Episode: 2895
Title: HPR2895: The work of fire fighters, part 2
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2895/hpr2895.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 12:54:01

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This is HPR Episode 200895 entitled The Work on Firefighters, Part 2.
It is the 10th anniversary show of your own pattern, and in about 40 minutes long, and carrying a clean flag.
The summer is the continued introduction into The Work on Firefighters.
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Hi, this is John Betten again, coming to you live. Well, not really. It's a recording.
Anyway, I thought I'd do a follow-up on my earlier piece about Firefighting.
Now, before I go talk about stuff, you know, one of the great things that I enjoy about open source and open data is that you can mix and mesh files.
So, well, being this sort of, I don't know, person that I am, I thought let's, I don't know, make a little joke, I guess, some jest.
You see, HPR2871, I guess, from the top of your mind that doesn't ring a bell, and if it does, you need serious help.
But if it doesn't, let me help you.
It was the HPR Community News Edition for July 2019.
And in that community news podcast, there were some really, really nice remarks about the earlier podcast that I made about Firefighting.
Really, thanks. It touches me.
But there was also something else. And it's, well, you know, I can mix and mesh and make a, use the contents of the early podcast in this one.
So, without further ado, let me introduce you to a few of the soundbites that were brought to life during the last HPR Community News.
Just for fun, you know, okay, here it goes.
I love this show.
Yeah, yeah, General always comes up with good shows.
Yeah, God really sucks me. He's making it hard for the rest of us like, yeah, yeah, that's, I guess that's why I'm not making any more show for HPR.
Yeah, exactly. You're never going to be very much.
Never going to be as good as that.
Yeah, I'm going to have to go back to do it.
Not some my earbud things and packing iron boards again to lower the standard little.
So, here I am wondering, guys, really? I mean, come on.
You're the guys who introduced me to this wonderful hobby called podcasts.
So, please continue making podcasts. If not for anything else, make them for me.
I mean, being the best podcast in the world can be pretty lonely.
So, I beg you, make another podcast, both of you, all of you.
Don't let me keep hanging here all alone.
Anyway, so this I had to get this off my chest.
You know, I just for the fun of it, I had to get this off my chest.
So, without further ado, let's start with the actual subject.
And the actual subject, of course, is another introduction into the work of firefighters.
Still, standard disclaimer, sorry, standard disclaimer.
I'm just speaking out of my own experiences.
It's only related to what I know about firefighting in the Netherlands.
So, I don't know anything else about other countries.
Okay, so first, there was a question in the comments section from one of our regular listeners, Ken Fallon.
And his question was, well, those fire hydrants, how do you access them
where they are in a parking space and there's a car parked on top of it, which would be an excellent question.
If it were for the fight that those underground fire hydrants are not located in parking spaces.
Most of the times, they are located on the sidewalk.
And if one is blocked, then you can bet your suite, whatever, that 80 meters, 80 meters further, up the road or down the road.
There's another fire hydrants.
And if that one is blocked as well, you just, there's 1500 liters of water in the car itself,
which means that for your average kitchen fire or washing machine fire, that's way more than enough.
On the other hand, if the house itself is on fire, it takes you about three, four minutes till it's empty.
So, yeah, it's where the number three and four were in charge of getting the water supply setup.
Have a hefty duty.
But in all the 10 years that I've done this, I've never seen a fire hydrant blocked by anything.
So, sidewalks, you know, it's between some sort of public shrubbery and the front lawn of a residential house.
And most of the time, it's not blocked at all.
And if it's a very tiny, teeny wincy street, then it's probably in the middle of the street.
And no parked cars parked in the middle of the street.
And since you're the firefighting department, you simply block the road.
And you play boss.
That's always nice to do.
In fact, in the Netherlands, we have these three disciplines.
You know, the firefighters, you have the police, and you have the emergency services.
And of these three, at the incident location itself, the firefighters are in charge.
So, not the police.
Police are in charge of taking care of traffic.
Unless, of course, there is a criminal activity going on in which case they get precedents.
