By David Anderson
Yesterday afternoon my son-in-law called quite out-of-breath shouting “Fire! It’s on fire!”
I’m not sure if I hung up on him before he got a chance to hang up on me but those few dreaded words uttered quite obviously while on the run from the sound of his voice got me to running too – out the door, up the steps, to the top of the hill and there I could hear the roar of the flames, see the crackling of the wood, smell the smoke.
In the next 90 seconds – his estimated time between calling 911 and the arrival of any number of fire-related vehicles – I had seen the flames approaching the blue sports car and turned running back down the hill asking the fellows coming up if they had a blue car? They did. “Give me the keys!” I demanded. “There’s a fire coming your car’s way!”
Startled, one of them handed them over without a word and back up the hill I ran and towards the car.
It was the wrong one.
Across the parking lot, out of danger, not threatened by the flames, the tail lights of another blue car responded to the clicker by blinking ‘Here I am! Here I am!’
Crap.
Running back down the hill, I tossed the keys to the fellow and shouted “Not yours!” and ran on by and down the stairs and across the ramp yelling “Anybody own a blue . . . .”
I never finished the sentence. There was no one around to hear me much less the owner of a blue car.
Back across the ramp and up the stairs I unhooked the hose from the faucet and ran some more to the house closest to the flames, attached the hose stretching it out hoping it would be long enough and pushed the handle.
Nothing.
The hose was kinked.
Dang.
Fixing that problem, thankful the gas tank would be the last to go, I turned back to the car.
The nozzle was set to “mist.”
The flames had nearly reached the tires.
Crap.
Frantically I rotated the dial from mist-to-soaker-to-flat-to-
Just in time.
Ninety seconds.
The fire-department’s hose was bigger than mine so they took care of the blazing abandoned/shed-type house; my son-in-law had his wooden fence under control; and the blue car didn’t melt.
Thank you West Pierce Fire.
