Fire prevention week always gets me feeling a bit of nostalgia, as I get to
thinking back to the days when I ran with the fire department. The trainings were always pretty fun, especially the weekend trainings held by the county once every year. I kept all of the certificates that I accumulated through the years, and I always remember the vehicle rescue training I took in October of 1994.
It was a rather warm weekend, and we had assembled in the classroom to go over some basic techniques and the tools used for the rescue. After a half day in the classroom, we packed up and headed out to a local junkyard to practice the
techniques we just saw. The tool itself was pretty heavy, but once you got it where you needed it, it did it's work and opened up a door. As we cut apart this car, an old eight ball rolled out onto the ground. I kept it as a reminder of the weekend, however, it would serve to remind me of something, rather, someone else.
I returned home that weekend, and had tuned my scanner into the local fire
dispatch, where I heard about an auto accident in front of a high school. Those are never good, and it wasn't my high school, so I didn't really think about it. The next morning as I walked into school, I realized something was wrong. I made it to my first period class, and was told to go to the library, where I had come to find out that a close friend of mine had died in a car accident. The worst part was it was the accident I had heard on the scanner. It got me to thinking about the weekend training I had just had, and now every time I look at that eight ball, I think of my friend Alicia.
Ever since that time, I always had a fear in the back of my mind when I went
responding to calls that one day I would come upon someone I knew. Thankfully, that never happened to me, but had I been involved longer I'm sure one day it would have.