Labor Day Save

Today is Labor Day and most of us have probably been out grilling steaks, sitting on the beach, slugging a beer and just taking the day off with our feet propped up.

Just up the road from here this afternoon a group of firemen I know had their Labor Day interrupted with some heavy laboring to do as a large home caught on fire. This group of guys

took their off day to risk both life and limb to save a house from becoming a big pile of black ashes. It was a dangerous situation as a lot of heat and hot gases had built up inside and threatened a sudden ignition.

In this picture you can see the firefighters quickly getting on the roof. The purpose is to get the windows open to let those gases out. The ladder in the upper part of the picture is so they check to see if the upper part of the house is hot with possible fire up there. Firemen from three different departments can be seen in this picture. Living in a small county like here you learn to work together in a bad situation. If you don't then this house is nothing but a big pile of charcoal. It took firemen about an hour to get this fire under control. One fireman told me that when you got to the top of the stairs you were literally crawling on the floor to try to find your way around. The smoke had also darkened the windows with black ash.

The bedroom at this location had been gutted with flames. The big job was keeping the fire from going to other parts of the house. Another group of firemen were inside the house at the time also working to knock out the flames. By this point most of the fire has been brought control. Because of the smoke still inside the house, airpacks were still needed to work inside the house.

And here we have the culprit that started it all. Well, there's a little more to it than a set of bed springs that have been turned to black ash. You wouldn't think that something like a cordless phone would cause so much stress in a day but that's what happened here. The phone overheated and fell on the bed igniting it and then the bedroom. Flames shot up along the wall at the head of the bed and up to the ceiling. A fireman told me the drywall above the bed had become very brittle from the heat climbing up the wall. There was enough heat that vinyl siding on an exterior wall in an adjacent room to the south had melted and had pulled loose from the wall.

Fortunately through it all no one was injured, except a 20-inch television that looked like a melted candle. So just remember that today while you were taking it easy in your comfy chair there were a lot of people out there who were doing the real deal.