The Fireman's life: Some thrills but always a lot of laughs

 

By Al Levine,

for AccessMilton.com

When you get the inside scoop on the life of a fireman, it doesn't seem very glamorous after all. They work 24-hour shifts [24 on, 48 off]. They sleep on bare mattresses – some in full uniform, most in sleeping bags – and keep fans going to block out any high-volume snoring. Ninety-five 95 percent of their workweek is spent responding to something other than a fire. They're more likely to rescue a cat from a tree than anyone from a burning building. "We're here for the what-ifs," Milton Firefighter Josh Payne said. "Pretty much when anything bad happens or people don't understand something. I'm talking about if they don't know how to turn off their water – we had a call last year from a lady who didn't know how to turn off her water. We get calls for everything." The pay is so modest, most of them have to work a second job. Payne has a landscaping business on the side. The training is never-ending and the repetition of the job – cleaning the station, cleaning the fire truck, scrubbing down soiled hoses after a burn exercise – seems downright tedious. Their schedule is perpetually hurry up and wait.

Milton native Josh Payne brings a desire for helping people and a healthy sense of humor to his job as a Firefighter at Station 42.

But they have an insatiable appetite for protecting and serving. "We're a special breed, as my mom says," Payne said.

He's a unique member of Station 42, a bona fide native of the area that became the new city of Milton who has come home to serve his community.

"It's special to me," Payne said, "because No. 1, I've got my parents and all my friends and all my relatives and now I'm here to take care of them if, God forbid, something ever happens. I'm finally giving back to the community where I grew up.

"Another cool aspect from my years of being raised here, it's just changed so much, there's so many new people. It's showing them, I guess, southern hospitality."

Payne is 26 and has been a firefighter for six years, starting as a volunteer in Alpharetta, working down in Hapeville. So what's the big appeal?

"Honestly, just the thrill of it all," he said. "It may seem messed up but to me it's just the fun of it. Going back to the first fire I ever fought. We were fighting an apartment fire in Alpharetta. The floor gave way and I fell to the first floor from the second floor."

The floor was burning in the middle of the room and the firemen were working the perimeter when suddenly the bottom fell out. "I'm talking to my buddy about where to go next and then it's like, boom, we're down on the floor and I was just like, wow, cool," he said.

"I thought that was the coolest thing. I landed on my air pack, looked around and said 'that was awesome.'"

You have to know that growing up Payne was a thrill seeker riding  go-karts and dirt bikes, jumping off tall mounds of Georgia clay. "Some people call it crazy but I just love the excitement of firefighting," he said. "Plus it's just helping people. I love helping people."

He has trained as an Emergency Medical Technician so he's there to help people who have dialed 911 with chest pains, folks having trouble breathing or who have been involved in a car wreck.

His work in the field is now family legend. Ask him about The Leg, a relative suggested.

It happened a couple of years ago when he worked in Hapeville. A call came in about a man struck by a train. The cops canceled the call, declaring the victim already dead. Payne's company went to the scene anyway.

"The guy was in the middle of the tracks, laying down, big huge gash in his head with a little bit of brain matter sticking out and his right leg, where the socket comes in at your hip, was gone. It was like 30 feet from his body," Payne said.

"He's down there and the cops were shining a flash light on him by his neck and I said 'did you just see that? His mouth barely moved.' We checked his pulse and he had a faint pulse, so we hurried and got a backboard, started administering drugs, started doing compression. We got him in the ambulance and someone said somebody needs to go get that leg.” Payne volunteered.

It was an assignment not every firefighter would jump at. 

"Nothing really grosses me out anymore," Payne said. "Certain guys have certain weaknesses. Like mine is if I see a pencil or something in the eye, that's where I get sort of grossed out.   Lot of other people, if they smell [throwup] or have to deal with someone who's had their teeth knocked out, they get grossed out. We're all human. It doesn't stop us or anything, though."

Bottom line, the man survived despite losing the leg. "He was pretty much dead and we got him back, it was the coolest thing I've ever done," Payne said.

These, of course, are the rare times when the thrill-seeking firefighter gets his adrenaline fix. Rescuing a cat from a tree has its merit but it's not the same as fetching a severed limb.

"Yes, I have gotten calls on the cat's in the tree," Payne said. "It's like I tell people, when a cat gets hungry, it's gonna come down. I don't care if it's up there for a day or two, it's gonna  come down."

On a recent typical day, the men of Station 42 responded to three calls. One for a citizen having trouble breathing, another for chest pains and a false alarm for a fire. But there were the usual duties of cleaning the station, cleaning the truck, rechecking all the equipment necessary for a successful response.

Most of their thrills come in training exercises.

“ Stuff at the [firefighters’] academy is nothing but fire classes,” Payne said. “Pressurized containers, structural fire control, fighting fires in sprinkled buildings. They've got a really cool one called Confined Space, where you're crawling through tunnels like 16 inches wide. You crawl and find your way out. I loved it. So if you're claustrophobic it's really not a cool job.

“ We did some training the other day where they black your mask out and it's all smoky and burning around you. They have a ton of hose. It's called Hose Evolution and they'll spin you around and throw you down on the hoses and say, all right, find your way out. In the fire service there's a ton of slang that we use. Smooth bump-bump to the pump. That's a good way to remember the way out if you ever get lost in a fire. Where the couplings connect on the hose, it's smooth and where they twist, it's bump-bump, so it's smooth bump-bump and that's the way you know to get out, you just follow the hose back to the truck.”

But that’s an extraordinary occasion. Between the calls for cats and false alarms, leave it to this special breed of heroes, then, to create some excitement of their own.

These men of honor, who daily are prepared to risk their lives for others, turn out to be a big bunch of practical jokers. The kind who might wheel someone's Harley into the bunk room at night and crank it up, just to startle a brother from his sleep.

"Firefighters are the craziest, goofy guys," Payne said. "That's another reason I love it so much. We're nuts, we just have so much fun. We just laugh and mess with each other all day long."

  He laughs about the time his teammates zipped him up in his sleeping bag while he was snoozing and put it out on a freezing night filled with sleet and rain. "They locked me out for like five minutes," Payne said. "I'm running around in my skivvies and they make me come in the doorway and they ask what are you doing outside?"

Just the kind of thing brothers would do to annoy each other.

"What other place can you go to have this kind of fun with guys who are your brothers," Payne said. "We're brothers. A third of your life, you're with each other. For 24 hours, every third day, you're with each other. You sleep, eat, live together. You've got to have camraderie, you've got to have the jokes.

"This is my second family. You become so close. When you go fight a fire, you've got to trust the other guy when you go in. Two in, two out, that's our motto. We talk about things that even my real relatives don't know about. We have fun. We laugh, we joke, we cook."

They also learn to live with sleep deprivation. Payne said he sleeps about three hours a night, even when he’s home.  “Maybe later in life all of us will be hurting,” he said. “Most guys will tell you they don't sleep good. You're so used to running at night. You're always anticipating the cal. As you are sleeping your subconscious is thinking: what if the tone goes off [it sounds twice], where am I going, what have I got to do?”

They are also a superstitious lot.

He won’t go to bed anytime before 10:30. “Rule of thumb is if you go to bed before 10:30, you're going to run calls all night,” Payne said. “I've seen it happen before. But if you go to bed at 10:30, a lot of times you won't run calls. The biggest superstition we have in the fire service is don't talk about calls. The minute you say man, we haven't run all day long, this is awesome, this is great, things are looking safe and great in the city of Milton, all of a sudden it's like an hour later we'll start running calls. It's just the craziest thing.

“ I never believed in superstitions. I still don't. Except for those two things.”