Into the Fire
ON THE BOOK SHELF
By John M. Malecky August, 2019
Into the Fire
By Edric Kennedy-Macfoy
Available from:
FSP Books & Videos
188 Central Street, Suite #4
Hudson, MA 01749-1330
1-800-522-8528
e-mail: support@fire-police-ems.com
www.fire-police-ems.com
Price: $12.99
This is a hard cover book measuring 6 ½ inches by 9 ½ inches with 224 pages. It is the memoirs of a London firefighter who put 13 years on the job. Now you may say that it seems like he left the job early and that would be the case, but the author did see his share of action, a selection of which is written about here.
He is single, lived with his mother and had a younger brother. There is also a brief mention of a daughter. He worked at many different fire brigade stations in some different capacities and his accounts make for interesting reading, especially when it has to do with the different lingo spoken between the American and British languages. There are explanations to the reader for certain terms and then there are others that you can pretty much figure out.
He explains the command levels as well as the types of apparatus that they use. His calls, or “shouts” as they refer to them as, are diversified from comical, like the swan rescue to the very tragic like the poisoning of two children by their mother. But the most tragic is a fire that involved a large hi-rise residential building which resulted in many deaths and injuries. His input with this fire was not the initial fire attack but rather the overhaul, mop up and recovery which affected him so deeply that combined with other gruesome work that he was called to do collectively caused him to eventually leave the job. There are a lot of details in the descriptions of the operations within the 17 chapters.
I sympathize how a firefighter could psychologically suffer. After all, other than in initial training, one does not know what it is like to be in a burning building with minimal to no visibility, unless he or she experienced it within their own home or a building that they had been in. The same goes for medical calls involving the seriously injured or dead!
This is a book worth reading! It is one in which a person contemplating a career in the fire service would find enlightening!
No information from the author.
