GWOT I - Station One
Aug. 23rd, 2023 12:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drewkittyGWOT I - Station One
Setting up a new operation requires a lot of work.
I'd made a security organization out of bits and pieces and scraps. And a ridiculous amount of cash, spent shortly before it became worthless. Plus a lot of chicanery and outright theft. Looting too.
A security organization's needs are modest. We need uniforms, vehicles, gear and weapons. We need experienced leaders and trainers for our skills. A base of operations and systems and facilities support.
Uniforms are relatively easy, especially if you know a seamstress and have a supply of patches. (We looted our Company offices to the ground, which helped.) Vehicles require parts and mechanics. Facilities had an industrial label maker that could do wide prints, which was really useful. A stranded heavy tow truck driver supplemented the assigned Employees with mechanical aptitude - and willingness to help mount armor and barbed wire to our new lead vehicle.
Gear is either really easy (belts and harnesses) or not easy at all (holsters, helmets and body armor.) We'd checked several uniform shops, which had all been looted, but I made a point of sweeping the detrius on the floor and in the back. Did you know that blue Ikea bags make great stuff transporters? Almost as good as salvage covers and much better than blue tarps alone. Among the remains were a lot of old leather holsters and straps.
Helmets ... well ... we were fucked for those. Hard hats would have to do for a while, until the mythical convoy from Utah I kept getting promised.
Body armor ... unobtanium. I wore my set, which is only rated 2A and intended to be concealed under a uniform shirt. Company offices yielded a few more sets and some extra plates. There was no question of being able to buy any - all vendors were running full tilt for the China war, selling only to Uncle Sam and his butler Homeland.
Weapons, ironically enough, were easy. We'd made a point of collecting small arms at every chance, including off the bodies of people who had somehow gotten in our way. (Forgive my vagueness on this point, as there is no statute of limitations on murder and there might be a normal again someday.) Laypersons often don't realize that any machine shop can make a decent machine pistol, and a medium machine gun is not much more difficult than a truck axle to make. I'd even known of a man who made a working fully automatic AK-47 from a shovel. That's right. A shovel. Took him a few weeks and a lot of folding, swearing and filing.
So it wasn't at all hard for a client with several in-house, fully equipped machine shops and supplies of tools and bar stock to make what was necessary. Don't tell the ATF. (Actually, you probably can't. They got transferred as an agency into Homeland.)
Ammunition would have been harder except that we'd collected ammo from Employees who had come in, and also munchkins as above. At the same time I'd stiffed Saratoga Gun Exchange for everything we could buy off them, I'd gotten them to throw in a couple of 12 gauge reloading sets and more black powder than I cared to admit. Their collections department (the owner) now vowed to get his revenge, as I'd paid in greenbacks shortly before they had been cancelled as currency. It wasn't going to happen. I had a security department.
I will draw a merciful veil over leadership and training for security organizations. Let's just say I'm winging it, leveraging my handful of trained soldiers, and watching the Client controlled force of Employees on the Reaction Team become competent at a much faster pace.
The capitalization is deliberate. The Client is the people paying for the security organization. The Employees are the Client's employees, not mine. The Reaction Team is the corporate militia, which is strictly under the control of the Site Location Executive. You can figure out that last part yourself.
The Site (note capitalization) was providing much of our support. We went out and hunted and gathered. (There is a statute of limitations on theft and commercial burglary, but why push it?) The Site's Facilities Group, like an amoeba, twinned off and formed a Logistics Group with a handful of logistics specialists over a mass of otherwise unhelpful dependents, hangers-on, and former marketing people. Part of the security team's job (note lack of capitalization) was to screen them in and out of their work areas daily to prevent theft.
So we had a security organization. Now we needed a Fire Brigade. (Pesky capitals again.)
Running a fire department, even a small one, is at least three orders of magnitude harder than running a security organization. (Don't even get me started about running a police department - even the police weren't running police departments, and wouldn't be until the China War ended.)
Fire vehicles are highly specialized to do multiple tasks, and roliing down the street or up the dirt road is only one of them. To a layperson, they're all red. To fire personnel, there are lots of additional questions - how much water can they flow? How much water can they carry? How much room to carry Stuff? Can they flow water while in motion, which is like walking and chewing gum at the same time? Can they turn on a dime or do they need an entire parking lot to make a three point turn? Can they cross that little bridge? Or get under those overhanging wires?
We had exactly two dedicated fire vehicles. An appropriated former volunteer fire engine (they would not be needing it) and the Site's pre-War brush truck, basically a pickup truck with a small tank, smaller pump and delusions of adequacy. Again, pre-War, the brush truck was left over from when the Facilities Group had had an industrial fire brigade, but it had been taken out of service to save money. As facilities people are wont to do, they hid it - and as many fire department parts and tools as they could - in the hopes of resurrecting the program someday.
(How do you hide an entire vehicle? Facilities can hide anything anywhere. Except from security.)
The Engine ... called that because it's basically a pump on wheels ... had many problems. The Diesel engine was on its last legs, it had leaky pump seals so it dumped water on the ground and only sent some of it down the hoses at a lower pressure, the electrical wiring was literally rat chewed, some of the lights didn't work, and the chrome had not been polished for a LONG time. Some of its equipment (mostly forcible entry tools) had been stolen before we had found it roadside. The rest was long out of date, and would have been out of service by any reasonable standard.
Firefighting uniforms were relatively easy. Their station garb is a dark navy T-shirt, often as not, with pants made of anything but polyester.
Firefighting garments, or Personal Protective Equipment, were _not_. A full set - helmet, turnout coat, turnout pants, fire boots, fire gloves, neck hood, goggles - would set you back several thousand dollars according to the catalogs. Even in the rest of America, you weren't buying them. In the Bay Area, there was no shipping and no warehouses and no local stock. Actual fire agencies had immediately secured the handful of local vendors for their own continuing needs.
Then there's SCBA, or Self Contained Breathing Apparatus. Never go into a fire without wearing one, you will sear your lungs and die. Might take hours, might take a few minutes, but sucks to be you. Workplace respirators neither keep out poisonous gases nor supply breathable air with oxygen. It's SCBA or no-can-do.
