Near Death Experience

My dad nearly died today. He's fine, but it was very stressful all the same. First of all, for those of you who don't know, my dad is a fireman so he's out doing scary brave things all the time, but except for the time he fell through a roof, I don't think he's been in this much danger, ever. Here's what happened:

The wind was blowing 51 mph today and a transformer or something blew off of a power pole and fell into a field of dry grass. It of course sparked and started a fire which spread rapidly because of the wind. The fire ended up being 2 miles wide and 4 miles long. Anyway, my dad was driving this big water truck through the field trying to find the best place to start watering the fire, and out of the smoke and dirt came a huge ditch, which he ran into, the truck sort of nosedived into it and then tilted and then jumped out, losing it's front bumper in the process. Firemen can't buckle up when they are in the truck because the bunkers take up too much room, so my dad was sort of flung around in the cab, hitting the windshield and the roof and the doors and basically turned into a pinball.

There were two men riding on the back of the truck, who he thought he threw off and killed, but they as it turns out held on and are fine too...anyway now the scary part... My dad jumped out of the truck to check on the other two men, and they were basically looking into a wall of flames, on all sides. They got back into the truck to drive off, and drove about a yard and then it died, I'm assuming because of the wreck. Their radios stopped working because they only had a portable and it for some reason doesn't work more than a couple of miles out of town...but they didn't have any way to really tell anybody where they were anyway because they couldn't see anything because of the fire, so my dad and his friend Rene crawled on top of the truck and started spraying water all around them to try and keep the fire away and the other guy starts trying to get a signal on the radio. They really thought "this is it, this is how firemen die."

So eventually everybody else starts freaking out (there were like 4 departments there because of the size of the fire) and they start looking for them and they can't see anything through the fire and the smoke, until finally somebody sees a little bit of the top of the truck out there surrounded by smoke and fire, and they drive in and rescue them. My dad is really incredibly sore because of the wreck, and he couldn't walk when they got him down and he was all black with smoke and sweat and somehow his hand is burnt...and he was so scared that he was crying, and everybody was crying and they took him to the hospital and he is fine, except they didn't take any x-rays, and I feel pretty sure that he probably has some serious spinal mal-allignment, if not something worse....anyway, he's very traumatized, like anybody would be, and I'm pretty traumatized because my dad nearly died, and it's just been a rough day.

(This picture is not of the actual fire, but I assume its similar)

My step-mother, who is also a firefighter fell or something and hurt her heel/ankle at this fire too, so it was a trying day for that whole household. Anyway, I'm really glad that he is okay and we went to see him tonight, which made me feel better, to see him all in one piece...so yeah scary day.