Backdraft was an awful movie from a firefighter’s perspective, but one line rings true. It’s towards the end, where the lieutenant is hanging onto the firefighter that was the arsonist by his hand. The arsonist was yelling at the lieutenant to let him go. …

Active shooter incidents were not common in my time on the fire department. They were so rare, we didn’t even have a word for it. There was only one in the 29 years I was on the job. It was mid-afternoon as I remember, The call was dispatched as a…

I met my ex-wife, the mother of my son, on the fire department. She was a volunteer paramedic for the fire department. The summer we starting dating was one in which we were both coming off of bad endings to long-term relationships. We starting hanging out on the Trails after…

Over the years as they tell stories of the big runs, firefighters tend to use verbal shorthand to describe them. We are no different. The Rene run. The pallet factory fire. The anhydrous ammonia run. Those were some of the biggies from my era. Just mentioning those words would bring…

We don’t want or need the recognition We had back-to-back runs that day. The chief and some of the crew were on a squad run, headed to Greene Memorial Hospital. We got a call for smoke in Hosmer, a dorm in the Presidents complex at Antioch College. We were short-handed and rolled with just three of us…

So Holzhauer lost Jeopardy tonight. We all knew it would happen eventually, but it was the way he lost that was surprising. Going into Final Jeopardy, Holzhauer had $23,400 while Boettcher led with $26,600. He only bet $1399, guessing correctly (duh!), …

This must have been back in the early 2000s. I had found a copy of Anthony Bourdain’s breakout book “Kitchen Confidential.” I devoured it in one sitting — he really captured what it was like working in a fast-paced restaurant kitchen. He was still working at Les Halles back then…