But that usually is the case.
OK, back to theory.
The theory of things nice to know.
Like I said before, we arrive at the scene with a firefighting at the car.
And the car is basically, it's got a driver, a duel.
Next to the driver is the car leader.
There's a nice Dutch word for it.
That's a very difficult to translate.
And next to that, behind those two people up for other firefighters,
ready to come into action.
And then the rest of the car is filled with all kinds of stuff.
So you have your water supply with houses and ward not.
You have your hydraulic equipment for car accidents.
And you have your ladder and your rope and a blanket.
Even a body bag.
I mean, it always stays in its own container.
Because, well, there's not that much need for a body bag, thankfully.
So it's a car.
It's a car fully equipped.
And it's standardized by the Ministry of the Interior.
So every firefighting car in the Netherlands of the kind that gets to the scene first.
Let's put it like that.
They all have the same equipment on board.
Now, there's this water stuff that's there are some things to know.
One is that we have two pressure systems on board.
One is high pressure.
And one is low pressure.
Now, let's first start with the high pressure.
The high pressure is a host of about 90 meters.
It's black. It's about an arm thick.
And it's wounded up in...
Yeah, wounded up.
And you can very easily pull it from the car and take it somewhere and spray with water.
And with high pressure, it's between 20 and 30 bars.
And it will deliver something between 120 and 150 liters per minute.
Now, don't get me wrong.
It's 10 to 30 or 20 to 30 bars at the building pump.
So the car has a building water pump.
But because of the resistance, at the end of this 90 meters, you still have six bars left.
So it's adequate.
But don't get your hopes up.
You don't need any more pressure.
So that's all fine.
It gives you a really nice length that you can spray in a distance if you bundle the outlet.
Or you can spray, if you like.
So that's 110 and 150 liters per minute.
Then there's a low pressure.
And the low pressure is between three and seven bars.
So that's not a lot.
But that is four times more volume per minute.
So it's six hundred liters per minute on average per hose.
And so it's high pressure, low volume, low pressure, high water volume.
Now, if you think back of your physics lecture, its action is reaction.
So if some device pushes six hundred liters of water away from you because of pressure,
then that same amount of energy pushes back at you.
So where high density, high pressure water, sorry, high pressure water is very easy to handle.
So pressure water is, well, it's not so much.
Yeah, it can be exhausting, but there are tricks in how do you handle a hose that way.
For instance, the hose comes on laying on the ground, of course.
But if you can bend it into a soil of an S, you can lean into the S so that the reaction pressure
and your body weight are nicely in balance.
And then it's pretty relaxed.
And by the way, if you have the time to set up low pressure water, then you have a big fire.
So you will be standing there for some time.
The hose systems themselves, originally the thickness was in inches.
It's still the same thickness, but then in millimeters.
But it's much easier in this case to refer to inches because it's two, three and six inches hoses.
Well, at two and three is what's on every firefighting truck.
And six is on special containers for really, really big incidents.
But then you get 150 millimeters of hose.
So that's pretty big.
So that's water.
Now, the other thing that I, when I have a demonstration, I get questions about,
how do you handle trauma?
How do you handle as a firefighting traumatic incidents?
And even that's pretty easy story to tell.
It's of course not story, not easy when it happens to you, but it's an easy story to tell.
So for instance, let's describe incidents not in detail,
but let's start with a very easy accident and incident.
And then we will work our way upwards, right, in traumatic events.
So first, you go to an incident, you do your stuff.
There's nothing really important going on.
It's not traumatic at all. Everybody goes home.
And yeah, you don't lose any sleep.
And nothing bad is happening. Easy peasy.
The second one is, okay, so you have a light, let's say the second level.
First level is, there's no trauma at all. Second level, why?
There's a light trauma.
It's a traumatic event.
It really, it takes you a couple of days to get over it.
And it's in your head. It spins around in your head.
But in the end, it fades away because you come to grips with it.
So you can handle it yourself.
So that's the second level, the third level.
It's just a little bit higher than this one.
