Firefighters? What's the dumbest person you had to save in a stupid situation?

I once had a firefighter tell me that he almost died in a housefire while going back into the

house to look for the owner. A neighbor was concerned about why the firefighter was still in the

residence, so he asked another firefighter. This is about how the exchange went. Neighbor, why is that fireman still in the house?

Firefighter, he's looking for the owner of the home. He's right over there with the video camera.

Turns out, the owner did not think it was important to alert the fire department he was out of the house.

Instead, he was just taking a video of the whole event. The fire started

because the owner had tried to smother his barbecue cooker flame with leftover wood from the siding

that had been installed on his home. The owner did not realize it would burn. Burned his whole

house down. Dummy tried to cross a 300 foot span of raging river in zero degree weather on a

snowmobile, and the machine was recovered days later. I'm not a firefighter, but I used to do a lot of

disaster response work. Hurricane Floyd, eastern North Carolina. I had a farmer with a large

family that refused to evacuate his house.

Stubborn idiot. River had broke loose, floodwaters were coming up fast, and the police had given

up on changing his mind. I drove my truck right up into his yard, rolled down the window,

and asked him to dress his kids in something orange or bright yellow. He asked me why and I said,

so body recovery will be able to distinguish them from all the dead pigs floating around.

He told me to F off, but five minutes later he had the whole family in the vehicle, and they

got the heck out. The first hurricane I worked was Fran back in 96. Fran was bad, with heavy

wind damage, roads closed, trees down everywhere,

cars crushed, and power lines down for weeks. Floyd taught me that flooding is a hell of a lot worse.

The devastation from flooding was far worse than anything Fran did, and the pigs. God,

...