Last night, well actually this morning, at 4:30 am, we get paged out to a medical call. After leaving the patient's house, our driver was attempting to turn around in the front yard when he got into some sugar sand. Being from Florida, this is a regular occurence, especially if you spend any time at the beach. And you know how much it sucks when you get your own car stuck in the sand. Now imagine that you are driving a fire truck.
Fire trucks are large in nature, but now pack a couple hundred pounds of equipment, another couple hundred pounds of hose, and 4 people and their gear. Sounds like it could be pretty heavy, right? There's more.
One gallon of water weighs 8.3 pounds, we have 1000 gallons on our truck. That is 8300 pounds! All of this weight and it's no wonder we got stuck. No, not stuck, we had the back end buried all the way to the axles! Not much you can do at this point except wait. Wait for someone to come pull you out. Easier said than done. It's easy to pull a car or truck out, but an over 12,000 pound fire engine, this requires heavy machinery. And that is exactly what came to our rescue - A grater tractor. It took him all of 15 seconds to pull us out and we were back in service.
We had to call this poor guy from the city and wake him up early, so he could come rescue us. When he saw us buried in these people's front yard, he laughed. I have to admit I was laughing too. So, needless to say, I have been up since 4:30 this a.m., and it is 12:45pm currently.
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