Calendar Pic!

I was pleasantly surprised the last week when neighbor Roger (fire chief for our local fire department) showed me that one of my pictures of our house burn was printed on the Minnesota State Community & Techical College from Moorhead, MN calendar for 2010.  I'd taken many pictures of the burn; of all of the firemen; the fire trucks and water tanks; the different stages of the burn; and then each group of firemen toward the end of the burn.  I made a DVD for each fire department and the Moorhead Tech so they could review the burn, etc.   The young firemen and women on this picture learned much that day.  This fire training will help to save the life of a fireman one day, or save the life of someone in a burning structure, and they learned how to save a burning structure.  Training like this is so valuable to these young people and other the new firemen that haven't had to enter a burning structure yet.  They took turns entering, searching, putting out the fire in each room.  They trained doing kitchen fires to fires in the upstairs from the roofline, to bedrooms, to the living room, and celler.  I thought it was very interesting how they searched for victims, and I noticed that at one time, there was some confussion, and a little panic, as a young fireman had not responded/or reported that he was back out after a training session.  For a few minutes, there was some mighty fast action getting in to play, for a group to go back inside to search for this individual; but the trainee was out, and  found out real fast that you HAVE to pay attention at ALL times! 

There were alot of other people taking pictures that day also.  For our family I made prints too, as one last remembrance of a house that was home for many years for my husband's family.  We miss the house standing there, however, the foundation had dry rot, and it needed a lot of work done.  It wasn't a project that we were able to afford.  It didn't take a week after the burn to get everything leveled off, and new grass planted.  I got a couple of trees planted this last fall, and now this spring we will be planting more trees, and flowers.