A Little Help

A Little Help

I was working one night at station 1 some years back, when we had a line of severe thunderstorms move through. Sometimes we get lucky and nothing happens and the storms just end. Other times we’ll get a lightning strike, or many strikes, and get a lot of calls where we have to check for fire or damage. Sometimes we’ll get a fire started by a lightning strike. I remember several times when towns near us had multiple fires from those strikes all at the same time. They had to call in a lot of help to handle things.

We had a strike once that actually didn’t hit the house at all. The lightning hit a tree in the yard. That tree just happened to be where an electric spotlight was mounted. The lightning followed the wire all the way back to the house, leaving a small trench in the ground. It then hit the breaker box and blew out the whole electrical system. That started a huge fire that ultimately destroyed the house.

On this particular night, the storm wasn’t quite finished when we got a call from a residence not too far from station 1. They reported a loud noise and now they had a smell of smoke from their basement. There was no visible smoke, just an odor. The captain ordered a full response to the house. We were about two minutes away. Our engine got there quickly with the captain in car-2. The family was outside and directed us into the basement. There was no outward sign of any problem from the outside.

Entering the basement, there was indeed an odor of smoke, but it was not strong. What we did notice was a leaking water pipe near the ceiling. We walked over and looked at it. This was an older house without a finished basement. There were floor joists above with the plumbing and wiring running along them. The leaking pipe was at a joint and was squirting a small stream of water up onto the wooden joist above it. There was a wire that ran along this joist also. The joist had charring on it. It had been burning.

Investigation reached the conclusion that the ≪BOOM≫ had been lightning striking something. What it struck, we never found out. It followed the wire, eventually igniting that joist. The fire didn’t spread very far, but it got hot enough to melt the solder in a joint in the water pipe. The joint separated a little and the water sprayed out, putting the fire out.

I never saw that happen, before or since. It’s nice to get a little help from Mother Nature once in a while, but if fires keep putting themselves out, we could be out of business!