July 11, 2019
"She's not taking it well," Ruby explained to a worried You at the firehouse after she got out of school as they talked about Yoshiko and Riko's breakup. "Riko-chan didn't tell her that she was moving on to Chika-chan, but she had a feeling she did, because she cut herself off from both of them."
"You gotta be fucking kidding me," You sighed to herself, annoyed and also worried by the reaction Yoshiko had. "I don't want this causing a rift in Aqours."
"We may not be an idol group together anymore," Ruby summed up her own feelings on the matter. "But we are still a friend group. I had fears that a relationship like this ending wouldn't bode well for us, and I was right."
You then threw her hands up in the air in frustration. "Fuckin' hell! Why can't she just be mature about this and move on?! I know it just happened, but you don't have to go nuclear and cut off your former group leader!" She then sighed in annoyance. "Chika-chan especially doesn't need this, since you two are going to the boot camp soon."
"11 days," Ruby pinpointed the exact amount of time. "11 days until we get to train in high heat and the sweltering sun."
"This Saturday," You added. "You and Chika-chan are gonna be doing some preparation training. We're gonna smoke up the second floor of Uranohoshi and have you two search it as part of drill. You're gonna be partnered together, and when you get to the end, you're gonna put out a small fire we're gonna set with a flare. Temperature's gonna be 30 centigrade, so be ready."
Ruby chuckled, realizing her concerns were gonna get realized sooner than expected. "Well, looks like I'm in danger."
"Nah," You assured her. "You'll be fine. We'll make sure of it. Speaking of training, Kanan's going back to the US in August to get a bunch more DRI courses, and I'll be doing water and dive rescue training here so I can get on the Water Rescue Serv-"Then, interrupting their conversation, the tones went off, setting their pagers and the in-station alerting system off. As You and Ruby got up and ran to the gear lockers, the info of the call came in.
"Numazu City Fire Alarm on the air for a mutual aid request to the City of Izunokuni to (ADDRESS REMOVED) for a box alarm, calling for Station 155 and Aerial 151 to the scene. Repeating, Numazu City Fire Alarm on the air for a mutual aid request to the City of Izunokuni to (ADDRESS REMOVED) for a box alarm, calling for Station 155 and Aerial 151 to the scene. Time is 1727 Hours, Dispatcher 102."
You said to Ruby as they both got dressed in their gear, "You probably won't be on the Aerial rig, but if they call in a 2nd Alarm, you'll probably be pulled to go on the ambulance."
"Right," Ruby replied as she and You finished putting on their gear. You ran to the ladder truck with the two paid firefighters as another volunteer ran into the station, while Ruby stood by in the back of the apparatus bay. As they all got their air packs on outside and stepped into the cab, Ruby thought to herself, "I'll be able to do that for real when I graduate. I can't wait."
...
As Aerial 151 reached the border of Numazu and Izunokuni, the crew of three guys in the back, which included You and Kanan, all sat and waited for their arrival. For many fires they went to in Izunokuni for mutual aid, they largely just stood by and filled in whenever the first in crews went to rest, and occasionally did truck work if they needed to. You mentioned to Kanan as they sat in the back, "Time for another boring time watching Izunokuni burn down a house."
"Yeah," Kanan replied, tightening the straps on her air pack. "You're not lying."
Then, the paid lieutenant up front turned around from the officer's seat. He had a shocked expression on his face. "Uh, hey guys, just to let you know, we're gonna have to go in. Izunokuni only got about 4 interiors from Station 4-4, and Pumper 155's got 3 more. We're probably gonna go in to back them up."
"Shit," Kanan remarked to You. "That's a really bad turnout from them." She then turned to the lieutenant up front. "Lieutenant, what's our role upon arrival?"
He just shrugged. "I got no fucking clue. I asked, and they just said "standby." They haven't replied since. It's Izunokuni, after all."
As the three of them in the back began to get ready, they turned their SCBAs on before putting their gloves and helmets on, wondering what their task would be upon arrival. Kanan thought to herself, "That city's fire department has always been a mess to work with. Most of their volunteers are clueless, especially their officers, and their career staff aren't much better."
...
