FOX:
A group of firefighters turned into Santa’s Little Helpers when they rescued a family’s Christmas presents, complete with wrapping paper, and their tree after a fire broke out at their Florida home on Saturday.
Several first responders with the Polk County Fire Rescue responded to a two-story house fire in Mulberry, a city just 40 miles east of Tampa, around 4 p.m.
As they responded to the scene, they were told a 13-year-old was able to safely escape the residence, and no other humans or animals were left inside,” the fire rescue wrote in a Facebook post.
Firefighters quickly worked to put the fire out, and once it was under control, the crew of Engine 2 came up with a heartwarming idea: to save the family’s Christmas presents, because “they stood the chance of being damaged.” MORE
Most firefighters are straight white males.
Damn Whitey and his disproportionate willingness to put his own life on the line for the aid and assistance of strangers
…you do what you can, once the life hazard is abated and your brothers and sisters aren’t put at undue risk. Every home is full of someone’s life, and what doesn’t seem important to YOU, may be to OTHERS.
You need to be a litte careful, especially in multi-unit dwellings that you’re not helping someone steal from a neighbor, but if there’s time, things are under control, and owneship has been established by Command, there’s no harm and TONS of community goodwill in getting a prized fur coat, a decesed veteran’s flag, that treasured toy, necessary medicines, and sometimes something as prosaic but as necessay as diapers, out of the relatively uncontaminated areas of a fireground, especially if there’s still a risk of ancillary water damage.
Lives first, but if the job wasn’t to save property as well, it’d be easier to just let every evacuated structure burn to the ground, from a utilitarian point of view.
One time, on a preplan inspection, an apartment owner said that’s EXACTLY what HE wanted us to do.
We were at this MUD complex with about a dozen structures ranging from 4 to 10 family units, and this cheeky bastard told the Chief that if any of them ever caught fire, he’d appreciate it if we’d just let them burn flat to the ground as the (cheap) construction was such that it would easier (for HIM) to scoop it off the slab with a bulldozer and start fresh, than to try to rehab a fire-and water-damaged partial structure.
…without cussing (as I would) or smacking the dude (as I certainly considered), he proceeded to lace into him about the sanctity of our sworn duty extending to his tenants, and whatever HE may have thought of his charges, WE were going to protect THEIR lives AND PROPERTY at all hazard, and if he found it inconvenient, he could commiserate over a Chardonnay with his insurance agent and leave US out of his life’s plans, and he would be happy to facilitate the conversation as he needed to talk to them with him ANYWAy about the numerous code violations we’d seen during the tour.
Jerk snapped his jaw shut so hard, I heard his tendons creak. He never asked us anything so stupid again.
We lived where we worked. Could be OUR house next.
Empathy is the next best teacher to the Lord. We knew tbe score, so if we could save, we DID.
…it’s part of the job…
…on the other hand, not ALL property is held in such esteem.
…one time, we had a room and contents burn that was caused by an inquisitive young man and his brothers…prolific…saucy (pre-Internet) magazine collection. Seems that the #2 son knew about #1’s stash, but Bro wasn’t the sharing type.
One day #1 was off with a bud and the parents were engrossed in a TV show, so #2 thought it an opportune time to take a gander. He thought to throw the covers over his head for concealment, but then realized the light was inadequate for…”reading”. The answer came to him in the form of Big Bro’s pack of matches…
…Mom and Dad told us later that they saw #2 zoom up the hall from #1’s back bedroom to his without a word to go with his terror-stricken face, so they looked at the point of origin, noted the rosy glow of dawn in the 10 PM hallway, and thought it prudent to summon SNS and his merry band and decamp from the interior forthwith.
Good early call, and we put a good stop on it. We were in the process of removing the fire load, which proved to be magazines so deep and wide that they were serving as a bed base encompassed by a box with a mattress on top, all in various states of crispy. Thick paper loads tend to hide fire in a smoulder, so we had to pull the pictures of incongruously chilly-looking young women in rather unusual poses, apart in front of unusually attentive neighbors…
…M and D informed us that they did not consider this PARTICULAR property as meriting salvation, as it was currently causing mortification AND giving a new meaning to “Pulp Fiction”, but it still behooved us to separate and extinguish the glossy kindling, although we did deploy HazMat curtains to limit the audience appreciation hour, kept the ribald comments to a minimum (not easy with a large group of active young men), and whistled up a City sanitation response to remove #1’s late “girlfriend” collection to their final, unglamorous resting place.
#1 was not, I gathered, informed during the proceedings, so he was blissfully unaware of the demise of his 2D harem. I kind of 3/4 expected a callback for an ambulance at some point when he DID return as the prodigal who found his fatted calf was reduced to a burned-out section of carpet and neighbors smiling knowingly behind their hands, but if it happened, it wasn’t on MY shift, so it was SEP (Someone Else’s Problem).
…I kind of felt for the kid. It was a pretty comprehensive collection, from what I saw, probably some time and effort into it, so much so that I seriously doubted he had, like, a GIRLFRIEND.
But who knows, maybe.it inspired him to go for flesh instead of fantasy.
Or inspired him to fratricide.
…either way, it was not on MY watch, so it is SEP to this very day…