IT WAS JUST A LITTLE FIRE...

Something about the mill

Photo by Stephen Radford on Unsplash

It was just a little fire…

If you’ve ever worked in an industrial setting—I mean a Blue Collar job—the chances are that you’ve either witnessed, or been involved in, an Industrial Accident, if not worse. (That would be tragedy, but we’re not going to talk about that at the moment.) I’ve got scars from various cuts; I’m also missing the tip of my right index finger, and the one beside it. (What the hell is that one called? Does everybody call it the Fuck Finger?) Anyway, it’s bent at a forty-five degree angle at the first knuckle. The index finger is cut off just below the fingernail, so the knuckle’s still there. The worse part is that the nail grew back. It started off as a little pimply looking thing. I popped it one night on an acid trip…

But that’s a story for another day.

We had a fire at the mill once, and it burned to the ground. They rebuilt it from the ground up. And then we had this fire…

I used to drive the bucket machine, which is basically a large machine (Cat, Volvo) with a yard and a half bucket—which is big. My job was to push chips into a conveyor and load barges. (Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy.) When I wasn’t doing that, I was piling the chips in the yard. I also had to keep up with the debris the mill produced; load trucks; take away block ends from the Cut-off Saw; clean up the yard; take away the hog the Barker produced; clean up and unplugged the sawdust and shavings bunkers as required. Needless to say, sometimes it got stupid busy.

One day, I went in to grab a load of hog, and saw smoke coming out of the bunkers. I called the foreman on the radio and told him there was smoke coming from the shavings bunker. (Shavings are what you get from the planer when a piece of rough lumber from the mill, goes through the “planer” and is planed to size.) The foreman told me to open the bunker door and drop the shavings on the ground. I was going to do that anyway. I climbed down from my machine and walked up the stairs to the control panel, turned it on, and then grabbed the handle to open the doors.

Now Compo has had issues with fires in sawmills because of fine dust. There were two types of shavings we produced: Hemlock and Fir. Hemlock is long and curly, just like you’d get if you used a hand plane on a 2x4 in the workshop at home. Fir is finer; Fir is light, and dusty, not as bad as Cedar. But some mills have had major explosions and burned to the ground because of dust.

When I opened the bunker doors, the shit hit the fan.

There was a huge fireball and an explosion of flame that totally engulfed the area where I was standing. The only thing that saved me was the fact that I was standing on a little square of plywood. Everything else was metal grating, and I was at least twenty feet off the ground. The flames were all around me. The stairs were engulfed; all I could see were flames in front of me, beside me, behind me. I looked down, thought about jumping, but decided not to; the ground was part cement, part pavement, part sawdust, and all pain. I pulled my sleeves down and put my hands on the rails. I slid down them, through the flames.

Now, most people I suppose, would step back and be glad they didn’t get burnt to a crisp. They’re going to go to the “mustering station” and wait for a head count—happily too, I imagine.

That thought never crossed my mind. The walls of the bunkers had once upon a time been made of large timbers that over the years had been damaged by different drivers—the weekend clean-up kid, the afternoon shift Charge hand—and had been replaced with old conveyor belts, made of rubber, of course. The idea was the belts would stop the sawdust and shavings from blowing all over the yard, and the wall wouldn’t get damaged. They only helped to feed the flames.

My first thought was that I had to put the fire out.

I ran to my machine, and drove headlong into the flames, thinking I could “push” the fire out. It was just shavings after all, and it wasn’t as big as I thought it was. What I didn’t realize, was that the rubber mats were burning all around me. I went in with the bucket down, and hit the shavings fast, pushing everything out of the way. Then I backed up, drove around to the back of the bunkers, and grabbed a load of hog. I backed up again, put the bucket down and drove into the fire, because I hadn’t quite  putting it out. That only made it worse. So I went back and got more hog. By this time the foreman—Bubba—was on his way. I knew I had to hurry or he’d try to stop me. He came around the corner and saw me going back under the bunkers. He started screaming at me to get out of there.

I figured: “Hey, I started it, I gotta put it out.” He stopped me before I could go under the bunks one more time.

He asked me what I thought I was doing. I told him I was putting the fire out. He swore at me. A lot. I suppose in hindsight Compo would’ve put the blame on him if I’d done something stupid and went all “worst-case scenario” on him. He was the one who told me to open the bunker doors. Doesn’t matter that I would’ve done it anyway.

The best part about the whole thing the fire investigation a couple of days later. The Company Rep was Mark. There were also two members of the Safety Committee—one for the Company, and one for us. Mark and I always got along. We’d stand in the only smoking area on that side of the mill, drink coffee, smoke, and generally shoot the shit. He knew I liked to write, and he knew I’d been there a long time. He loved it when I told him stories about what it used to be like there.

He asked me what happened.

I told him there was smoke and I went to open the bunker doors.

He smiled and said: “Of course you did. I mean, I’d expect nothing less of you.”

I told him I jumped through the flames.

He said: “Well of course you did. What else could you have done?”

He told me one of the other drivers witnessed everything, and thought I was literally toast. He was pretty sure I was trapped in the flames because he couldn’t see me. Apparently, it was a wall of flames. It was more like a curtain I said. He saw me sliding down the rails, out of the flames, and just as quickly jump into my machine. He watched me drive into the flames. Then he watched me drive around the back to get hog, and go back in, not once, but twice.

Mark asked me why I’d do something as stupid as that.

I told him because I opened the doors and that’s what started the fire, I had to put it out.

He said: “Of course. Why wouldn’t you?”

When I told him I did it three times, he smiled, and again said: “Of course.”

I asked him if that was all he needed. That’s when he told me the other driver thought I was a hero and probably saved the mill. I told him it was’t that bad, I did what anyone else would do.

He laughed: “No! No one else is going to do that. The flames were probably fifty feet high.”

I said: “All the more reason to put it out.

He asked me again, what I was thinking, and I said, I wasn’t.

“Of course you weren’t,” he said.

The mill manager said we’d probably be down for a couple of days. I said we could just dump everything on the ground and I’d take care of it. I thought I could keep up with everything falling on the ground. He said the planer wouldn’t be running because they had to replaced a lot of the hoses that burned, and wiring.

I told him, no problem…

Of course.

When I got home, I told my wife there was a little fire. I never told her everything that I did. I told her I had jump through the flames and slid down on the handrails by pulling my sleeves down. I didn’t tell her I went running into the flames. I never told her I was trapped by the flames on that platform and had no choice but to jump through the flames.

I didn’t tell her because I knew she’d get upset. I’m not stupid.

It was three years before I told her the whole story, instead of just bits and pieces. We were drinking wine and I just sort of filled in the blanks.

She just shook her head and said: “What is the matter with you?”

I told her I felt obligated to put it out because I started it.

And she said: “Of course."