At 5:39 PM, they arrived on scene. The crew of Aerial 151 got out and immediately began grabbing tools from the rig as the officer on board walked over to the incident commander, still not yet having received any direction as to what tasks had to be done. It had been 13 minutes since the first Izunokuni firefighter's had been dispatched. You and Kanan paired up and walked to the front door, stopping to take their helmets off and mask up.
The lieutenant ran over to them and told them, "Alright, you two are gonna go upstairs and perform a complete primary search of the second floor! There is an attack crew on the first floor dealing with the fire now." The house itself was a small two-story house, typical of the Japanese countryside.
"Got it," Kanan replied as she pulled her hood up and put her helmet back on. She then clipped her regulator in and began breathing pack air along with You. "I'll take left, you take right. That sound good?"
"Yeah," You replied as they both walked into the house, the two of them immediately going down to their knees due to the heavy smoke inside. As they crawled down the front hallway to the stairs, they passed by the two lines that had been stretched in, and crawled right over them in the thick smoke. As they reached the stairs, You went first, taking a wide stance and striking each step above her with her first tool, an axe, to check for the integrity of the stairs, her other tool being a halligan. "Kanan-chan, the stairs are good so far!"
Kanan carried a water can extinguisher and a smaller halligan bar. "Alright!" As they reached the top of the stairs, they saa that the hallway branched three ways, one of those ways being into a bedroom. "Search the bedroom across from us first!"
"Right on," You replied as she crawled up to the door and felt it with her gloved right hand, setting one of her tools down temporarily before opening the door by turning the knob and picking her tool back up. The two of them then crawled in, with Kanan going left and You going right as they had planned before.
"Command to Second Floor Search," the commander on scene then radioed to Kanan.
"Go ahead," she radioed back to him.
"Go ahead and start opening up windows on the second floor when you get to them," the commander replied. "Let's start venting this place out a bit."
"Received," Kanan replied. She then yelled over to You, "Hey, You-chan, when you get to a window, open it up!"
"On it," she yelled back. Sure enough, she quickly found the window in the bedroom. "Kanan, I'm opening one up!" She first tried to simply lift it open, but it would not budge. She then tried to push it open, also with no luck. Having tried it twice, she instead used the axe she held and bashed the window open with it, smashing the glass and then clearing it as best as she could. She then continued her work, searching the rest of her side of the room before she met up with Kanan. "Anything?!"
"No!" The two of them then began to crawl back to the door, keeping to the wall as they had done before as much as they could. Once they found their way out, Kanan turned to You and told her, "Okay, let's go to the right!" You nodded, and they both crawled to the right, quickly finding a door to a closet. "I'll check the closet real quick! Stay out here!"
"Right," You replied as Kanan opened up the closet door and crawled in slightly, checking the entire closet space in one swoop of her small halligan bar. She then quickly backed out. "I got nothing! Let's move on!"
...
Back at the firehouse, a second alarm had not been called, so Chika and Ruby were studying a textbook the department issued to all new firefighters. This textbook was to be used for the upcoming boot camp class that month. One of four homework assignments for the class to complete was a study on a line of duty death in the fire service, either from overseas or in Japan. Per the assignment, it had to be either a multiple fatalities incident or a notable single fatality incident. Ruby had chosen a commonly-used American incident: Black Sunday, which saw two incidents occur in the same day at two separate fires that killed four firefighters in New York City, while Chika chose an incident closer to home: the Yamaku Academy Fire of 2008, which killed six firefighters and eight civilian victims. Both incidents shocked the fire service the world over, and led to several changes in procedures and technology.
Ruby was telling Chika of the events that occurred on Black Sunday, starting with the first fire that occurred, in the apparatus bay as they held notepads and sat on a bench together. "Okay, so it began when a fire broke out in an apartment building in the Bronx. The Bronx is like this upper northern area of New York." Ruby pulled her phone out to show Chika a map of the city, and pointed to the Bronx. "It's right here. Anyway, it was in the morning, and it was really cold out. They called three alarms to the fire. From what I can gather, the owner of the building illegally put up walls in the apartments to make them smaller."
Chika, confused as to why the landlord did such a thing, asked her, "Why would he do that?"