The Site dealt with a lot of hazardous materials. So we had a handful of dusty lockers with SCBAs in them for the Site Hazardous Materials Team - also taken out of service several years ago to save money. The air compressors even had a fill kit so we could refill the bottles. And medical oxygen too, which caused me to jump for joy when I found out.
This left all the Stuff.
A fire vehicle is basically a big toolbox full of Stuff to go do fire service work. Much of it is custom made, all of it is expensive, and while you can do some substitutions, they are clumsy at best and slow everything down. (No glass extrication tool? Hacksaw. No Jaws of Life? Hydraulic jacks and some metal clamps, thanks Buddy for thinking of it.)
The one big sticking point on Stuff was the fire hose. You know, what actually carries the water from the fire hydrants to the engines and pumps and from there to the fire.
We had hose cabinets. The hoses in them were mostly rotted. A couple had been left open and the rats had gotten them. The hoses Facilities had hidden in the brush truck had mostly dry rotted.
Couldn't we just use garden hoses?
Says here a garden hose flows fourteen to twenty-two (14-22) gallons per minute.
The low setting on a small diameter firefighting nozzle (one of those custom made expensive pieces of gear) is fifty (50) gallons per minute. That's the casual setting. For actually fighting fire, double or triplet that. So one good hose is worth five garden hoses. Size - and girth - really does matter.
Then we had the leaders and trainers problem.
Enter Janine, stage right.
Pre-War she had been a manufacturer's contract technician for an esoteric system I can't discuss. So she'd been on site doing warranty repairs when San Francisco stopped having a homeless problem. Or a water supply. Or air you could breathe without risking breathing in fallout. Etc, ad nauseum.
She couldn't go home. It had been in the Castro.
So she'd stayed here and attached herself to Facilities. As one of the few highly competent people in that shop, who wasn't an Employee, they'd made her a job offer. She'd declined.
So, like security, she'd remained a Contractor. (Pesky capitals again.) We'd kept feeding her and money was piling up in her direct deposit that she couldn't use, any more than the rest of us could. But as a single contractor for a single company, she'd hung out with the other contractors because otherwise she had no place to fit in.
But she had taken it upon herself while out on a convoy to grab the aforementioned fire engine. I'd told her that if she brings the puppy home, she gets to feed, water and clean up after it. Given her a promotion to Captain.
Then I'd gone to Legal One and through him, the SLE. (Figure out the acronym yourself, please.)
The problem was directly akin to our medical problem. Pre-War, the security at Site had done all first responder services - answered in house emergency calls, activated outside agencies, made notifications, sent guards to respond, secured scenes and challenged trespassers, provided first aid and rudimentary EMS, done incipient firefighting, even secured utilities and supported fire brigade and hazardous materials team operations. But all of these activities assumed that ambulances, fire departments, police departments, etc. would 1) respond and 2) take over.
That wasn't happening. Thanks Firecracker War.
So with no ambulances we could collect patients and wait for them to die.
So I'd make up an infirmary, drafted a vet surgeon to run it, done a lot of creative acquisitions (I think the robbery statute of limitations is longer than that for simple theft, so again, merciful veil) ... and continued involving myself in its management, rather to everyone's dismay. Except the patients. It was a self solving problem, everyone would be a patient eventually and understand why I had to keep butting my nose in to keep the floors clean and the hands washed.
If the San Jose Fire Department is not coming, we need to roll our own. The Site Fire Brigade is back, with a vengeance.
I didn't know if I could run a fire department. I doubted it, frankly, because you can't teach what you don't know and I couldn't even wear a SCBA without taking ten minutes to figure the bitch out. (I'd starfished and nearly passed out, the first time.)
Firefighters are expected to put on SCBA in less than sixty seconds. They are timed. They time each other for fun. A good time is forty seconds or less.
We had exactly three trained fire personnel on site. Janine, who had been a volunteer fire engineer - qualified to drive apparatus, run calls and flow water, but not to run a station. The VP of Facilities who was far too busy and also hated my guts because I'd let his family die horribly. (Employee > Contractor, my version doesn't matter.) We couldn't put him at risk anyway. If he looked like he was going to put on a turnout coat, I'd have to stop him - for the safety of the Site. One of the Facilities water systems engineers who had been in the site Fire Brigade and had helped hide all the stuff, who was - to put it politely - a fire nerd. Also valuable but a little more expendable than the VP-F.
So it was Janine in charge of the Fire Brigade, reporting to me. Her contract company signed a contract with my Employer, with great relief because it got them off the hook. Apparently her HR file had been four hundred pages, and she had worked there for three years. (Very very good at her job, very very abrasive to everyone, and what the contract company's VP of HR had called a "walking human resources disaster" in the one conference call with me.)
Janine could not manage her way out of a paper bag. But she could LEAD. That would do. Like a strap-on ... spine ... I could provide the management skills to back up her leadership.
So she was full time running the Fire Brigade. Part time running that esoteric complex system I mentioned. Also part time doing technical stuff for the Ammunition Technical Working Group. (Again, don't tell ATF.)
We had daily meetings. They basically boiled down to:
"What is the operating status of your fire equipment? What is your staffing level today? What major parts and systems don't work?"
"Janine, what are you working on today?"
"Janine, these are the three most recent complaints about you from Client HR. First one. Did you really call Karen in Site Ops a crotch dropping dispenser with delusions of femininity? Why?"
Finally we assigned someone from Client HR to follow her around with full power to either shush her or tell the other person to 'Go Away, We're Busy,' any time she left the fire station.
That last was also a neat trick. Constructing buildings normally requires red tape, construction permits, fees and taxes and inspections... this was one area where the Firecracker War actually made things a lot easier. Both the sprawling dependent camp and the well organized Contractor Yard were proof that we could scrape up minimal housing quickly.
