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I wasn't able to get them to easily transfer onto DW, but I have a few photos of yesterday's fire on my blog:
http://markrhunter.blogspot.com/2015/11/barn-burner.html
Some photos from yesterday’s fire on my blog … a bad day for everyone.
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It’s not workable to wear air packs at wildland fires, but you can usually stay out of the worst of the smoke if you’re careful. I wasn’t.
Sunday we responded to a fire that burned into a field and a pine woods. After getting the brush truck stuck (my 4WD success ratio sucks) I ended up in the woods, and underestimated the amount of smoke while working my way to the front of the fire.
It wasn’t too bad … except it appears that one of my many allergies is pine trees, and the smoke was from burning pine wood and needles. I spent all day Monday with a sore throat, raspy breath, wheezing, irritated eyes, and itchy skin. It was like watching a political debate. But I slept through most of it (the allergies, not the debate—well, the debate too), because that’s what Benadryl does to me.
So from a “routine” ground cover fire I got smoke inhalation, while another firefighter had singed hair, and a third a cut head. What lesson do we take from this?
You never know what’s going to go wrong. Not an original lesson, but still.
Not the same fire, Emily took this a few years ago -- I was busy both times.
Hopefully today’s rain will cut down on ground cover fires for awhile, and hopefully without severe storms. And hopefully without an earthquake, like Missouri just had. Worst case scenario: an earthquake during a forest fire, with a funnel cloud touching down to make a fire tornado. The scary part is that it could happen.
But remember, folks: Just because the ground is still wet doesn’t mean we can’t have ground cover fires. Dead foliage from over the winter dries out quickly, and until things green up later in the spring it can ignite easily—sometimes within hours of a rain. I’ve seen flames burn through a swamp, right over standing water.
In fact, fires this time of year can be even worse, because brush, grass, and fields still burn, but the ground can be too wet for four wheel drive brush trucks to reach the flames. Firefighters have to walk to the fire with hand tools, or wait for the flames to reach their positions close to the road. Waiting means the fire gets bigger, and there’s a chance it might reach and damage buildings or vehicles.
So don’t burn in windy conditions, have a cleared area around whatever you’re burning, and watch the fire until it’s completely out. If in doubt, don't do it.
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| Not being in a burning building doesn't make it safe: Firefighters have suffered smoke inhalation, heat exhaustion, falls, burns, and being hit by vehicles at grass and field fires. |
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| This photo is from a fire that endangered buildings on March 18th, near Long Lake Road and CR 175 N. |
The editor of the newspapers I work for asked me for a fire service related article for our Fire Prevention Week insert last week, and this is what I came up with:
It’s not easy to say how a first generation volunteer firefighter like me got into the business.
I took some photos at the Albion Fire Department’s recent vehicle extrication training (it was 86 degrees!) and, naturally, posted them on the AFD’s FB page:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1442727146000864.1073741835.1417039808569598&type=1
Copies of “Smoky Days and Sleepless Nights: A Century Or So With The Albion Fire Department” will be on sale for $9.95 at the Albion Fire Department’s annual all-you-can-eat fish and tenderloin fry. The meal will again be a part of the Chain O’ Lakes Festival, on Wednesday, June 4th.
The dinner will be held from 5 p.m. – 7:30 p.m. at the Albion Fire Station, 210 Fire Station Drive on the east end of town. Price for adults is $9, for children $6, and it’s free for children 5 and under. In addition to the unlimited fish and tenderloin, chips, applesauce, baked beans, bread, and a drink are on the menu.
Proceeds for both the meal and the book go to the Albion Fire Department’s emergency equipment and training fund.
My attempt at a press release, so people would know where the Smoky Days book sale money is going. I can’t help noticing that press releases involve a lot of bragging.
Albion Fire Chief Steve Bushong accepts a check from local author and volunteer firefighter Mark R Hunter for recent sales of his history book about the AFD.
Smoky Days And Sleepless Nights: A Century Or So With The Albion Fire Department is being sold as a fund raiser for the Albion Fire Department, and first came out at the AFD’s 125th Anniversary celebration in July, 2013. The check, for $200, is in addition to sales made last summer, with all proceeds going to the AFD.
Smoky Days and Sleepless Nights chronicles the fire disasters that struck Albion’s early history, efforts to form a fire department, and the first century of the AFD. The fully illustrated book, which was written by Hunter and designed and edited by his wife, Emily, sells for $9.95, and is available as e-book or in print on their website, www.markrhunter.com, or directly from Amazon.com.