It's a traumatic event. And after a couple of days,
you just can't get to grips with it.
And you want to talk to somebody about it.
So what you do on average is you go to one of your other firefighting colleagues
and maybe one that you feel comfortable talking to.
Or maybe someone that was also there.
So he can relate to what happened.
And you talk about it and together you find a way to put things to rest.
And you get it off your chest and get grips with it.
So that's the third level.
Now, the fourth level, the next higher up level,
is some of those firefighting colleagues have been specially trained
to do these kinds of conversations.
And I've done in the past the training for that myself.
So I am one of the colleagues, but I'm also a colleague that people could call day or night
if they want to talk with me about things that happened that they witnessed
and that got stuck in their head.
Well, what we learned is you need that person to keep talking
and reliving the traumatic event over and over and over again.
Because the emotion is like a bucket in your head, a bucket full of emotions.
And you just have to drain the bucket by reliving, talking about event over and over again.
And this can be difficult because instinctively sometimes you don't want to relive those events
because it was way too traumatic.
Still, and that's the heart, but brutal truth, getting back to that moment, that emotion,
what decision did you make?
Why did you make that decision?
Did you make that at that time that you made that decision?
Think that was the best decision to make.
Yes, because you didn't know anything, something that became obvious later, for instance.
Yeah, but you didn't know it at the time you made the decision.
So you have to forgive yourself, for instance, this is an example, you have to forgive yourself
for making what in hindsight could be a wrong decision.
But at that time that you made the decision, that was based on the information that you know, that you knew,
and it was the best decision to make.
The last level, 5th level is the one where somebody is really traumatized
and one of the colleagues, and even a trained colleague, just is not suitable enough,
not proficient enough to handle this kind of assistance.
And then for that, you can always go to your local post commander and say that you need a professional.
And then instantly you get the phone number of somebody who is a trauma specialized psychologist.
So their day job is psychology and then specialized in working with people who are traumatized.
I've been to somebody like that myself and they're amazing, they're completely amazing.
And the other thing that we shouldn't forget, and that goes for a lot of stuff, but also for this, is basically, shit happens.
Whenever you come to the scene as a firefighter, the bad thing has already happened.
There's nothing I can do to change that. I can maybe shift the outcome in a positive direction,
but the incident has happened anyway already.
And one of the things I learned is, there's only so much you can do.
Even when you come there with 4, 8, 16, 32, I don't know how many people,
if it's a small fire, large fire, whatever, there's only so much you can do.
If you arrive at, let's say, a wooden house completely ablaze,
there is so much energy from the fire produced every second.
There's only so much you can do with the hose of water.
Even if you drown the thing, it's a chain reaction that is...
In the end, you will stop it, but it's not like, okay, you flip a switch and the fire is out.
It just doesn't work that way.
And what I...
I don't know how it's in other countries, but here in the Netherlands, it seems like everybody...
There is this saying, I believe I learned it somewhere when I was in the state someday.
The opinions are like assholes, everybody's got one.
And that's...
It seems like whenever you arrive at the scene, people have an opinion, people know what to do.
Yeah, there's a house on fire, pick a house and start putting out fire, start pumping water on it.
No, because you don't know if there are any people left in the building.
So first, before you want to boil them a shrimp in steam, you have to check that everybody's out before you start putting out a fire.
Besides, usually a fire doesn't grow as fast as you sometimes see in the movies.
And I've seen the movies too.
Backdraft, you know?
That's maybe something for another episode.
Backdraft, pleasure over what those are.
Yeah, okay, not now, maybe next time.
But on average, you know, a house on...
Which has a fire in a room.
Most of the houses in the Netherlands are not from wood.
They're from brick and concrete.
Sometimes with wooden bars at the attic.
But yeah, it doesn't grow exponentially.
Thank God for that, of course.
Thank God for small favors.
Okay, I promised you earlier I would talk about a few stories.
So I just, from the top of my head, pick three random stories I'd like to talk to you about.
Maybe even do a fourth one.
That's a good one.
Let me make a note.