A fire station is a house with a huge garage attached. We couldn't do the house part. But the garage ended up being four 40' shipping containers in a remote parking lot (far enough from the other buildings that a fire wouldn't affect it), double stacked to form two side walls, with a truss system jury rigged above it and various types of roofing on the truss system. It neatly doubled as a training facility with various nooks, crannies and features. Bulky gear we had could be stored in the bottom containers. The top left container was converted to a classroom during the day and a bunkhouse at night. (I drew the line at a fire pole - broken ankles disable personnel, and we couldn't afford that. But they did use a ladder to get up and down until we found the spiral staircase and brought it back and welded it in.) The top right container became Janine's working office and secure equipment storage.
I always met her in her office. We always looked around the station. I was learning as fast I could in the time I could spare, which wasn't much.
Janine saw eye to eye with me on just one thing, but it was the most important detail of all.
It has to be perfect. And if it is less than perfect, we need to be honest about it and everyone who needs to know, needs to know.
So when the main pump on the fire engine took a shit, which it did regularly, no one would waste time fucking with the panel and they would just bring a weak-ass portable pump instead.
Or when the Goddamned extrication tools were borrowed by security for a convoy and not fucking returned, the improvised pump jack and fugly crowbar would be put immediately in their place and all fire personnel notified. Or fucking else.
Or if the EMS bag did not have enough bandages in it, for which there was absolutely no Goddamn excuse in this fucked up world because the Craft Club made them now from cut up sheets, someone would _immediately_ go restock the shit from the EMS cabinet in one of the cargo containers, and the restock cabinet would be resupplied, and those assholes in Logistics would get a new order for a lot more. Which would then keep the sluts in the Craft Club busy in the evenings for a few days.
Learning is a two way process. I was teaching Janine the fundamentals of line management. She was teaching me, directly and indirectly, how to swear. Copiously and at length.
But this evening I was burning sleep time to sit in on one of Janine's trainings. Volunteer Employee and Contractor fire personnel trained four days a week and all day on one weekend day. Janine of course was at every training and both weekend days.
She'd sent me the syllabus after I'd taught her how to write one.
"Ethics of Fire Service"
Considering I'd written a ruthless class on the "Ethics of Deadly Force," rammed it through both Employer and Company Legal, and made all guards and gotten the Client to make all Employee managers take it ... yeah, I needed to sit in on this one.
Narrow classroom, narrow tables, one student per table. So about sixteen in the room. Janine paced up and down.
First she showed a video. "What we do in life ... echoes in Eternity." Then a quote from Rocky. Then "Life is scary. Get used to it."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZccjzVtHTQM
Apparently she'd had it on her phone, which is the only way we had it since YouTube was down for the duration of the War.
I had never seen more animation in her face. Not when she'd breached a door as part of a combat entry in which I'd blown through several magazines, while she was armed only with a Halligan tool. Not when she'd been in the middle of the infirmary treating five immediate patients at the same time during the massive attack. Not when she'd supervised rigging hoses to wash the hazardous materials off us after looting the Dollar Barn on Leigh. Not when she'd begged to be allowed to keep the fire engine. Not even when we'd had a visit from the Marines, and their helicopter gunner had been a literal twitch from blowing us all away.
"The deal is simple. The fire service exists to save human life and protect property. That is what we do. We do not trade lives for property. We take calculated risks to save valuable property. A fire is not an emergency for a firefighter. I will say that again.
"A fire is NOT an emergency for a firefighter."
With that she picked up something off the wall.
A jet of flame shot out five feet, neatly down the center aisle. People recoiled.
She put it back on the wall. I looked at the bracket. A fire extinguisher was mounted next to a sign saying LESS FIRE. The blowtorch she had just displayed was mounted next to a sign saying MORE FIRE.
"You must master this profession. This is always true. It is true in war, which is where we are now. It is true in peace, which is just a different, slower war. When you fail to master this profession, you will die. You will be horribly injured. Worse yet, other people will die and will be horribly injured. And you will live forever with the knowledge that it was your fault."
She sat on one of the tables, nearly displacing the volunteer who had to schooch out of her way.
"The first baby I killed was seventeen years ago. It was a Tuesday in May. I responded to the station for a structure fire. It was a volunteer station, like this one but much better equipped. I was a new volunteer but I was fully trained and signed off. I had all my gear. I knew what I was doing. I thought I knew what I was doing. And I was a hell of a lot better trained than any of you are now."
Her face was somber.
"It wasn't a false alarm. It was a working structure fire. I put on my gear. I was slow. Others were slower. We hooked up to the hydrant, we started flowing water, we made forcible entry, we sought out the fire.
"Captain told me to break out the windows. Actually, he told me to break a specific window on the second floor, to affect flow path. Singular. Not plural. But I didn't hear that and he didn't say that, and I didn't know that. I hadn't had that class, which had been an advanced class but is a basic class now. I didn't know what flow path meant. So I took the pike pole and started breaking out windows. Just like cops sometimes do, even now.
"He started screaming at me, 'What the fuck are you doing?' and he broke off and ran into that house. But he put on his PPE first, because you can't save anyone if you're dead.
"He did what is called a primary search without hose, or Vent Enter Search. That's an extremely dangerous tactic, that the fire service abandoned a decade ago. You will be doing primary search without hose because we don't have enough fucking hose to do VEIS. He didn't have a thermal imager. He didn't even have a tool in his hand, another cardinal failure.
"He found a woman and dragged her out, saving her life. She had to go to the hospital but she lived.
"I'd ventilated the house all right. I'd given the fire a lot more oxygen, speeding it up so it would burn a lot faster.
"The house collapsed thirty seconds later. Crushing the crib and killing her baby, if the smoke hadn't gotten the baby first."
Long pregnant pause.
"If I hadn't made a rookie mistake, breaking out all those windows, there might have been time to save both. There wasn't.
"Much later, very drunk, Captain told me that he'd ran past the crib because he'd seen her down. He didn't think. He didn't think to grab the baby.
"So when you hear VICTIM VICTIM VICTIM, you fucking drop everything and you grab the fucking baby. Don't drop the baby. If you drop the baby, pick it up. Tell the medics too.
"People will die because you fuck up. See Echo 18 back there? How many people have you killed by fucking up this year?"
I blinked, held up a hand. Counted.
"At least seven," I said quietly into the silent room. And I was probably under-counting.
