Another Update

I just sent out an email to everyone but I always have trouble keeping up with all the email addresses and a lot of them are old I think.
Found out yesterday that I made the IA-TF I Urban Search and Rescue team. For those of you who forgot or don't know, they are the specialized teams that get deployed to things like 9-11, Katrina, I-35 bridge collapse, tornados, earthquakes, etc. They don't know when they can send us down to College Station, TX for training but we will get outfittted with gear and join the team for training. Of course, the Nov. training dates fall in line with a WMD Haz Mat drill in Des Moines that I volunteered to go to so now I will piss off one chief to please another one.

So now that they are demolishing flood damaged homes, you really get to see the government at it's finest. In order to demolish a home, contaminated and damaged by the flood, you have to have:
The contractor hired to demolish the home
Family Environmental (a company to make sure all the EPA, OSHA, etc laws are followed)
a Disaster & Recovery company (hired by the city)
a City of CR building inspector
a staffed CRFD engine company

From 7:30 am till 3 pm yesterday, two other guys and I were paid $25 an hour to sit in a fire truck and do nothing. At one point, we counted 16 guys at this site (4 were actively working).

Saturday, the 8 new rookies come online. Official count: 10 firefighters under me. There should be 12 (which would prevent my layoff should they choose to close a station for budget purposes) but one rookie last year was fired and another went onto days to be a plans & inspector.

Everyone at CRFD and Area Ambulance have found out about Rachael and I dating. It hasn't been as bad as I thought it would be but there is some regular joking around. It's weird to think I havn't dated someone for about 2 1/2 years. I kind of forgot how hard it is to have to think about someone else when you are making plans, trading work days, etc.

Nick

That's two posts in about 3 weeks. I'm getting better.

UPDATE!

Hello all! I'm sure none of you look at this anymore but I told mom that I was going to update it so I'm sure you will hear about it. Things are, for the most part, pretty regular here. I just got back from Anniston, Alabama. Went down there with the fire department to take a WMD Haz Mat class. (Yeah, like there will be a WMD attack in Iowa) It was a lot of fun and on the last day we did some exercies surrounded by real VX gas (the same stuff seen on the movie The Rock). They used 1200 times the lethal dose for a human being, but didn't tell us that until after we were done. So far I havn't bled from my eyes or fell on the ground with a seizure so I guess I'm ok. Maybe that joke was over the line.

Will be in Chicago this weekend with my roommate John. He is doing the Urbanatholon. I guess it's a 10 mile race with barricades, cabs, and steps involved. I don't think I'm in good enough shape to do as good as I want so I will go for support.

Think I will go as Tom Cruise from Risky Buisness for Halloween.

Sadly, that is about it for new stuff going on with me. Like I said, I lead a very boring life.

Monica, thanks for the football picture of the boys.

Love and miss you guys!

Nick

PS-oh, I'm kinda sorta dating someone. Her name is Rachael and she is a paramedic for the ambulance service in town.

Alright Fam, I will do my best to update you on what I've been doing here in Cedar Rapids for the past month. I'm doing this at work so if it stops suddenly it's because we caught a run and I had to log off. If I don't, someone will come in and send out an embarassing department-wide email under my name.

It all started about August 8th. I pumped my first fire which was suspicious in nature, I will come back to that later. On the 9th we used our boats to give people rides up at the Ellis boat harbor so they could get their boats out of the water at the very last moment (See picture above, Im towards the front). At the end of the day it was starting to sprinkle and lighting out so we tried to get back to the boat dock quickly. We were yelled and cussed at by the houseboat people because we "were causing too much of a wake" and it was going to damage their 'houses'. We actually had to call the police because they were getting so angry with us. I guess their houses smashing into that railway bridge wasn't nearly as bad as our 'wake'. I smile everytime I see that picture of their houses against the bridge. Assholes.

When I worked June 11th, the day before the flood really hit. I was out at Station 6 so I had no idea what was going on down at Central station. They were sandbagging and putting things up on tables so they wouldn't get wet. At this point we were supposed to get one foot of water in the station. We actually got 12 feet. A fridge was lodged up in the celing.

On the 12th, I sat at home and watched everything on TV. Errily similar to what I was doing when Katrina was happening, only now it was happening in my backyard. (Not literally, our place was not touched). On the 13th I was on a boat all day in the Czech Villiage. We pulled a couple people out of their second story windows and about 25 pets throughout the day. I had one cat by it's neck and it swung around and scratched my arm with it's hind legs. I thought about throwing it in the water but we were pretty close to shore (I had an audience) and that would probably be too mean. This is also when Channel 2 wanted to take a tour of the area and the news guy tricked me into doing an interview. I never got to see it. Usually this would be a big deal but when other guys have their picture on the front page of the New York Times, the LA Times and on the news in Germany, Channel 2 isn't that big of a deal.

