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I'm Brian Gilbert… Engine 5-1
Todd Legler, water tender 5
Mia Munoz, Law Enforcement
Melissa Woodruff, Engine 5-1
Shawn Galvone, Engine 5-1
Jason Kolb, Engine 5-1 Senior Firefighter.
Kolb: Basically, this is our engine, let's do a little overview of what's on our engine…it seats five, that's what we normally have, if we have more people we'll have a chase truck following us for extra people. This is the pump, it regulates which side we want to pump out of, regulates…shows us the pressure we're pumping out to the fire itself, we usually have one person here at all times to make sure we never run out of water, and to listen to the radio, just in case there's something else.
Ah, we have a live reel, which we rarely use…it's not what we normally use, basically.
This cabinet here is a [breast?] cabinet, this has our [unclear, radio noise] our gated wise? stuff that we need on the fire for hoses, if we need to reduce …foam nozzles, like when we initially get on a fire, if we want to foam it to knock down the smoke and fire, we'll just set the foam on, and kinda, it will settle down the fire quite a bit, just assorted reducers and such…first aid kit, just in case anybody gets hurt anywhere…banjos, cause we normally run out of water if we're out all day long….up top we have hose packs, right here…it's kind of like a quick lay almost, it's got an inch lateral, and inch and a half trunk, which we'll show you in a little bit, it's just a continuous lay….[noise, truck starting] we'll describe that later…just wrap it around the fire, it's really quick and gets the fire down. Also in some cases there's a lot of ….getting to the fire itself, the terrain….we have a Missoula pack (?) here, its 400 feet of inch and a half hose, and what we'll do is we take that off the truck and run that to the fire, and then we'll start breaking out hose packs, so we don't waste the hose, this is just to get us to the fire….do you want to go to the other side?
(fadeout)
…last year we went up to Montana for structure prep, this engine is mainly used for our force, for maybe structure protection because of the amount of water it holds… and we can pump really easily. We have our saw cabinet, this is our fire saw, during lightning season we use this saw quite a bit when we start hiking in through lightning fires…the green pack has assorted chaps,…(he can't remember the word) wedges, for on the fire, and these are sort of tools to help us move around.
JK: Is there a saw for every person?
Kolb: No, normally when we get to a fire, whoever has seniority will pick somebody to fight…It's kind of learning, we like to get everybody to try the saw and cut down a tree just to get that experience, get them used to cutting.
Got the tool cabinet, it's just assorted tools, what we use —pulaskis, shovels, we have bird's foot, rhinos, just assorted tools for different areas of terrain that we have to dig - sometimes it's easy, digging, just scraping at dirt - other times it's rocky and we need different types of tools for breaks.
JK: Which one is the Pulaski?
Kolb: this is a Pulaski, we call it a "super P", what we did is we welded two extra sides on it to give it more weight, to dig deeper underground, it's more weight, heavier to get down to the ground…
We use this tool a lot, this is the rhino…It's a good scraping tool, knocks out grass, gets a lot of stuff - needles out of the way.
This is a falling tool - what we use this for is if we get to a snag fire, or a tree fire, like to get the sound of the tree to see if it's hollow or if it's good and sturdy, you know, get the sound, we just whack it a couple times. you can also use that for digging line. Shovel…self explanatory. We created this tool a couple years ago, it's called a bird's foot, used to be a McCloud, which is like a big rake, so what we did is just cut off the edges. It's a multi-use tool, you can get into little areas with that tool…a really good tool. In there we've got a…if we're out overnight, we've got our MREs, plenty of food to last us for a while. hold our tents in there…