Pipe Nozzle: Firefighting Prose You Can Read
Book Details
Author(s)Barry Roberts Greer
ISBN / ASIN1477402527
ISBN-139781477402528
AvailabilityUsually ships in 24 hours
Sales Rank3,803,445
MarketplaceUnited States 🇺🇸
Description
Pipe Nozzle ... is both a chronicle and an historical document, because the equipment we used is now in museums, and I don't exaggerate. When I joined Engine 6 in New London, they responded on a 1954 Seagrave long-nosed conventional cab; the only place you'll see one now is in a fire museum. And that's fine by me, because that means I rode one of the finest pumpers ever built. It means I fought fires during the last of the leather lung days--one of the reasons I ended up with cancer....
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Stories about mistakes made at fires. Stories about the paradox of firefighters who would risk their lives to save another but were, at the same time, some of the biggest flaming bigots you ever met in your life. And dumb. Plenty of smart ones, but I knew some who didn't know the difference between a piston pump and an impeller pump. I knew one who didn't know, when an alarm came in, where the hell to get on the pumper; the volunteer company had never trained him.
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But what's missing most in firefighting prose is emotional honesty. Before you gag and think I mean an angst-filled, existential, extended interior monologue about the meaning of life, you can relax. It's now called post-traumatic stress syndrome, and fire departments know how to deal with it now; not then. My brother, after he served as a New London firefighter, trained as both a chaplain and as a counselor, and did just that for the Warwick, Rhode Island fire department. He'd be there just to listen after a tough run like the deadly 2003 nightclub fire in West Warwick, Rhode Island that killed 96 (at the fire and another four after the fire); he also spent time at Ground Zero after 9/11 just to be there, to listen if any of the people now called "first responders" needed to talk. It's okay now to talk about it, which is why, for the first time in four decades, I'm doing just that...
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I quit talking about it most of the time for forty years, but now I'm writing about, because I am tired of being silent, tired of trying to explain it to people who don't give a damn or don't know enough to give a damn. If you're a firefighter and know people like that, send them to Pipe Nozzle.
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Stories about mistakes made at fires. Stories about the paradox of firefighters who would risk their lives to save another but were, at the same time, some of the biggest flaming bigots you ever met in your life. And dumb. Plenty of smart ones, but I knew some who didn't know the difference between a piston pump and an impeller pump. I knew one who didn't know, when an alarm came in, where the hell to get on the pumper; the volunteer company had never trained him.
Â
But what's missing most in firefighting prose is emotional honesty. Before you gag and think I mean an angst-filled, existential, extended interior monologue about the meaning of life, you can relax. It's now called post-traumatic stress syndrome, and fire departments know how to deal with it now; not then. My brother, after he served as a New London firefighter, trained as both a chaplain and as a counselor, and did just that for the Warwick, Rhode Island fire department. He'd be there just to listen after a tough run like the deadly 2003 nightclub fire in West Warwick, Rhode Island that killed 96 (at the fire and another four after the fire); he also spent time at Ground Zero after 9/11 just to be there, to listen if any of the people now called "first responders" needed to talk. It's okay now to talk about it, which is why, for the first time in four decades, I'm doing just that...
Â
I quit talking about it most of the time for forty years, but now I'm writing about, because I am tired of being silent, tired of trying to explain it to people who don't give a damn or don't know enough to give a damn. If you're a firefighter and know people like that, send them to Pipe Nozzle.
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