The rest of the month is a blur of being at work, doing my laundry at the station, eating peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, and sleeping about 3 hours at night. Since Central is totally lost, the trucks had to be moved to stations all over the city. All of our reserve equipment and special operations trailers are sitting outside in a parking lot. For a while we lost all of our station phones and radio contact. Texas Roadhouse was donating lunch and dinner everyday, we had 16 guys sleeping at a station designed for 3, we had to run lights and sirens just to get through town; it was just weird. There is really no good way to describe how different things were and how much the term 'fly by the seat of your pants' became our department mantra.

Since June 8th, I have worked 22 out of33 days. I worked 165 hours straight with a 12 hour break at one point, and then came back 3 days later and worked another 120 hours.

The days in red are all the days I worked from June 8th till today (July 10th).

It sounds like they are going to tear down Central station. No one knows yet if they are going to build a new station in the same spot (with first floor being only apparatus parking and administration/living quarters on the second floor) or if they are going to look for a new spot. To think of everything we lost at the station, all those little things that can't be replaced, is very sad. That place was a second home to me. I was able to walk through it the other day and it has been totally stripped down to the cinder block walls and metal studs. Weird stuff.

Someone from FEMA said that their list of disasters goes 1) Katrina 2) 9-11 3) Iowa Floods, and our chief said recently that this flood is in the top 5 for American natural disasters. It sounds like when people realize how little they are going to get from FEMA, we could average one or two house fires every day.

That's all I can really think of at the moment but I will update again soon when I think of more stories and stuff to write about.

Dicky

I have noticed that you all have upped your posting output. I will post also.
So I have started a full-on workout schedule to lose all the weight I gained while sitting on the couch with my broken ankle. Seriously, I have puffed out like a tick. When I went back to work, I had to struggle to get my workout pants on. Ouch.
On the work front, I havn't seen fire since the middle of December. Next week I work 6 out of 8 days and the first week of July I work 5 days in a row. It will be interesting.
After the Parkersburg tornado the USAR team had it's first full deployment. This is exactly why I want to join the team. How cool would it have been to be up there right after it happened and help all those people right away.
Im getting ready for RAGBRAI. I bike about 40 miles a week but it's so damn windy! Since I still can't run because of my ankle, I bike a crap-ton at work and at the gym.
That's mostly it. I need to get my day going.

Old Man and the Sea

So this past weekend I went fishing on Lake Michigan with a bunch of guys and I have to say, for hardly ever fishing in my life I had the best time. We were at Winthrup Harbor which is about 20 min north of Chicago, right on the Illinois/Wisconsin border. We went up Saturday afternoon and stay in Milwaukee with a guy someone knew. Sunday we drove to the harbor and went out to catch some Koho Salmon. We spent a lot of the time fishing next to a decommisioned nuclear power plant, but failed to pull in any three eyed fish made popular on The Simpsons. It was a beautiful day, the fish were bitting and I wasn't in a cast. That night we went out to eat and then crashed around 9:30, since the next morning would start around 4 am. We headed out about 4 miles the next day and tried to catch a few King Salmon as well as Koho. I, being the least experienced, caught the only one. It was about 10 lbs. (as seen above).

We caught our limit each day (5) and before we left they cut them all up so John and I have about 20 fillets of salmon in my freezer each.

This is me hugging my King Salmon. Right before is lept up at my ear and tried to rip it off. I had the last laugh when I threw it in a dark cooler with about 14 of his dead relatives.

Me, my roommate John, and Paul. Paul was hired with John the year before me.

Ok, I don't have a lot to update, since I have been sitting on the couch for the past 3 weeks, but according to Mom I need to update this for my sisters. Recently I have read 21:Bringing Down the House, the true story about the MIT students that took a crap-ton of money from Vegas. Awesome book. Online I ordered 3 more books. Last Man Out (about an FDNY captain that was trapped in a stairwell of the World Trade Center with the crew of Ladder 7), Again to Carthage (the sequal book to Once A Runner, the best book written about running), and Texas City 1947 (about the massive explosion in Texas City, Texas in 1947). Yes, I am a nerd and love to read about the disasters in America in the 20th century.
Im still up for the job for an open USAR position, which is awesome.
I got out of my big black boot and was given an air splint. I can atleast walk around again now, with a noticable limp.
I may be going to a Cubs game (11-7) this next week. It should be great.
That is all.

Ankle Update

Alright, so this is NOT a picture of my ankle, I actually got it off of Google.com images.

I went to Dr. Fabiano today at PCI and he took even more X-rays of my ankle. The prognosis looks good. He said it is in fact a non-displaced fracture of my right fibia (which is actually the very lower part of of lower leg bone). I did not tear any ligaments, a fact he learned of by doing an extreamly painful Stress X-Ray and said it should heal perfectly. He said that as soon as I can walk on it, I would be able to. With that said, Im still going to take some time and make sure it heals right.

I have another appointment on April 15th to take some more x-rays and make sure everything is alright in there. I will let you guys know as soon as possible as to what is going on there.