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"I do."
"Very well," Co
Wendy trotted over to the ladders at a fair pace. She could have run, but this evaluation was as much about pacing as capability; she'd seen women in fantastic condition wear themselves out halfway through.
Three ladders were racked on the wall, hung vertically. Beside each one, to the left, was a spare, empty rack. The test was simple; lift off each ladder and move it over one rack.
The ladders weighed forty-seven pounds and were awkward in addition; it was quite a test of upper body strength and balance for a one-hundred-and-twenty-pound female to lift and move one, much less three. Add in forty pounds of bunker gear, a breath-pack and all the rest and it was a challenge. And only the first.
She managed the ladders in good time. And managed the second evaluation which was to fully raise and lower, "extend and retract" one of the ladders. Harder than it sounded, it had to be done hand over hand, maintaining control, or the ladder simply "dropped." A drop was not an automatic fail, but it would count heavily against her.
The third evaluation, the high-rise pack, was the first that she knew was going to kick her ass. This involved carrying an "assault pack," two fifty foot sections of 1ѕ-inch attack line, a nozzle, a gated Wye valve and a hydrant wrench, to the fifth floor of the smokehouse. Forget that the smokehouse was living up to its name, with thick black smoke belching from a generator on the ground floor and billowing up through the stairwells. Just lifting the pack—which was about a hundred pounds, or more than seventy percent of her body weight—off the ground was a struggle. The requirement was to move "expeditiously" up the stairs, but in reality nobody managed so much as a trot. Each step was a struggle and by the time she reached the third level she knew that if she paused for even a moment she could never get going again. But finally, panting in the heat from the suit and gasping for air, she saw the firefighter at the top. It was through a haze of gray that was only half to do with the smoke, but she'd made it. She carefully lowered the pack to the ground and just rested on her knees for a moment until the red haze over her vision cleared. Then she stood up and, following the pointed finger, went back downstairs to the Maze.
The Maze was the confined spaces test chamber on the third floor. A plywood and pipe "rat-maze," it filled only one room but encompassed a total of a hundred and sixty-five feet of linear "floor." The Maze was multi-level with a series of small passages and doorways, many of which could be slid open or closed at the whim of the testers. None of the passages permitted so much as crouched movement; the entire maze was done on the belly, sometimes crawling at an angle or twisting through three (some suggested four) dimensions to reach a new passage.
Strangely, Wendy had never had a problem with the Maze, even when it was blacked out. Perhaps being buried alive in Fredericksburg had some compensations; she had come out of it with a fundamental lack of claustrophobia. Much the same could be said for Shari, who had waited out the weeks awake. If she had tended to claustrophobia, she would have put herself under like the firefighter who was trapped with her.
That didn't mean it was easy. The movement method was difficult. But Wendy didn't have a problem, including remembering not to take the smooth tu
Wendy, on the other hand, came out the corrugated tu
She trotted up the stairs to the roof and picked up the essential tools for the door breach test: a backpack of liquid nitrogen and a CO2 –powered center-punch. The testing device was in the center of the roof; an apparently freestanding doorway with a closed memory plastic door in it.
The design of the door necessitated the unusual gear. For safety reasons, memory plastic doors were designed so that their "base" configuration was "closed." That meant that a precisely graduated charge had to be applied to them to get them to "open" or collapse into a tube along one side of the door.
When in their extended configuration the doors were very tough; you could hammer at them with a sledge all day long and not get them to break. And for security purposes the charge had to be applied along a recessed edge. When first confronted with this design, emergency perso
The tester nodded when Wendy had the gear on, held up a stopwatch and pressed the start button with a shouted: "Go!"
There were several steps to the door breach and each had to be done precisely. She trotted to the door, positioning herself on the left side, and removed her Nomex gloves then began ru
She stepped back and shouted "Hot door!"
The tester hit the stopwatch and made a notation on her clipboard as Wendy took the opportunity to put her gloves back on. "The door is to be considered hot, but breachable," the tester said. She did not bother to note that if Wendy had not detected the heat she would have been disqualified; that went without saying. "Continue," the tester added, hitting the stopwatch again.
Wendy stepped back and looked at the pressure gauge for the LN bottle. The bottle had a line ru
The nitrogen gushed out of the nozzle in a white, foaming stream, exploding into vapor as it heated in the room-temperature atmosphere. The reason that the test was on the roof was two-fold; it permitted the gas to be carried off and it prevented having a supercooled room.
There was a limited splashback zone, about a foot out from the door, and the small amount of liquid quickly boiled off. Before it had entirely vanished, however, Wendy stepped forward, avoiding the drops, and placed her punch against the left side of the door.
Normally she would have placed it against the lower left, but with the single point of high temperature being there, she felt a need to adjust. As cold as the nitrogen was, the memory plastic of the doors had a fairly high specific heat and the lower left might not have cooled off enough to be cleared.
Placing the punch, she angled it so that it would go straight in but, in the event of a refractory door, would not kick into her body, and pulled the trigger.
The punch, which looked somewhat like a cordless electric drill, contained a twenty-centimeter steel spike, charged by a CO2 cartridge in the handle. When triggered, the spike flew out at over three hundred meters per second, penetrating the door and, if it was cold enough, shattering the plastic.
In this case it was cold enough and the door shattered from top to bottom, breaking into chunks ranging from dust up to a few centimeters across. The sole exception was an almost perfectly circular point on the lower lefthand corner. It looked like her decision not to punch the door there was a good one.