Thetford —
“And I’d put my gear on over all this,” said Whitcomb, the deputy chief of the Thetford Volunteer Fire Department, between morning and afternoon sessions of an EMT class she was teaching at the station. “(The cold) just creates different kinds of challenges.”
Several devastating fires over the past two weeks — losses included a West Fairlee woman’s home on Dec. 28, the home of a Plainfield family of four on Jan. 2 and the fully involved, four-alarm fire at Durgin and Crowell Lumber Co., in Springfield, N.H., on Jan. 3 — have coincided with a bitter cold snap, highlighting the ways harsh winter conditions can raise the risk of structure fires, while making it harder for first responders to extinguish the flames.
“Compared to last winter, this one is terrible,” Cory Austin, West Fairlee’s fire chief, said in a phone interview on Friday. “Pretty brutal, really.”
One reason why firefighters have been getting so many calls in the past few weeks is because in the extreme cold, people have turned to unsafe measures to keep warm, often inadvertently. Chad Whitcomb, Thetford’s fire chief (and Mariah Whitcomb’s husband), listed some common risk factors as chimneys with too much soot, carbon monoxide problems from improper ventilation and electric space heaters plugged into extension cords.
When fires happen in a winter like this one, crews have to fight a lot more than just flames — they’re also battling brutal cold, onerous road conditions and the limitations of equipment that’s built to withstand only so much. Water supply can get cut off. Trucks can freeze into what Whitcomb described as “giant ice blocks” that take hours to thaw.
The homeowner in the West Fairlee fire, Penny Benjamin, lived on a Class 4 road, meaning it’s not maintained by the town. Only a single fire truck could get to the scene at a time — “one truck in, one truck out,” Austin said — and only barely.
“Chad was driving one that night, and he said there were branches scratching at the windows and sides,” said Whitcomb, gesturing to the 40,000-lb. vehicle in question. The truck’s wheels were also straddling the road that night, driving instead through the snowbanks that had piled up on either side.
But prolonged exposure to extreme weather conditions also takes a physical toll on the human body, from frostbite to injuries from slipping on ice to chest pains that require hospitalization, firefighters said.
“You’re asked to go from zero to 60,” even when the temperature stays closer to zero, Whitcomb said. “It hurts to breathe.”
Moving around requires more effort when wearing many bulky layers, the bulkiest of which is the turnout gear.
And when its cold, blood vessels constrict — or narrow — which places extra pressure on the heart, she said. This is why people with weaker hearts, such as older adults, face an increased risk of heart attack when they exert themselves in cold weather.
“The exhaustion is really what messes me up the most,” said Bill Taylor, the Meriden and Plainfield fire chief, in a phone interview on Saturday. “You worry that if you don’t get your sleep, it just weakens your immune system and opens you up to getting the flu.”
Temperatures dipped to minus 26 degrees the night of the Plainfield fire, he said. Water from hoses was freezing before it even hit the flames, and he ended up at the scene all night.
Peter Lacaillade, the Springfield, N.H., fire chief who was at the fully involved, four-alarm fire at Durgin and Crowell Lumber Co., was dealing with a bad cold this weekend.
It doesn’t help that some departments have been short-staffed. Taylor said his crew relies heavily on high school student volunteers from Kimball Union Academy, but since they were on school vacation at the time of the Plainfield house fire, “we were spread as thin as we’ve ever been,” he said. “We count on our mutual aid partners. If there’s a fire in Plainfield, we can count on Cornish, Lebanon, Windsor and all of our neighbors to be there to help us.”
Whitcomb, for one, isn’t fazed by the dangers this winter has brought. To hear her tell it, a good firefighter is one who takes these challenges in stride.
“This is why we’re here. To get the job done,” she said. “This is what we signed on for.”
And it’s firefighters’ sense of duty to their community, Austin said, not their attachment to physical comfort, that keeps them going when the going gets tough.
“Basically, people get into this business because they like to help people. I don’t know. It’s kind of hard to explain,” he said. “It can obviously be trying at times. You can get put under a lot of stress. But it keeps drawing you back.
“You can’t ever walk away.”
EmmaJean Holley can be reached at ejholley@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.