"Exactly my point. We are not security guards and we are not law enforcement. But we are not off the hook as firefighters just because our security is weak and our police are missing in action because our soldiers are in China. Our job is still the same. We save lives at great risk and we protect property with calculated risks.
"This is an all-hazard Fire Brigade. There is no one in this fucking world that does what we do. Injured people, call the medics. Law problem, call the law, or imitation law like Echo 18. Hazmat? There's teams and companies for that including this one now. But if you want to put water on fire and drag people out of fire, you have to call _us_. There is no one else to call.
"I have talked to San Jose Fire. If we have a confirmed working structure fire, they cannot help us. Even then. They have too many fires every day, all over their first in areas. They don't do EMS any more. They don't do standbys, or lift assists, or public assists. They put out fires and they put out a lot of fires. They have call volumes worse than Stockton and San Francisco put together. And in between, they try to garden and gather food, just like us.
"That means if there is a fire here, we in this room put it out, or we lose that building. Simple as that.
"San Francisco's call volume is now zero. As best I know, no member of the San Francisco Fire Department is still alive. Any reason for that? Anyone? That was a question."
Someone spoke.
"They lost their lives saving others."
"Exactly. Those who were not killed at once by detonation started doing what they could. Mostly that was to get streets unblocked and get people moving, to get people the fuck out. Vehicles when they could, walking when they couldn't. Carrying people out. Then going back in, over and over again, guaranteeing lethal radiation exposure for themselves. Setting up decon points to wash radiation off people as they walked past, when they could find water. Lifesaving first aid for those who could be saved, and ruthlessly ignoring the dead and also those about to die. On duty, off duty, disabled, retired, didn't matter. They drove in if they didn't live in the City. Or they got as close as they could, and were on the front lines of the megafires. And died for it, every one.
"We are the final line of defense for ordinary folks. We are not combatants. We do not touch guns. We are civil defense workers. But we are lawful targets under the ordinary laws of war, if we are protecting military targets or objectives.
"Echo 18, is this Site a lawful military target?"
I'd already had this discussion with Legal One.
"Yes."
We coded for the War. We supported our troops in China. So if the Chinese attacked us, it was only fair.
"So we are an all hazard department. But we can't put ourselves at risk for anything but lives. So there will be times Echo and I tell you to stage, to stay away, to stay put, even to take cover and hide. YOU WILL OBEY THAT INSTRUCTION. Even when every nerve and synapse is telling you to get your ass in there and get it stuck the fuck in.
"You obey orders. The fire service has always been a paramilitary organization with a chain of command. Because the white hat means I am responsible for each and every one of your lives. It means that when I make a mistake, I am very likely to kill one or more of you."
Janine paused, looking in each person's face in turn. I recognized what she was doing, because I did it too on the daily. Memorizing their appearance so that they would be clearly defined in her future nightmares.
"But if you go off and freelance and do your own thing, you are likely to get YOURSELF killed and also several other people.
"So you need to obey your orders. And because Echo 18 is generally incident commander, that means I have to take his orders.
"You don't need to like each other. But on the fireground we are all brothers and sisters. Bet your life on them because they bet their life on you.
"A Chief told me once, 'Ours For Theirs.' I asked him what he meant. He just said it again. He didn't explain.
"I will explain it, briefly and once. We do not trade something for nothing. People will die and we cannot save them. Property can be destroyed. But I will not risk your lives for shit, or for corpses. Neither will you. You are not allowed anymore.
"I will risk your life for the lives of others. I will even GIVE your life for the lives of others.
"Ours For Theirs. That is what it means.
"If you have a problem with that, get the fuck up and get out of this room right now and turn in your gear. Echo 18 may have a job for you. There are lots of other things you can do in this life. But unless you decide, right now, that you are literally willing to die to save lives in this profession, I can't use you and you need to get the fuck out."
Someone stood up.
He turned away to walk out the back of the classroom.
I won't identify him. He worked at Site. He saved lives doing other stuff. He survived at least until my departure from Site. I still have great respect for him.
But he did not agree to give Ours for Theirs. Or more precisely, his for yours.
"Thank you for your honesty. Anyone else?"
I couldn't ask that of my guards. I could ask them to take lives. I could ask them to risk their lives. I did both every day.
But I couldn't tell them Ours For Theirs. Observe And Report. Be a good witness. Do what you can, where you can. Call it in, call for help.
But not coldly sacrifice yourself for others. That was not an ask I could make.
But that was the ask for fire service personnel.
Good that I knew that now. Because it cemented my decision, that I had to be in actual command of the Fire Brigade. Because they didn't have brakes.
I didn't need to be Chief. But I did need to be able to keep them out of situations where giving their lives was not necessary, or justified.
Because the Site did not have firefighters to save lives. That was not why we needed a Fire Brigade.
The Site was the War. We needed a fire service to stay in business, writing the code, preventing fires and putting out small fires and saving people from big fires. Can't write code in a burned out shell.
And if the Site stopped working, it would not be a handful of dead in a fire, it would be thousands of people jobless in a radioactive hell, or interned by Homeland, or ... God forbid ... sidewalked.
If sending these dozen plus people into fire could save thousands, I would do it. Cheerfully.
Would that I could go instead. But just as Janine could not put on SCBA and rush in every time... neither could I.
Janine continued and I half listened. Talking about prevention, about chain of command, about bugles and colored helmets and protocols. Clear and concise communications. Conditions, actions, needs. Maydays. Action words.
Yeah, I needed to be here and to lose the sleep.
There was a test at the end. But the real test had been earlier, with one person failing it.
After the students left, Janine paused near me. Wondering if I would say anything after all the times she'd called me out in the class.
"Janine," I began. "Two people were dead, that call 17 years ago. You and your Captain clawed back one. That's good work. You telling the story today, might save more. Again, good work."
She shook her head.
"I've tried telling myself that for years. You may even be right. That was the first baby I killed."
She turned away for the spiral staircase.
Only then did I hear the slight emphasis, on the modifier.
Crap.
Ours For Theirs. But in an apocalypse, we may not even get to enjoy the luxury of that choice.
Setting up a new operation requires a lot of work.
