Shattered Memories

Sorry the stories are coming a bit slower lately but I'm busy again doing some more after hours sheet rocking for SAR (Search and Rescue), at our club house...

     I clearly remember once collecting an artifact at a fire scene from a two story building. I think the building had once been an old restaurant, but anyway, we had a late night fire call there. We got the fire knocked down pretty quickly on the first floor and headed to the second floor to see what the fire had done aloft. We found quite a bit of heat damage, but no actual fire had crawled up into the second story. In the corner of that upstairs room, we found an old hanging lamp made of plastic. It had gotten so hot it had melted and oozed into molten strips of plastic six feet long, almost all the way to the floor. After we had extinguished the fire downstairs, it had cooled the upstairs enough for the plastic to re-harden. It was a beautiful work of fire art. We asked the property owner if we could have that unique melted lamp and he said, "Sure, it’s all yours."

     So, with the fire still smoldering in spots below us, several of us firefighters got a spine-board out and by standing on the first floor's icy roof, carefully, ever so gently we managed to ease this brittle lamp down from it's hanger and lowered it onto its side. Carefully we began removing it out through the second floor window and down the ladder to the ground. That's about when the Fire Chief drove onto the fire scene. I suppose from a distance, in the dark it did look like we were evacuating an injured firefighter out of the building. Let’s just say he wasn't very happy when he found out what we were actually doing. That old melted lamp hung in our training room at my station for years and years before someone accidentally bumped into it one night and shattered it into a million pieces.