Locally it’s available at the Albion New Era newspaper office on South Orange Street, the Brick Ark Inn on North Orange Street, and at the Albion Fire Station on the east side of town. The Hunters can also be contacted for a copy at (260) 636-3468 or at markrichardhunter@gmail.com.
Mark R. Hunter has two works of fiction set in northeast Indiana, published by Whiskey Creek Press: The romantic comedy Storm Chaser, and a follow-up short story collection Storm Chaser Shorts. He has two more books coming out in 2014.
(Dreamwidth hates me, so the photo is on my blogger:_
http://markrhunter.blogspot.com/2014/04/local-author-that-would-be-me-donates.html
SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK
After three decades as a volunteer firefighter, I … hurt. A lot, especially when it’s cold. Recently I’ve been seen wearing a sling, to let my arm heal after I bent an elbow the wrong way. (I don’t really need the sling—it’s to keep me from reaching for stuff with my bad arm.)
Bob Beckley was already an old timer (or so my 18-year-old self thought) when I joined. He just hit his 40thyear.
Bob Brownell was just given his fifty year pin.
Fifty years.
And that was because they missed the actual anniversary: He’s been a firefighter for 53 years. He was already doing the job for two decades before I walked into the firehouse for the first time, sucking on a bottle and wetting my pants. (Just kidding … I wasn’t sucking on a bottle. I left it in the car.)
Now, what else happened around 53 years ago? Hm. Well, 52 years ago, although I don’t actually remember it …
Holy cow. Bob Brownell has been fighting fires since before I was born.
And the rest of us still have to fight him for the friggin’ fire nozzle.
Maybe it’s a Bob thing. Maybe being a Bob gives you more energy somehow; maybe it’s one of those mystical names that keeps you young even longer than sleeping under a pyramid, or marrying Playboy bunnies.
Brownell would have started around 1961 or so. Kennedy was President. In Albion, our newest truck was a 1952 fire engine, the first engine I rode to a fire almost two decades later. It had a manual transmission with about 42 speeds on it.
And I’m tired?
( Now, Brownell is a transfer, which means he didn’t start with our department. What happened was, he started on a different fire department, wore all of them out, then moved to another one. Then all the young guys on that department got tired of him making them look bad, so he left there and came to us. You know those stories about immortal people who moved every few decades so people wouldn’t notice they aren’t aging? That’s Brownell. )
After three decades as a volunteer firefighter, I … hurt. A lot, especially when it’s cold. Recently I’ve been seen wearing a sling, to let my arm heal after I bent an elbow the wrong way. (I don’t really need the sling—it’s to keep me from reaching for stuff with my bad arm.)
Bob Beckley was already an old timer (or so my 18-year-old self thought) when I joined. He just hit his 40thyear.
Bob Brownell was just given his fifty year pin.
Fifty years.
And that was because they missed the actual anniversary: He’s been a firefighter for 53 years. He was already doing the job for two decades before I walked into the firehouse for the first time, sucking on a bottle and wetting my pants. (Just kidding … I wasn’t sucking on a bottle. I left it in the car.)
Now, what else happened around 53 years ago? Hm. Well, 52 years ago, although I don’t actually remember it …
Holy cow. Bob Brownell has been fighting fires since before I was born.
And the rest of us still have to fight him for the friggin’ fire nozzle.
Maybe it’s a Bob thing. Maybe being a Bob gives you more energy somehow; maybe it’s one of those mystical names that keeps you young even longer than sleeping under a pyramid, or marrying Playboy bunnies.
Brownell would have started around 1961 or so. Kennedy was President. In Albion, our newest truck was a 1952 fire engine, the first engine I rode to a fire almost two decades later. It had a manual transmission with about 42 speeds on it.
And I’m tired?
( Now, Brownell is a transfer, which means he didn’t start with our department. What happened was, he started on a different fire department, wore all of them out, then moved to another one. Then all the young guys on that department got tired of him making them look bad, so he left there and came to us. You know those stories about immortal people who moved every few decades so people wouldn’t notice they aren’t aging? That’s Brownell. )SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK
Years ago I shopped at a place called Excel Home Furnishings on the north side of the Noble County Courthouse square. I liked wandering around the second floor, because they’d installed enclosed bridges that allowed the furniture to be displayed not only in the original building, but in two other neighboring ones.
(I have no explanation for why I love exploring sprawling areas like that. It’s why I keep getting lost at the State Park … and the mall.)
In one of those buildings most of the upstairs was open, and there was a big raised area, like a stage. For someone who lived in a utility apartment at the time, I thought it was really cool.