I'd made a security organization out of bits and pieces and scraps. And a ridiculous amount of cash, spent shortly before it became worthless. Plus a lot of chicanery and outright theft. Looting too.
A security organization's needs are modest. We need uniforms, vehicles, gear and weapons. We need experienced leaders and trainers for our skills. A base of operations and systems and facilities support.
Uniforms are relatively easy, especially if you know a seamstress and have a supply of patches. (We looted our Company offices to the ground, which helped.) Vehicles require parts and mechanics. Facilities had an industrial label maker that could do wide prints, which was really useful. A stranded heavy tow truck driver supplemented the assigned Employees with mechanical aptitude - and willingness to help mount armor and barbed wire to our new lead vehicle.
Gear is either really easy (belts and harnesses) or not easy at all (holsters, helmets and body armor.) We'd checked several uniform shops, which had all been looted, but I made a point of sweeping the detrius on the floor and in the back. Did you know that blue Ikea bags make great stuff transporters? Almost as good as salvage covers and much better than blue tarps alone. Among the remains were a lot of old leather holsters and straps.
Helmets ... well ... we were fucked for those. Hard hats would have to do for a while, until the mythical convoy from Utah I kept getting promised.
Body armor ... unobtanium. I wore my set, which is only rated 2A and intended to be concealed under a uniform shirt. Company offices yielded a few more sets and some extra plates. There was no question of being able to buy any - all vendors were running full tilt for the China war, selling only to Uncle Sam and his butler Homeland.
Weapons, ironically enough, were easy. We'd made a point of collecting small arms at every chance, including off the bodies of people who had somehow gotten in our way. (Forgive my vagueness on this point, as there is no statute of limitations on murder and there might be a normal again someday.) Laypersons often don't realize that any machine shop can make a decent machine pistol, and a medium machine gun is not much more difficult than a truck axle to make. I'd even known of a man who made a working fully automatic AK-47 from a shovel. That's right. A shovel. Took him a few weeks and a lot of folding, swearing and filing.
So it wasn't at all hard for a client with several in-house, fully equipped machine shops and supplies of tools and bar stock to make what was necessary. Don't tell the ATF. (Actually, you probably can't. They got transferred as an agency into Homeland.)
Ammunition would have been harder except that we'd collected ammo from Employees who had come in, and also munchkins as above. At the same time I'd stiffed Saratoga Gun Exchange for everything we could buy off them, I'd gotten them to throw in a couple of 12 gauge reloading sets and more black powder than I cared to admit. Their collections department (the owner) now vowed to get his revenge, as I'd paid in greenbacks shortly before they had been cancelled as currency. It wasn't going to happen. I had a security department.
I will draw a merciful veil over leadership and training for security organizations. Let's just say I'm winging it, leveraging my handful of trained soldiers, and watching the Client controlled force of Employees on the Reaction Team become competent at a much faster pace.
The capitalization is deliberate. The Client is the people paying for the security organization. The Employees are the Client's employees, not mine. The Reaction Team is the corporate militia, which is strictly under the control of the Site Location Executive. You can figure out that last part yourself.
The Site (note capitalization) was providing much of our support. We went out and hunted and gathered. (There is a statute of limitations on theft and commercial burglary, but why push it?) The Site's Facilities Group, like an amoeba, twinned off and formed a Logistics Group with a handful of logistics specialists over a mass of otherwise unhelpful dependents, hangers-on, and former marketing people. Part of the security team's job (note lack of capitalization) was to screen them in and out of their work areas daily to prevent theft.
So we had a security organization. Now we needed a Fire Brigade. (Pesky capitals again.)
Running a fire department, even a small one, is at least three orders of magnitude harder than running a security organization. (Don't even get me started about running a police department - even the police weren't running police departments, and wouldn't be until the China War ended.)
Fire vehicles are highly specialized to do multiple tasks, and roliing down the street or up the dirt road is only one of them. To a layperson, they're all red. To fire personnel, there are lots of additional questions - how much water can they flow? How much water can they carry? How much room to carry Stuff? Can they flow water while in motion, which is like walking and chewing gum at the same time? Can they turn on a dime or do they need an entire parking lot to make a three point turn? Can they cross that little bridge? Or get under those overhanging wires?
We had exactly two dedicated fire vehicles. An appropriated former volunteer fire engine (they would not be needing it) and the Site's pre-War brush truck, basically a pickup truck with a small tank, smaller pump and delusions of adequacy. Again, pre-War, the brush truck was left over from when the Facilities Group had had an industrial fire brigade, but it had been taken out of service to save money. As facilities people are wont to do, they hid it - and as many fire department parts and tools as they could - in the hopes of resurrecting the program someday.
(How do you hide an entire vehicle? Facilities can hide anything anywhere. Except from security.)
The Engine ... called that because it's basically a pump on wheels ... had many problems. The Diesel engine was on its last legs, it had leaky pump seals so it dumped water on the ground and only sent some of it down the hoses at a lower pressure, the electrical wiring was literally rat chewed, some of the lights didn't work, and the chrome had not been polished for a LONG time. Some of its equipment (mostly forcible entry tools) had been stolen before we had found it roadside. The rest was long out of date, and would have been out of service by any reasonable standard.
Firefighting uniforms were relatively easy. Their station garb is a dark navy T-shirt, often as not, with pants made of anything but polyester.
Firefighting garments, or Personal Protective Equipment, were _not_. A full set - helmet, turnout coat, turnout pants, fire boots, fire gloves, neck hood, goggles - would set you back several thousand dollars according to the catalogs. Even in the rest of America, you weren't buying them. In the Bay Area, there was no shipping and no warehouses and no local stock. Actual fire agencies had immediately secured the handful of local vendors for their own continuing needs.
Then there's SCBA, or Self Contained Breathing Apparatus. Never go into a fire without wearing one, you will sear your lungs and die. Might take hours, might take a few minutes, but sucks to be you. Workplace respirators neither keep out poisonous gases nor supply breathable air with oxygen. It's SCBA or no-can-do.
The Site dealt with a lot of hazardous materials. So we had a handful of dusty lockers with SCBAs in them for the Site Hazardous Materials Team - also taken out of service several years ago to save money. The air compressors even had a fill kit so we could refill the bottles. And medical oxygen too, which caused me to jump for joy when I found out.