So, yeah.
First, the first story is about my own first deployment as a firefighter.
You know, having been trained and...
I had this major on my belt doing what I usually do working.
I got my own IT company.
I work from home lots of times.
And suddenly the patient starts ringing.
I see there's an accident nearby on a highway.
So I jump in my car, go to the firefighting station, fire station.
Get on board.
I put on my suit, get on board.
And I'm the first one in.
So I'm front seat, in a way.
Then I see somebody else get in as a driver.
And he says to the other guys, you wait, I'll just go ahead anyway.
So here I am, together with the other guy and not with six of us.
No, just the two of us.
Going with siren and flashlights to the incident scene, incident location.
And it was a car that had been re-rendered by a garbage truck, a full garbage truck.
So the car in front of it was...
It was a French car, French making, but it was a little bit shorter now.
Shorter than it originally was.
So we arrived at the scene, I'm still pretty fresh.
I'll put those cones on the road to mark the place where the rest will arrive and we'll start doing our job.
But the emergency service are already on the location, on the scene.
So one of them says, yeah, firefighter, can you assist me?
When I look left, I look right and no, he clearly met me because there was nobody else.
And yeah, yeah, sure, what do you want?
Can you hold the head of the victim?
Well, the victim, is that a word?
So can you hold his head?
Well, it was the driver and the airbag had gone off and nevertheless your neck gets a beating.
And so to ease...
Because the head on average is about 7 kilograms.
So to ease the driver's comfort, I was asked to hold his head from behind.
Now, the car, like I said, was a little shorter.
So you have to imagine I put my elbows on what's a thing called on the back window,
where you can put your hood on and I don't know, a pillow or something else.
You know what I mean?
At the back of the car, just behind the couch, yeah.
Okay, so I put my elbows there and I just put my hands forward and I could easily hold the head of the driver.
Like I said, the car was a little shorter than originally produced.
And we were standing there and he was trying to talk a little bit.
Well, he didn't have a lot to say.
It was conscious and not in a real bad shape, thankfully.
But nevertheless, the instruction was staying in your car.
We moved the top of it to make a cabrio out of it and cabrio and we'll get you out of your car safely.
So the first responders were on the scene and I didn't care of him and I was holding his head.
And I've been doing that for 45 minutes.
And by that time, I was relieved by a colleague.
And that was basically it.
I mean, oh yeah, while I was holding his head, at some point his right arm moved upwards.
And he petted on my hand, which was all on his over his ear as in sort of a thanks for doing this.
And that's, yeah, that touches something.
That was my first, my first incident.
I didn't lose any sleep over it.
But when we got home from at home on the fire station and at the fire station,
the commander took some time to go around and ask everybody about their experiences,
how they had experienced this incident.
And so I could say that this was my first, well, clearly everybody knew that.
But yeah, I won't say it's not a biggie, but it's not dramatic.
Then two months later, there was a very, very, very big fire at the industrial site.
And it was a storage shed with a wooden frame.
And then aluminium plates on top of it.
So the fire was in the building and we weren't allowed to go in.
It was a way to how to go in.
And we had to wait till the outside, the aluminium would melt before we could put some water into the building itself.
And the size of the thing is sort of 50 meters long by, so 50 meters long by 15, 15 meters wide and 15 meters high.
So it was a pretty impressive storage shed.
There were no accidents.
It was just, it was some, I don't know, some, some ground grinded material, not valuable.
So not a biggie.
But it was a large incident.
It was what's called a very big fire.
So there were lots of people involved.
I was in the first car on the scene.
I saw the nice blue sparks from the electricity power lines zapping back and forth due to the fire.
So we tried to steer away with our houses clearly because water conducts electricity.
And like I said in the first broadcast, it really annoys firefighters if they are called,
a hobby paramaniac or something else, you know, it's really annoying.
But I think that anybody is in some sort of awe when you see a large building as in a really, really, really huge campfire.
And we were there for, it started somewhere around five in the afternoon.
And we went, we were there until a long time into the night and the fire was contained.
