As our department’s duty officer, I responded to a mutual aid request from an area agency. It was a structure fire in a single-level residential home. I was assigned to the Alpha division, and when there was growing concern about fire extending into the attic, two firefighters were assigned to me as a crew. Prior to our entry, it was determined that there was a fire condition in the basement, with growing heat in the Alpha-Bravo corner. The size, duration of burn, and intensity of that fire were unknown. We made entry through the front door, with the objective of opening up the ceiling in the area of the Alpha/Bravo corner to locate and extinguish any fire. The corner of the alpha side was two bedrooms, each having an exterior wall on alpha. As we made our way down the short hallway to those bedrooms, I was sounding the floor with a hook; there were no indications of a compromised floor. As I was about to step across the threshold of the corner bedroom, a solid stream of water shot up through the floor and into my face. (I was wearing full PPE, so there was no risk of injury from the hose stream) We backed away from the room, reported the conditions, opened the hallway ceiling to find no fire, and then exited the building. It was later disclosed that the Charlie division crews found that the entire subfloor and floor joists were completely burned away under the corner bedroom. The only thing giving the floor the appearance of integrity was that the hardwood flooring’s tongue-and-groove was still intact.
LESSONS LEARNED:
Knowing all the officers in the host department who were on scene, I took the time to make follow-up phone calls and have detailed conversations. I discovered that the host department had just made the formal switch to the Blue Card model, and this was the first fire using it. We were not aware of the change going in, but upon reviewing the circumstances, it became clear that certain steps (continuous 360s, for example) were missed because new things are awkward. On my part, I should not have trusted that all information was complete, just because we were as far into the incident as we were. My actions should have been “trust but verify,” not just “trust.”