This left all the Stuff.
A fire vehicle is basically a big toolbox full of Stuff to go do fire service work. Much of it is custom made, all of it is expensive, and while you can do some substitutions, they are clumsy at best and slow everything down. (No glass extrication tool? Hacksaw. No Jaws of Life? Hydraulic jacks and some metal clamps, thanks Buddy for thinking of it.)
The one big sticking point on Stuff was the fire hose. You know, what actually carries the water from the fire hydrants to the engines and pumps and from there to the fire.
We had hose cabinets. The hoses in them were mostly rotted. A couple had been left open and the rats had gotten them. The hoses Facilities had hidden in the brush truck had mostly dry rotted.
Couldn't we just use garden hoses?
Says here a garden hose flows fourteen to twenty-two (14-22) gallons per minute.
The low setting on a small diameter firefighting nozzle (one of those custom made expensive pieces of gear) is fifty (50) gallons per minute. That's the casual setting. For actually fighting fire, double or triplet that. So one good hose is worth five garden hoses. Size - and girth - really does matter.
Then we had the leaders and trainers problem.
Enter Janine, stage right.
Pre-War she had been a manufacturer's contract technician for an esoteric system I can't discuss. So she'd been on site doing warranty repairs when San Francisco stopped having a homeless problem. Or a water supply. Or air you could breathe without risking breathing in fallout. Etc, ad nauseum.
She couldn't go home. It had been in the Castro.
So she'd stayed here and attached herself to Facilities. As one of the few highly competent people in that shop, who wasn't an Employee, they'd made her a job offer. She'd declined.
So, like security, she'd remained a Contractor. (Pesky capitals again.) We'd kept feeding her and money was piling up in her direct deposit that she couldn't use, any more than the rest of us could. But as a single contractor for a single company, she'd hung out with the other contractors because otherwise she had no place to fit in.
But she had taken it upon herself while out on a convoy to grab the aforementioned fire engine. I'd told her that if she brings the puppy home, she gets to feed, water and clean up after it. Given her a promotion to Captain.
Then I'd gone to Legal One and through him, the SLE. (Figure out the acronym yourself, please.)
The problem was directly akin to our medical problem. Pre-War, the security at Site had done all first responder services - answered in house emergency calls, activated outside agencies, made notifications, sent guards to respond, secured scenes and challenged trespassers, provided first aid and rudimentary EMS, done incipient firefighting, even secured utilities and supported fire brigade and hazardous materials team operations. But all of these activities assumed that ambulances, fire departments, police departments, etc. would 1) respond and 2) take over.
That wasn't happening. Thanks Firecracker War.
So with no ambulances we could collect patients and wait for them to die.
So I'd make up an infirmary, drafted a vet surgeon to run it, done a lot of creative acquisitions (I think the robbery statute of limitations is longer than that for simple theft, so again, merciful veil) ... and continued involving myself in its management, rather to everyone's dismay. Except the patients. It was a self solving problem, everyone would be a patient eventually and understand why I had to keep butting my nose in to keep the floors clean and the hands washed.
If the San Jose Fire Department is not coming, we need to roll our own. The Site Fire Brigade is back, with a vengeance.
I didn't know if I could run a fire department. I doubted it, frankly, because you can't teach what you don't know and I couldn't even wear a SCBA without taking ten minutes to figure the bitch out. (I'd starfished and nearly passed out, the first time.)
Firefighters are expected to put on SCBA in less than sixty seconds. They are timed. They time each other for fun. A good time is forty seconds or less.
We had exactly three trained fire personnel on site. Janine, who had been a volunteer fire engineer - qualified to drive apparatus, run calls and flow water, but not to run a station. The VP of Facilities who was far too busy and also hated my guts because I'd let his family die horribly. (Employee > Contractor, my version doesn't matter.) We couldn't put him at risk anyway. If he looked like he was going to put on a turnout coat, I'd have to stop him - for the safety of the Site. One of the Facilities water systems engineers who had been in the site Fire Brigade and had helped hide all the stuff, who was - to put it politely - a fire nerd. Also valuable but a little more expendable than the VP-F.
So it was Janine in charge of the Fire Brigade, reporting to me. Her contract company signed a contract with my Employer, with great relief because it got them off the hook. Apparently her HR file had been four hundred pages, and she had worked there for three years. (Very very good at her job, very very abrasive to everyone, and what the contract company's VP of HR had called a "walking human resources disaster" in the one conference call with me.)
Janine could not manage her way out of a paper bag. But she could LEAD. That would do. Like a strap-on ... spine ... I could provide the management skills to back up her leadership.
So she was full time running the Fire Brigade. Part time running that esoteric complex system I mentioned. Also part time doing technical stuff for the Ammunition Technical Working Group. (Again, don't tell ATF.)
We had daily meetings. They basically boiled down to:
"What is the operating status of your fire equipment? What is your staffing level today? What major parts and systems don't work?"
"Janine, what are you working on today?"
"Janine, these are the three most recent complaints about you from Client HR. First one. Did you really call Karen in Site Ops a crotch dropping dispenser with delusions of femininity? Why?"
Finally we assigned someone from Client HR to follow her around with full power to either shush her or tell the other person to 'Go Away, We're Busy,' any time she left the fire station.
That last was also a neat trick. Constructing buildings normally requires red tape, construction permits, fees and taxes and inspections... this was one area where the Firecracker War actually made things a lot easier. Both the sprawling dependent camp and the well organized Contractor Yard were proof that we could scrape up minimal housing quickly.
A fire station is a house with a huge garage attached. We couldn't do the house part. But the garage ended up being four 40' shipping containers in a remote parking lot (far enough from the other buildings that a fire wouldn't affect it), double stacked to form two side walls, with a truss system jury rigged above it and various types of roofing on the truss system. It neatly doubled as a training facility with various nooks, crannies and features. Bulky gear we had could be stored in the bottom containers. The top left container was converted to a classroom during the day and a bunkhouse at night. (I drew the line at a fire pole - broken ankles disable personnel, and we couldn't afford that. But they did use a ladder to get up and down until we found the spiral staircase and brought it back and welded it in.) The top right container became Janine's working office and secure equipment storage.