It turned out to be even more cool when one of the employees showed me a normally closed off area, where we could see the outer walls and roof. There they were, plain as day: Charred wood and smoke stains. At one time in the distant past, he explained, the building had burned.
( That was my introduction to the Albion Opera House. )
In 1859, fire breaks out in the Noble County Courthouse in Chapter One of
Smoky Days and Sleepless Nights: A Century Or So With The Albion Fire Department:
John W. Bryant spotted the fire in Albion’s first courthouse at around 1 a.m. on a frigid January morning. He saw flames spread through the clerk’s office on the south side of the ground floor, and gave an alarm that likely consisted of a high pitched scream.
In those days, the entire population of a town would turn out to give what help they could at the call of “fire!” In some communities the law stated everyone had to own at least one bucket. As the alarm spread, people would throw their buckets out the window, where they’d be grabbed up, until everyone formed bucket brigades to splash water on the fire.
How many concussions resulted from fallen buckets hasn’t been documented.
Albion’s first reported fire rescue and injuries followed … you can read the whole book by ordering on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Mark-R.-Hunter/e/B0058CL6OO/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_pop_1, or from my website at www.markrhunter.com.
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In addition to being available for sale at the Albion New Era office on South Main Street and from the fire department, Smoky Days and Sleepless Nights: A Century or So With the Albion Fire Department is also for sale at the Brick Ark Inn, on North Orange Street.
The Brick Ark Inn is a bed and breakfast owned by my high school classmate, Tammy Luce, and it’s developed a reputation for comfort and hospitality. She agreed to sell the book there mostly for her guests, but I’m sure anyone could drop by to get a copy (and try some of the honey for sale there), and to check the place out. Here’s her website:
Smoky Days is about Albion’s fire history, and Tammy is set up in an 1880’s brick home just a block from the Noble County Courthouse Square, which figures prominently in the book. In fact, her home is next to the former location of the Worden House, which is mentioned in the book’s opening chapter as the scene of one of Albion’s earliest fire related injuries. On the same block is the Albion Opera House, which has its own segment in the book.
Of course, you can order any of my books from the website at www.markrhunter.com. But if you happen to be visiting Albion you owe it to yourself to check out the Brick Ark Inn, one of our jewels run by a jewel of a person.
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Smoky Days and Sleepless Nights will be available at the Breakfast With the Firefighters Saturday morning at the Albion Fire Station, 8-11 a.m.
On an unrelated note, here’s a photo Emily snapped of me at Yesterday’s Whitley County Writer’s Group:
http://markrhunter.blogspot.com/2013/10/writers-group-and-fire-breakfast.html
SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK
Sometimes my life seems a little … surreal.
Like something out of a TV show surreal. One of those TV shows where characters are always doing double takes, and saying things like “that’s new”, or “I did not see that coming”.
For instance, I meet a woman on a writing website, marry her, and then discover she has all the skills needed to design a book package at the exact moment when I happen to delve into the sometimes difficult world of self-publishing. Didn’t see that coming.
Naturally that leads into the already told story of my book signing for said book, and speaking of surreal: It’s been over two years since I did my first book signing, and it’s still weird. Does Stephen King ever look at himself in the mirror and think, “How did all this happen? Wasn’t I just a nobody teaching school, yesterday? Now cartoon versions of me are doing cameos on Fox TV shows.”
Then, being Stephen King, he’d go off and write a story about a writer’s cartoon mirror image doing horrifying things in an isolated Maine cabin.
The morning of this particular signing I had to work until 11 a.m., and it started at noon. I didn’t worry about that, because it was at an entire fire department’s 125th birthday, and there was lots of stuff besides me going on there. I was a sideshow.
A little writing update: While we were in Missouri I made it a point to work an hour or two each day on my Storm Chaser sequel, which was original called Storm Damage but now has the working title of The Notorious Ian Grant. (Partially because there’s already at least one book named Storm Damage.) I’ve now finished the second draft (third, depending on how you define it), and Emily is going to be my first reader – we’ll see what she has to say about it.
I’m also working on a series of what I’m calling “space opera” stories, and a possibly novella length story that’s going to be part of a Girl Scout related project that I’m helping with (no, seriously). And of course Harlequin Special Edition still has my full manuscript of Coming Attractions; I don’t expect to hear from them for at least a couple of months.
Things went well yesterday: We haven’t counted how many copies of Smoky Days and Sleepless Nights were sold, but it was more than twice as many as any previous book signings – not including people who pre-ordered, but weren’t able to come. We're only a dozen or so new sales from the break-even point, and after that the Fire Department will get money toward training and equipment.