"I think it was to make more apartments," Ruby explained to her. "Anyway, six firefighters were doing a search on the fourth floor when the fire suddenly flashed and blocked their only escape out of an apartment. They tried to get ladders raised to them, but it was too late. They all jumped from the fourth floor, and only two of them had ropes to do so. The other four just leapt from the windows." Ruby then showed her a picture of the building after the fire, with graphics pointing out where each firefighter jumped from. "Two of them died immediately, and a third died six years later. The other three were so badly hurt they had to retire."
"I see, I see," Chika replied to her, saddened by the incident description. "So this is why we have those ropes in our gear... Well, that and what happened at Yamaku Academy."
"Correct," Ruby affirmed to her. "There was another fire just a few hours later. This was in Brooklyn, which is across the East River from Manhattan. Firefighters were entering a basement fire when they were forced to retreat due to the high heat, but one of the men that went down didn't come back up. He was apparently caught on a coat rack and was found unconscious. He later died at the hospital. Now, as to what you said about Yamaku Academy, yes, that's true. Even after Black Sunday, Japanese firefighters were still not issued escape ropes en masse until after the Yamaku Academy fire."
"It's so sad reading these cases," Chika noted as she wrote something down in her notepad. "And it's aggravating, too, sometimes. There's so many ifs that you think of, so many ways that these deaths could have been avoided. There were so many I found that I had a hard time choosing. There was stuff like the Hackensack Ford Dealership fire, the Charleston Sofa Super Store fire, the 2003 Kobe house fire, the Tianjin explosion, the Worcester Cold Storage fire, and so many more." She then stretched her shoulder and arms out and let out a sigh. "But that's why we learn about them, I suppose. I want to go home to my mom, dad, and sisters, and to my friends, and especially to Riko-chan."
Ruby nodded, agreeing with her. "Right. I want to do as much as I can to make sure I go home to my parents and my older sister. Dia-oneechan would... I don't know what she would do if something happened to me." She shook her head a little bit, unable to imagine what kind of grief Dia would be in. "It would absolutely destroy her. But... I shouldn't worry about that." She then unexpectedly put an arm around Chika's shoulders and got close to her. "I got you, Kanan-chan, and You-chan, and I got other guys and girls here who will do everything they can to keep me safe, and they know I would do the same for them."
"Yeah," Chika nodded, resting on Ruby. "You're right." As they rested on each other's shoulders, Masako walked by them and gave a confused look, to which Chika told her, "Dont worry, Lieutenant, we're fine."
"Alright," Masako replied. "I was just a bit confused, since you're with that Sakurauchi girl now, Chika-kun."
Chika and Ruby both laughed in response. "Nah, this isn't anything, don't worry. Trust me, we'd be a bit closer than that if she was here."
...
An hour and a half later, Aerial 151 returned from the fire. The crew on board was exhausted, and had all heavily dirtied their gear from fighting the fire in Izunokuni. You met with Chika as she stepped off the rig, and as they walked to her locker, she told her, "This fire was such bullshit."
"I don't think so," Chika replied to You as she took her gear off and placed it on the floor to be stripped apart and cleaned. "Sounds like you guys had quite a bit of work."
"Yeah," You replied, annoyed at Izunokuni. "That's why. We aren't supposed to be doing things that Izunokuni should be doing themselves, like a primary search. We go to provide backup and essentially relieve first-in crews, not do their job." She then completed taking her gear off. "But of course, their station closest to our city only got four interiors on their three trucks out of ten people they got. We had to do most of the firefighting for them."
"That sounds bad," Chika replied to her. "Only four out of ten? Any stations in our department that bad?"
"Well," You explained to her. "Quite a few of the single-pumper firehouses can get bad. Station 154 sometimes only gets a single interior, since it has only nine volunteers with three interiors. Station 156 has sixteen guys and two rigs with only seven interiors. The issue is that people are aging around here, and as they get older, they're letting their interior quals drop without anyone young and new to replace them."
Chika nodded, understanding the gravity of the situation well. "That sounds bad. At least we get a good turnout."
"Because we're the main firehouse for District 15," You added. "We have the most volunteers and the most interior-qualified volunteers in the district. Even so, we've been asking for a third paid firefighter to be added to our firehouse for a few years, and the city still says no."