I always met her in her office. We always looked around the station. I was learning as fast I could in the time I could spare, which wasn't much.
Janine saw eye to eye with me on just one thing, but it was the most important detail of all.
It has to be perfect. And if it is less than perfect, we need to be honest about it and everyone who needs to know, needs to know.
So when the main pump on the fire engine took a shit, which it did regularly, no one would waste time fucking with the panel and they would just bring a weak-ass portable pump instead.
Or when the Goddamned extrication tools were borrowed by security for a convoy and not fucking returned, the improvised pump jack and fugly crowbar would be put immediately in their place and all fire personnel notified. Or fucking else.
Or if the EMS bag did not have enough bandages in it, for which there was absolutely no Goddamn excuse in this fucked up world because the Craft Club made them now from cut up sheets, someone would _immediately_ go restock the shit from the EMS cabinet in one of the cargo containers, and the restock cabinet would be resupplied, and those assholes in Logistics would get a new order for a lot more. Which would then keep the sluts in the Craft Club busy in the evenings for a few days.
Learning is a two way process. I was teaching Janine the fundamentals of line management. She was teaching me, directly and indirectly, how to swear. Copiously and at length.
But this evening I was burning sleep time to sit in on one of Janine's trainings. Volunteer Employee and Contractor fire personnel trained four days a week and all day on one weekend day. Janine of course was at every training and both weekend days.
She'd sent me the syllabus after I'd taught her how to write one.
"Ethics of Fire Service"
Considering I'd written a ruthless class on the "Ethics of Deadly Force," rammed it through both Employer and Company Legal, and made all guards and gotten the Client to make all Employee managers take it ... yeah, I needed to sit in on this one.
Narrow classroom, narrow tables, one student per table. So about sixteen in the room. Janine paced up and down.
First she showed a video. "What we do in life ... echoes in Eternity." Then a quote from Rocky. Then "Life is scary. Get used to it."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZccjzVtHTQM
Apparently she'd had it on her phone, which is the only way we had it since YouTube was down for the duration of the War.
I had never seen more animation in her face. Not when she'd breached a door as part of a combat entry in which I'd blown through several magazines, while she was armed only with a Halligan tool. Not when she'd been in the middle of the infirmary treating five immediate patients at the same time during the massive attack. Not when she'd supervised rigging hoses to wash the hazardous materials off us after looting the Dollar Barn on Leigh. Not when she'd begged to be allowed to keep the fire engine. Not even when we'd had a visit from the Marines, and their helicopter gunner had been a literal twitch from blowing us all away.
"The deal is simple. The fire service exists to save human life and protect property. That is what we do. We do not trade lives for property. We take calculated risks to save valuable property. A fire is not an emergency for a firefighter. I will say that again.
"A fire is NOT an emergency for a firefighter."
With that she picked up something off the wall.
A jet of flame shot out five feet, neatly down the center aisle. People recoiled.
She put it back on the wall. I looked at the bracket. A fire extinguisher was mounted next to a sign saying LESS FIRE. The blowtorch she had just displayed was mounted next to a sign saying MORE FIRE.
"You must master this profession. This is always true. It is true in war, which is where we are now. It is true in peace, which is just a different, slower war. When you fail to master this profession, you will die. You will be horribly injured. Worse yet, other people will die and will be horribly injured. And you will live forever with the knowledge that it was your fault."
She sat on one of the tables, nearly displacing the volunteer who had to schooch out of her way.
"The first baby I killed was seventeen years ago. It was a Tuesday in May. I responded to the station for a structure fire. It was a volunteer station, like this one but much better equipped. I was a new volunteer but I was fully trained and signed off. I had all my gear. I knew what I was doing. I thought I knew what I was doing. And I was a hell of a lot better trained than any of you are now."
Her face was somber.
"It wasn't a false alarm. It was a working structure fire. I put on my gear. I was slow. Others were slower. We hooked up to the hydrant, we started flowing water, we made forcible entry, we sought out the fire.
"Captain told me to break out the windows. Actually, he told me to break a specific window on the second floor, to affect flow path. Singular. Not plural. But I didn't hear that and he didn't say that, and I didn't know that. I hadn't had that class, which had been an advanced class but is a basic class now. I didn't know what flow path meant. So I took the pike pole and started breaking out windows. Just like cops sometimes do, even now.
"He started screaming at me, 'What the fuck are you doing?' and he broke off and ran into that house. But he put on his PPE first, because you can't save anyone if you're dead.
"He did what is called a primary search without hose, or Vent Enter Search. That's an extremely dangerous tactic, that the fire service abandoned a decade ago. You will be doing primary search without hose because we don't have enough fucking hose to do VEIS. He didn't have a thermal imager. He didn't even have a tool in his hand, another cardinal failure.
"He found a woman and dragged her out, saving her life. She had to go to the hospital but she lived.
"I'd ventilated the house all right. I'd given the fire a lot more oxygen, speeding it up so it would burn a lot faster.
"The house collapsed thirty seconds later. Crushing the crib and killing her baby, if the smoke hadn't gotten the baby first."
Long pregnant pause.
"If I hadn't made a rookie mistake, breaking out all those windows, there might have been time to save both. There wasn't.
"Much later, very drunk, Captain told me that he'd ran past the crib because he'd seen her down. He didn't think. He didn't think to grab the baby.
"So when you hear VICTIM VICTIM VICTIM, you fucking drop everything and you grab the fucking baby. Don't drop the baby. If you drop the baby, pick it up. Tell the medics too.
"People will die because you fuck up. See Echo 18 back there? How many people have you killed by fucking up this year?"
I blinked, held up a hand. Counted.
"At least seven," I said quietly into the silent room. And I was probably under-counting.
"Exactly my point. We are not security guards and we are not law enforcement. But we are not off the hook as firefighters just because our security is weak and our police are missing in action because our soldiers are in China. Our job is still the same. We save lives at great risk and we protect property with calculated risks.
