Cool Job: Firefighter Takes the Heat

On Saturday nights, A.J. Coston doesn’t get a lot of sleep. Usually three or four times a night, a loud bell rings, a red light goes off, and he has to jump out of his bed. That’s because he’s a weekend volunteer firefighter with Loudoun County Fire and Rescue Station 13 in Northern Virginia. During the week, he lives at home with his mom, dad, and sister, and does his main job: going to high school. Coston, a junior captain and firefighter, is 18 years old.

“I always wanted to get into firefighting since I was a little kid watching fire trucks go by,” he says. “One day I was bored and on the Internet, and I found out that Loudoun County offered a junior firefighter program.” He was only 16, but he was hooked.

A hard-working student, he managed to go to high school, do his homework, and fit in 160 hours of firefighting class on top of it all. He went to class from 7:00 to 10:30 two nights a week and all day Saturday for months.

Fighting fires is dangerous work. Firefighters never stop practicing the skills they need to stay safe. Once Coston learned those skills, he was allowed to work inside burning buildings. But not before grabbing all his gear. Coston says he wears firefighting boots (rubber or leather with a steel plate), turnout pants (fire pants), a turnout coat, a hood to protect his neck and head, a helmet, and an SCBA (Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus), which includes a mask, air bottle and pack, and gloves.

Coston says what you carry into a fire depends on what position you’re riding. “You might take in a Halligan bar [Read about this on Wikipedia], an axe, a flashlight that can shine through smoke, a thermal imager which can show images through smoke, a water can, or a pike pole (used to pull ceilings down and check to see if the fire has gone into a crawl space).”

“Teamwork is huge,” he says. “It’s the whole team that puts the fire out, from the guy pulling the hose line to the guy holding the nozzle. The guy holding the back end of the hose may never even see the fire he’s putting out, but he makes sure the guy up front has enough hose to get there.”

Coston is also a trained Emergency Medical Technician (EMT). A fire company doesn’t just get called to put fires out. They respond to 911 calls about everything from accidents to heart attacks.

Firefighters feel great about helping people. “My most dramatic call was probably the time four kids were struck by lightning,” says Coston. “We had one kid in cardiac arrest [that means his heart stopped], and we did CPR [cardiopulmonary resuscitation] and got a heartbeat back. He’s pretty much fine now!”

Coston will be off to college next fall, building on his dream job. “I’ll get my degree in emergency medical care, and then apply to a fire and rescue company for a while. I want to be a flight medic on a helicopter eventually,” he says.

Remember, call 911 if you smell smoke or see a fire.

Fast Facts:

• Not all fire trucks carry water
• A truck company carries a long ladder to reach high-up places
• A rescue company has a big tool box with almost every tool you can think of
• Not all fire trucks are red
• Not all fire stations have dogs
• Many firefighters have a college degree in Fire Science
• There are different kinds and sizes of fire hoses for different situations
• You can take a firefighting course as early as age 16
• Some firefighters are also paramedics
• Firefighters respond to more false alarms than fires

  Teachers

A mom and dad were worried about their son not wanting to learn math at the school he was in, so they decided to send him to a Catholic school. After the first day of school, their son comes racing into the house, goes straight into his room and slams the door shut. Mom and dad are a little worried about this and go to his room to see if he is okay. They find him sitting at his desk doing his homework. The boy keeps doing that for the rest of the year. At the end of the year the son brings home his report card and gives it to his mom and dad. Looking at it they see under math an A+.

Mom and dad are very happy and ask the son, "What changed your mind about learning math?"

The son looked at mom and dad and said, "Well, on the first day when I walked into the classroom, I saw a guy nailed to the plus sign at the back of the room behind the teacher's desk and I knew they meant business."

The parents were very disappointed in the grades that their son brought home. "The only consolation I can find in these awful grades," lamented the father, "is that I know he never cheated during his exams."

"Dad, can you write in the dark?"
"I think so. What is it you want me to write?"
"Your name on this report card."

A little girl came home from school and said to her mother, "Mommy, today in school I was punished for something that I didn't do."

The mother exclaimed, "But that's terrible! I'm going to have a talk with your teacher about this ... by the way, what was it that you didn't do?"

The little girl replied, "My homework."

The child comes home from his first day at school.
Mother asks, "What did you learn today?"
The kid replies, "Not enough. I have to go back tomorrow."

Little Johnny returns from school and says he got an F in arithmetic.
"Why?" asks the father.
"The teacher asked 'How much is 2x3?' and I said '6'"
"But that's right!"
"Then she asked me 'How much is 3x2?'"
"What's the fucking difference?"
"That's exactly what I said!"

A teacher was having trouble teaching arithmetic to one little boy. So she said, "if you reached in your right pocket and found a nickel, and you reached in your left pocket and found another one, what would you have?"

"Somebody else's pants."

Teacher: "Sam, what is the outside of a tree called?"
Sam: "I don’t know."
Teacher: "Bark, Sam, bark."
Sam: "Bow, wow, wow!"

The teacher came up with a good problem. "Suppose," she asked the second-graders, "there were a dozen sheep and six of them jumped over a fence. How many would be left?"
"None," answered little Norman.
"None? Norman, you don't know your arithmetic."
"Teacher, you don't know your sheep. When one goes, they all go!"