Although we aren't plumbers and this was anything
but a life-or-death emergency, we figured we'd try and help. We went into the
basement and turned off the water to the offending apartment which after a
couple of minutes stopped the heavy flow of water into the caller's apartment.
But that wasn't the end of the call. What if the
water was from an overflowing bathtub and someone was injured or worse?
We needed to check.
Before we bashed down the door, we tried knocking
and yelling with no response. Our last attempt before smashing in the door was
to check for an open window. Luckily, one of the windows was cracked open and, since
we are the fire department, we happened to have a ladder.
I sent the new guy up the ladder so he could open
the door for the rest of us. He shouted into the room before he climbed through
the window which was a good thing. We wouldn't want him to have a run-in with a
dog, or a gun, or both. He found his way through the dark apartment to the
front door and let us in for our search.
The old, weathered hardwood floors were flooded with
at least two inches of water. I felt a little on edge walking into her hallway
with a flashlight. I have to tell you, I had a little hesitation as I walked
through the hallway in anticipation of what I might find in the next room.
That's because a few years ago, I was doing the
exact same thing after a woman called and asked us to check on her family
member since she hadn't talked to him and was worried that he had been
depressed. When I went into this guy's basement, I turned the corner from the
stairs and almost walked face-first into his body. hanging from the rafters. It
didn't take much experience to realize he had been dead for quite awhile. The
only way I can explain walking into something like that is comparing it to
seeing a ghost. Not in a spiritual way, but in a surreal, somewhat creepy and unexpected
way.
But back to the other night. As three of us sloshed
through the apartment and rounded the hall to the bedroom, we found a young
lady lying unconscious on the bed. She was as naked as the day she was born,
but that didn't seem too out of the ordinary since it was very hot and humid
outside and the apartment didn't have air conditioning.
My first reaction was that she was dead, or had OD'd
or something of that nature since we had made a ton of noise getting into the
apartment. One of the other two firefighters shouted, "Hey," with no
reply. I dug through my bunker pants for a pair of gloves so I could check her
pulse and sent someone for our EMS kits. The other firefighter shouted,
"Hey" again and this time the lady nearly jumped through the ceiling
with a screech that startled the hell outta me. She screamed over and over,
"What are you doing in here?" like a vinyl on permanent skip.
We turned away as she wrapped herself in a blanket.
I tried to explain why we were in her apartment, but her panicked shouting drowned
out my voice. Calmly and repeatedly, we told her to relax and that we were the
fire department. Slowly, she settled down. With her mood changing from panic to
embarrassment and ultimately to understanding, I
explained, "You've left water running somewhere and you're flooding your
downstairs neighbor." I told her we would step out of the apartment to
give her some privacy while she gathered herself and that she could come out
and talk to me when she was ready.
When she eventually came out, she was obviously
embarrassed, as anyone would be. We talked for a few minutes and I apologized
for scaring her.
That wasn't our last call of the night, but
definitely the strangest. To make our night even more odd, we were called for
another service run where a young lady had taken out her trash and locked
herself out of her apartment. Making things worse, she had two young babies
still inside. Luckily, she too had a slightly opened upstairs window for us to climb
through.
That's
the way the fire department works sometimes. In the last year I haven't had a
single call where we needed to climb into someone's window (other than if their
house was on fire, that is), yet last shift we did it twice during one night. All
in all, it was an interesting evening, with no fires and no injuries—just a lot
of ladder climbing, a naked lady and 2 babies oblivious of the goings on in
their homes.