Nevertheless, it took us about two or three days to extinguish all the small fires that kept erupting on random places.
It was a large incident, lots of cars involved, lots of houses, small, big, and bigger.
And when we were cleaning up, one of my colleagues said to me, like I said, I was two or three months in and he said,
well, now it's time to quit.
So I, time to quit, I thought to myself, did I do anything wrong?
Did I rub somebody the wrong way or did I make very big mistakes?
So I said, why should I quit now?
Well, he says, with fires like this, really, it doesn't get any better.
And he was right.
I mean, a big fire, no personal injuries, it doesn't get any better than that.
The other thing, there was also one of my earlier days, month, my first burning car.
In the middle of the night, two, three o'clock, a pager went off, I went to the fire station, went into the car, drove up.
There was a car on fire.
It sometimes happens.
But it was my first car on fire.
And so we were, I was sort of, okay, what do I need to do now?
What do you expect me to do?
And we were taking horses and walking towards the car.
And there was this sort of exploding sound.
And I said, oh, that's, you know, I've seen enough movies to know that when a car is burning or it's something, it explodes completely.
Of course, this is all bullshit.
And that's the way the movies are made.
But nevertheless, there was an explosion sound.
So I was a little startled.
And I looked at the site commander.
Let's give him that thing.
Is it, oh, it's just one of the tires, no worries.
And sure enough, three more banks.
And then that was it.
So whenever you see a car burning, a real explosion, it's not the gas tank.
It's the tires.
The last one I like to discuss is, is a difficult one.
We went to the scene where a car had collided with a tree in a corner.
So it just slid out of the, slid off the road and collapsed into a tree.
And it was a girl 25 years old.
And she was unconscious.
Showing off the first response, the first aid was there.
The medics.
But she was clearly in a bad place.
And we did the best we could.
She went with ambulance to a hospital.
While they were driving to the hospital, they changed the destination to another hospital,
which had more experience with severe brain damage.
And well, that's it then.
So you go home wondering, OK, is this the best that we could do?
And well, sure enough, it is.
It's just that shit happens.
And it happened before we came to the scene.
And a couple of weeks later, I talked to my neighbor.
And we have a joining houses in the Netherlands, a lot of them.
I talked to my neighbor and he says, well, weren't you at the scene with that and that accident?
You know, the car, hit a tree, girl, 25 years old.
He said, yeah, yeah, I was there.
Yeah, I know her.
It's, I don't know, relative, rather distant family, not really close.
But close enough.
And then, well, first of all, you're bound to secrecy.
So everybody has their own story in their mind about how stuff happens.
And when they are at ease with that, who am I to present them with another story?
What good would it do?
And so I said, yeah, we were down.
As far as I can tell, we did absolutely the best we could.
There was no hiccups.
It was a smooth operation as far as her health was concerned.
We got her into an ambulance.
And from time to time, I kept taps on my neighbor, as in, do you know how she is now?
And so about half a year later, I learned that, yeah, she was out of the hospital.
Yeah, she was out of, what's the word for rehabilitation?
And that's not it.
Well, you know what I mean, training to try to start, restart using your body.
And she will suffer the consequences of that incident for the rest of her life.
And it's, you know, it's easy to say shit happens.
It's not easy when shit happens to you.
And I think I have, like everybody else, I have my own shit to deal with.
So last Saturday, we would go on a holiday, but we didn't, because one of the children developed pneumonia.
Thankfully, we are now two days, three days later, and the medication has kicked in.
So we got a green light from the general physician to, well, to restart our vacation.
And it's, when I tell you that this is her first, then no, not the first.
This is a fifth, yeah, five, fifth pneumonia this year.
I think you understand that there's more going on than just being a happy firefighter.
Anyways, there was me talking about firefighting again.
I would like to thank all those guys who gave me those amazing compliments.
That really touches me.
If you have comments, if you have questions, just put them in the show, in the show comments.
I love to read them.
And well, I think I just promised you a third episode.
So it has to wait, but I will return.
Okay, bye-bye.
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