Atlanta Fire Rescue Battalion Chief Shawn Manns and his crew were on their way back to their station Thursday morning after responding to a call. As they were driving, they spotted a plume of black smoke rising in the distance.
“So I’m instructing command tech to head in this direction,” Manns told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I asked communications if they had a fire call in Station 16′s territory, and they advised that they did.”
Within one minute of the call, Manns and his team arrived at the house fire in the 500 block of Cairo Street in northwest Atlanta.
The fire, which started at around 8 a.m., was fully involved by the time the crew arrived, Manns said, and there were reports that people could be inside.
Credit: Sam Baskin
Credit: Sam Baskin
“(The house) was boarded up,” he said. “There was a report of two people staying inside.”
The crew was able to quickly search and confirm that no one was inside.
Because of the heat from the flames, Atlanta fire had to send additional engines to the scene solely to rehabilitate the crews, according to Manns.
“We try to shorten the rotations,” he said. “Get them in, get them out, and make sure they rehab hydrated.”
Heat exhaustion is always a risk for firefighters, Manns noted, and the blazing temperatures of summer don’t make the job any easier.
“One of the things we’ve been doing is calling for extra engines to come out to assist with whatever we need,” he said. “I had that extra engine come out and set up a rehab sector with Gatorade and just check the firefighters out in the event somebody was suffering from heat exhaustion.”
— Staff photographer Chris Day contributed to this article.