Also, and a bit to my surprise, we sold five copies of Storm Chaser! I was left with just one, although more are on order.
It wasn’t as hot as earlier in the week, and we didn’t get rained on. We started signing as soon as we got there, before we even had time to unpack my tote. (I have a book signing tote!) Sadly, the helicopter and bagpipers weren’t able to make it, but there was a good crowd, some awesome fire trucks (both new and classic), lots of fun stuff for the kids (and great food), and a wonderful dedication ceremony. I’ll have more information – and pictures – later.
Now the history book is “officially” available. If you’d like a signed copy, it’s $9.95 plus shipping and handling; we don’t have a PayPal button up yet on the website, but you can go there to shoot me an e-mail, or order it through Amazon and Create Space.
Orders through me will be a little delayed: I start vacation tomorrow, and we might not get much internet time for a while, so please be patient until after the first of the month. Also, we need a rest!
Less than 12 hours to go before the Albion Fire Department's 125th celebration begins! Hope to see a lot of people there -- hope to sell a lot of books, but the main thing is getting people to turn out and support our fire department.
SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK
Although the idea behind my new book is pretty straightforward, I thought some people might want details, so I put word out in the local media that I was open for interviews. They replied that they were closed. But my friend, Howie Dunnit, stepped in and volunteered to interview me. He’s not a journalist, but how bad could it be?
“So,” he asked, “About this book: Are you crazy?”
Did I mention he’s not a journalist?
“You write fiction, and alleged humor. What made you take on a non-fiction project?”
Well, someone said “If someone put a gun to your head and made you write this, would you?”, and I just assumed they had a gun.
“Very funny. What about this crazy title? Smoky Days and Sleepless Nights: A Century or So With The Albion Fire Department. The title’s longer than the book.”
But it describes the thing perfectly. Besides, long subtitles are in, they’re cool. They’re still cool, right?
“Keep telling yourself that. So, you’ve got a book about history. Only it’s not about big, fun history stuff, like wars, or moonshine, or baseball. It’s about a little town in Indiana. What’s in it for me?”
( Nothing’s in it for you. You haven’t read anything longer than a cereal box since I’ve known you, and you don’t usually finish those. But it covers firefighting, and small town life, and of course history, and some people like that stuff. )
As you all know, the big “official” reveal of Smoky Days and Sleepless Nights is noon to 5 p.m. this Saturday, at the Albion Fire Department’s 125th anniversary celebration. (July 20th)
You probably don’t know that my request for a day off was denied, and then last week I was assigned mandatory overtime: So I’m working from 11 p.m. Friday night until 11 a.m. Saturday, then going straight to the Central Noble School campus to get set up for the book signing. Then I have to go back in to work Saturday night. This is totally unconnected to my desire to someday write full time for a living.
The show will go on, with apologies for bags under the eyes, yawning, or constant caffeine consumption. However, come in to get your book early: If things slow down later in the afternoon, I might leave a little early to catch up on sleep. If that happens, I’ll leave signed copies behind for sale (and they’ll always be available later, of course).
Don’t forget also that everything going on outside will slow down from 1-2 p.m., for the official dedication inside the CN Auditorium. If there’s bad weather, the lobby of that building will host the book signing and registration. Hope to see you all there!
The TV interview for Smoky Days and Sleepless Nights is now up on the Indiana’s News Center website:
Thanks to Eric Olson for doing the interview!
The Fort Wayne Firefighters Pipes and Drum Corps and Samaritan helicopter plan to help the town of Albion celebrate its fire department’s 125th anniversary on Saturday, July 20th.
The Pipes and Drum Corps was established in 2001 after the 9/11 terror attacks, as an honor guard to pay tribute to fallen firefighters. They currently consist of seven pipers and six drummers.
Samaritan is an emergency medical air transport service that has landed at Albion area emergency scenes numerous times. Their appearance will depend on weather conditions, and it’s hoped they won’t get called away to an emergency response during the celebration.
In addition, the Albion Fire Department is working to form their own honor guard, to present the colors during a dedication ceremony scheduled for 1-2 p.m., in the Central Noble Schools auditorium along East Main Street. The AFD’s 125th celebration will go on from 12 noon until 5 p.m., and include fair style food, games for kids, a fire truck cruise-in, and a signing for a book about the AFD’s history, among other things. The event’s Facebook page is at:
https://www.facebook.com/events/134280070100750/?fref=ts
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