When it rains, it pours..

It was a Saturday night, and pretty quiet for being a Saturday.. Then it hit the fan..

It all started about 8pm, two hours to the end of shift.. I took the frantic 911 call of a guy screaming it's on fire.. it's on fire.. after getting what it was and where he was the fire department was summoned in full force.. it was an acetylene tank which is used for welding, and it was next to an oxygen tank next to a house.. We had the guy get anyone that was in the house out and go down the street since the two are extremely flammable and under pressure.. It was treated as a structure fire and got a full response from City Fire and an auto-aide engine from the city to our north (Which is amazing that they came over the air and responded, usually they take a pass since they are vollys and not always fully staffed)

As city was taking care of this fire, and getting it under control city to the north (which has their own dispatch center) had a report of a structure fire in an apartment complex building, which activated auto-aide for them and send a City Fire engine, and two engines from two other departments.. We are the MABAS center for our county (Mutual Aide Box Alarm System) and that means if city to the north called for a box-alarm on their fire we would take over the fire traffic, page the box and run the show from our center.. So, we prepared and since I am the new guy they were going to have me page it, so I got the card printed and waited.. and they called for a investigation box... whaa?! That threw us off, so we paged out the arson team and went about our own business until the town all the way east had a structure fire!

Town to the east is volly, and do not have auto-aide, so when we got the 911 call about the garage fully engulfed attached to the house I paged the fire dept, printed their box card, went to the printer and was about 2 steps from my console when the chief went over the air and called for box card 123-321, woo! My first Box! I paged it out and spent 1 minute and 40 some seconds over the air giving all of the changes and calls and was done.. I was told that it was better than some of the people that have been there for a long time.. that made me feel good!

As soon as we were done paging the Box, as all of the units start going en route, we start getting 911 cell calls about a MVA on the highway just north of the farthest city to the north.. they were saying 4 vehicles involved, jeeze.. So, we page out fire and have them rolling on the way, I call up state police and ask if they need the farthest city pd to assist and she said no, there were 3 troops on scene and 5 en route (wow, I didn't even know that many worked a shift!) .. she then came back to the phone chuckling, telling me that there was only 1 car involed and 3 stopped to help.. no injuries.. how the callers were getting 4 vehicles involved in an accident we don't know...

So, after an hour it died down, all we had going was the box structure fire going out east and for the next hour we were pretty quiet and relief came and we went home.. so in a span of 1 hour we had three structure fires and a mva, with one fire going box.. when it rains it pours!