"This is an all-hazard Fire Brigade. There is no one in this fucking world that does what we do. Injured people, call the medics. Law problem, call the law, or imitation law like Echo 18. Hazmat? There's teams and companies for that including this one now. But if you want to put water on fire and drag people out of fire, you have to call _us_. There is no one else to call.
"I have talked to San Jose Fire. If we have a confirmed working structure fire, they cannot help us. Even then. They have too many fires every day, all over their first in areas. They don't do EMS any more. They don't do standbys, or lift assists, or public assists. They put out fires and they put out a lot of fires. They have call volumes worse than Stockton and San Francisco put together. And in between, they try to garden and gather food, just like us.
"That means if there is a fire here, we in this room put it out, or we lose that building. Simple as that.
"San Francisco's call volume is now zero. As best I know, no member of the San Francisco Fire Department is still alive. Any reason for that? Anyone? That was a question."
Someone spoke.
"They lost their lives saving others."
"Exactly. Those who were not killed at once by detonation started doing what they could. Mostly that was to get streets unblocked and get people moving, to get people the fuck out. Vehicles when they could, walking when they couldn't. Carrying people out. Then going back in, over and over again, guaranteeing lethal radiation exposure for themselves. Setting up decon points to wash radiation off people as they walked past, when they could find water. Lifesaving first aid for those who could be saved, and ruthlessly ignoring the dead and also those about to die. On duty, off duty, disabled, retired, didn't matter. They drove in if they didn't live in the City. Or they got as close as they could, and were on the front lines of the megafires. And died for it, every one.
"We are the final line of defense for ordinary folks. We are not combatants. We do not touch guns. We are civil defense workers. But we are lawful targets under the ordinary laws of war, if we are protecting military targets or objectives.
"Echo 18, is this Site a lawful military target?"
I'd already had this discussion with Legal One.
"Yes."
We coded for the War. We supported our troops in China. So if the Chinese attacked us, it was only fair.
"So we are an all hazard department. But we can't put ourselves at risk for anything but lives. So there will be times Echo and I tell you to stage, to stay away, to stay put, even to take cover and hide. YOU WILL OBEY THAT INSTRUCTION. Even when every nerve and synapse is telling you to get your ass in there and get it stuck the fuck in.
"You obey orders. The fire service has always been a paramilitary organization with a chain of command. Because the white hat means I am responsible for each and every one of your lives. It means that when I make a mistake, I am very likely to kill one or more of you."
Janine paused, looking in each person's face in turn. I recognized what she was doing, because I did it too on the daily. Memorizing their appearance so that they would be clearly defined in her future nightmares.
"But if you go off and freelance and do your own thing, you are likely to get YOURSELF killed and also several other people.
"So you need to obey your orders. And because Echo 18 is generally incident commander, that means I have to take his orders.
"You don't need to like each other. But on the fireground we are all brothers and sisters. Bet your life on them because they bet their life on you.
"A Chief told me once, 'Ours For Theirs.' I asked him what he meant. He just said it again. He didn't explain.
"I will explain it, briefly and once. We do not trade something for nothing. People will die and we cannot save them. Property can be destroyed. But I will not risk your lives for shit, or for corpses. Neither will you. You are not allowed anymore.
"I will risk your life for the lives of others. I will even GIVE your life for the lives of others.
"Ours For Theirs. That is what it means.
"If you have a problem with that, get the fuck up and get out of this room right now and turn in your gear. Echo 18 may have a job for you. There are lots of other things you can do in this life. But unless you decide, right now, that you are literally willing to die to save lives in this profession, I can't use you and you need to get the fuck out."
Someone stood up.
He turned away to walk out the back of the classroom.
I won't identify him. He worked at Site. He saved lives doing other stuff. He survived at least until my departure from Site. I still have great respect for him.
But he did not agree to give Ours for Theirs. Or more precisely, his for yours.
"Thank you for your honesty. Anyone else?"
I couldn't ask that of my guards. I could ask them to take lives. I could ask them to risk their lives. I did both every day.
But I couldn't tell them Ours For Theirs. Observe And Report. Be a good witness. Do what you can, where you can. Call it in, call for help.
But not coldly sacrifice yourself for others. That was not an ask I could make.
But that was the ask for fire service personnel.
Good that I knew that now. Because it cemented my decision, that I had to be in actual command of the Fire Brigade. Because they didn't have brakes.
I didn't need to be Chief. But I did need to be able to keep them out of situations where giving their lives was not necessary, or justified.
Because the Site did not have firefighters to save lives. That was not why we needed a Fire Brigade.
The Site was the War. We needed a fire service to stay in business, writing the code, preventing fires and putting out small fires and saving people from big fires. Can't write code in a burned out shell.
And if the Site stopped working, it would not be a handful of dead in a fire, it would be thousands of people jobless in a radioactive hell, or interned by Homeland, or ... God forbid ... sidewalked.
If sending these dozen plus people into fire could save thousands, I would do it. Cheerfully.
Would that I could go instead. But just as Janine could not put on SCBA and rush in every time... neither could I.
Janine continued and I half listened. Talking about prevention, about chain of command, about bugles and colored helmets and protocols. Clear and concise communications. Conditions, actions, needs. Maydays. Action words.
Yeah, I needed to be here and to lose the sleep.
There was a test at the end. But the real test had been earlier, with one person failing it.
After the students left, Janine paused near me. Wondering if I would say anything after all the times she'd called me out in the class.
"Janine," I began. "Two people were dead, that call 17 years ago. You and your Captain clawed back one. That's good work. You telling the story today, might save more. Again, good work."
She shook her head.
"I've tried telling myself that for years. You may even be right. That was the first baby I killed."
She turned away for the spiral staircase.
Only then did I hear the slight emphasis, on the modifier.
Crap.
Ours For Theirs. But in an apocalypse, we may not even get to enjoy the luxury of that choice.
no subject
Date: 2023-08-23 07:17 pm (UTC)VFD
Date: 2023-08-24 06:05 am (UTC)When she died, they had a full "last call" for her. I couldn't be there, because I'd visited her the previous summer while she was still alive.
Re: VFD
Date: 2023-08-25 07:28 am (UTC)