Fire Recruits Find The Rescue Path

Angel Martinez burst through the apartment’s front door, a faded basketball cradled in his hands, a cloud of smoke rushing out behind him.

“I got the baby!” he shouted through his face mask. ​“I got the baby!”

A 43-year-old former tow truck driver and native of Puerto Rico, Martinez is one of 31 recruits in the current class of aspiring firefighters training to join the New Haven Fire Department.

On a soggy, overcast Thursday morning, Martinez joined over around 20 fellow students, instructors, and current firefighters to get some hands-on search and rescue experience at the former Farnam Courts public housing complex on Grand Avenue between Franklin Street and Hamilton Street.

That training included climbing up to a building’s roof and cutting four-by-four ventilation holes over where a fire might be, and rushing into a smoke-filled apartment in full gear to rescue a basketball standing in for a child victim.

No fires were set or extinguished during Thursday’s training. (The smoke came from a smoke and fog machine meant for the theater.). The heights and the chainsaws and the heavy uniforms and the cramped apartment conditions were all very much real. As were the intensity of the rescue situations and the pulsing adrenaline of the recruits, whom instructors spurred on with both deliberate step-by-step instructions and the occasional shout of urgency.

“It’s OK to fail here without being a failure,” Battalion Chief and fire union President Frank Ricci (pictured) told Martinez and fellow recruits Jacari Santiago and Eric Flores after they found the basketball roughly three minutes after they entered the smoky apartment. But in real-life situations, they would have to move even faster, and in closer communication, and with greater attention paid to hallways and doors and other potential exits, in order to save the life of an actual fire victim.

That was the very point of Thursday’s drills, Ricci said.

While most of any given class’s instruction takes place at the Fire Training Academy at 230 Ella T. Grasso Blvd., the academy tries to give every class of recruits at least one opportunity to hone their life safety, incident stabilization, and property conservation skills in a building somewhere else in the city.

For a long time that on-site education took place at the old Brookside Apartments near West Rock, Ricci said. On Thursday, recruits used Farnam’s boarded-up townhouses that will soon be demolished to make way for Mill River Crossing, Phase 2 as a real-life simulacrum of what they will soon experience after graduating in November. This recruit class began in July.

“You can only duplicate so much at the academy,” Ricci added about the importance of bringing recruits out into the city in their training to become New Haven firefighters.

“Today is supposed to make everything inside of the class more practical,” said adjunct instructor and 12-year fire department veteran Edward Taylor (pictured at left in photo, with Ricci and Lt. Vinnie Caruso).

The first assignment of the morning involved climbing up a ladder stretching from Truck 1 to one of the boarded-up building’s roofs to practice ​“vertical ventilation.”

What that means in non-firefighter speak: Standing on a slanted asphalt roof in full firefighter gear dozens of feet above the ground and using a chainsaw to cut a four-by-four hole designed to release smoke and heat from a burning interior.

While the driver and the tillerman from a responding truck company work on cutting holes in the roof, Taylor said, the truck’s officer and other firefighter go inside the building to start searching for potential victims.

Cutting a hole in the roof to clear smoke helps with visibility for rescue operations, Taylor said. And it helps relieve some of the heat and pressure bearing down on potential victims. Firefighters must make sure to cut the hole as close as possible to above the source of the fire, he added, or else the rush of oxygen might exacerbate the heat and draw the flames toward elsewhere in the building.

Waiting on the roof for the recruits was city firefighter and designated academy instructor Rob Yates (pictured on right, with recruit Eric Flores). Sliding up and down the asphalt-shingled roof alongside the more warily stepping recruits, Yates talked them through where and how to cut such a hole.

“What’s your first cut?” Yates asked Flores as he struggled to get the chainsaw started in the trickling rain.

Farthest away, Flores said. Meaning that the first cut into the roof is always on the side of the square farthest from the firefighters and the roof ladder. Then a top cut and a diagonal cut, which give the firefighter a triangular window through which to inspect what’s taking place underneath the roof in the room below. Those are followed by two more cuts, one on the bottom of the square, and one closest to the firefighter.

As Santiago practiced knocking in the four-by-four square with a long, metal pike, Yates reminded the recruits to communicate constantly with their partner firefighter on the roof. If you need to take a step back, he said, let your partner know so he or she can spot you.

“The main object of everything we do as firefighters is life safety,” Taylor said. ​“If we don’t live, no one else does.”

Just imagine if this roof were compromised, Taylor added. Or if there were superheated gases and smoke rushing out of the building. Or if there were people struggling for their lives in the rooms below.

Learning to control one’s adrenaline is one of the most important skills a recruit has to develop when learning to become a firefighter. Because, no matter the simulacrum of training, a real fire will be significantly more intense.

When asked what most surprised him about being on an actual roof to practice vertical ventilation, Santiago (pictured at center, with Martinez), 24, replied, ​“Just how steep and slippery some of these buildings can be.”

After climbing down from the roof, Santiago, Flores, and Martinez made their way into the boarded-up complex where Ricci and city firefighter and adjunct instructor Dan Sullivan were waiting on the porch of a ground-floor apartment.

No longer above the building, the recruits were now to practice search and rescue operations from the inside.

Usually where there is a single-alarm fire, Ricci said, a truck company responds for search and rescue and three engine companies respond to get hoses into the building and conduct fire suppression at the site of the fire, the floor above the fire, and in the building’s attic. Sometimes the search and rescue truck gets to the scene first, he said, which means that firefighters must be prepared to rush into a burning building even before a hose line is in.

Now that the department has a new heavy rescue, Ricci said, that fourth engine company will respond to provide emergency rescue support for firefighters caught in trouble.

Even though a vast majority of the department’s responses are for medical emergencies and not fires, Ricci said that the department still responds to a fire every three or four days on average. And, with more and more plastic-based material inside people’s homes, he said, those fires are burning faster and more intensely than ever before.

Ricci told the recruits that their first responsibility is to make a beeline to the source of the fire. They must look behind every door, in every hallway, under every window, because people likely try to rush to known entry and exit points in emergencies. And when they find the source of the fire, Ricci said, make sure the room is empty and then shut the door.

Think of the fire as a pitbull, he said. If the door’s open, that pitbull is rushing out at you and everyone else in the building. If it’s closed, the pitbull’s contained.

Inside the apartment, the recruits crawled along the floor through smoke so thick their surroundings were all but invisible.

“Let’s go, let’s go!” Ricci shouted. ​“It’s a very small apartment. Our citizens don’t have enough time. We need to get them out.”

Ricci had hid the basketball-child behind the front door, but the recruits rushed right by it. For two to three minutes, they crawled around couches and down hallways, into the bedroom and the kitchen, looking for the ball.

Sullivan (pictured) stood by a couch, telling them not to mind the furniture and to find that child.

The three recruits rushed out of the apartment because Martinez had run out of air in the canister he held on his back. ​“You two go back in,” Ricci said to Flores and Santiago. ​“There’s a kid trapped in there.”

Soon after Martinez changed his canister and went back into the apartment, he found the ball, tucked right behind the entrance door.

Martinez (pictured) said leaving the apartment to change his air canister forced him to reset how he was thinking about where the victim might be. When he re-entered, he said, he remembered he had to look behind every door. Including the front entry.

When asked how he felt about finding the ball, and about making it through his first day in out training in a real city building, he smiled and said, ​“It feels great.”