Erin raised her eyebrows. “According to the two in, two out protocol, I needed to stay to supervise the probie.” New probies were notoriously careless since they tended to believe they were invincible. And their rookie had already proved himself untrustworthy.
“Yet you allowed Clarke to enter the house by himself.”
“Clarke is an experienced lieutenant. He seemed to be less at risk than our probie, who was doing the 360-degree eval around the house with Hudgens,” Vanessa said. Good thing, because Erin almost interjected that they only had three people, which does not evenly divide by two. Did he expect her to go inside and circle the house at the same time?
“Why didn’t Rodriguez do the 360 eval of the house?”
“With no visible fire, it was delegated to Ladder crew, and with our staffing, Rodriguez switched to TAC-2 to update Medic rather than speak back on TAC-1. I stayed, listening to TAC-1.” Vanessa explained.
“Could you hear Lieutenant Clarke’s progress to the garage?”
“I heard the civilian tell Clarke it was only burned food. I changed from our TAC-1 to Command Channel and contacted Dispatch,” Erin added without prompting.
The Chief swung around to Erin again. ““Why did you do that? Shouldn’t you have switched to TAC-2 alternate frequency to communicate with Rodriguez?”
“I trusted Engine was listening in on TAC-1. Carver monitored TAC-1 while I called Dispatch. I requested additional support.”
Erin again kept her comments brief. No blame. No fault.
“Not that it helped. We’d made it around the house to the garage, and she was still trying to get a hold of Dispatch. That’s when we heard yelling and discovered the garage door was locked tight,” Carver added.
“But you didn’t know the situation in the garage?”
“No idea. The patient was still mumbling about Riker. Hudgens was on Command Channel when we heard Rodriguez blast the evac signal. The next thing we knew, Rodriguez drove the engine through the garage door,” Carver told the Chief.
“That was all the warning she gave you?”
“It was a fast situation,” Theo spoke up for the first time. “The evac order required split-second decision making.”
“The situation was difficult to predict since our radios picked up a lot of ambient noise in the garage,” Vanessa hedged. “She made the decision and made me evac the engine to minimize staff injuries.”
“What happened next?” Chief Baker inquired too casually, watching all of them with quiet interest.
“We saw Lieutenant Clarke engaged in a physical altercation with the patient who was on fire,” Carver explained. “It appeared he had poured gasoline on himself. Hudgens separated the two, and I used the fire extinguisher to put the patient out. Clarke and Hudgens went with him in the ambulance to MetroGen.”
“We took them all because Hudgens and Clarke would need to be cleared due to their gasoline exposure… and the civilian wasn’t doing well,” Theo said.
“Crashing the engine seems rather extreme without trying any other methods. I understand that it dissipated the gasoline vapor quickly, but it also ran the risk of explosion . . . and several of you were present when itdidexplode later,” Chief Baker observed, making a note on the legal pad in front of him. “Is there more to this protocol breach beyond Rodriguez wanting to shine as acting captain?”
“Of course not,” Carver spouted. “They’re completely professional now. Aiden and Luna dating is ancient history. I heard that ended when Captain Soto retired.”
His teammates gasped in horror as Carver inadvertently revealed the cause of the power struggle in Firehouse 15.
The Chief didn’t react outside of a slight widening of his eyes.
Erin’s instincts were screaming. The Chief was playing them. He wanted to crack the team open, reveal all the dirty laundry to place the blame squarely on the two lieutenants. And the damn probie was handing it all over to him!
“The real problem is the outdated equipment and the failure of Dispatch to give us help,” Erin challenged. “Our unit is understaffed and under-equipped. It falls squarely on the shoulders of upper management to make sure that we have the resources to do our job. How long did it take for the next unit to respond to our calls for help?”
Chief Baker set his pen down serenely. “Hudgens, is it? A word outside.”
If there was a level of silence more silent than silence, the room got there.
Erin stood, wishing she had some impulse control. It would have been a good idea to resist the need to protect her team and not call out the Chief on his management style.
“Is there a problem here, Hudgens?” the Chief asked when they were alone in the hallway. His voice was dangerously controlled and low. The cute guy who had seemed so non-threatening at yoga earlier today was looking at her like a lion who’d cornered a baby gazelle.
“No problem, sir,” she said, keeping her gaze on a point on the wall behind him. A good firefighter could control her air, her emotions, and her attraction to her superior officer.
