City Manager Dave Corliss, second from left, takes a course in firefighting during Saturday's FIREOPS 101 class at Lawrence-Douglas County Fire & Medical's training center at 19th Street and Haskell Avenue. Corliss and 15 other Lawrence residents were invited to learn more about firefighting and participate in four drills.

New assistant City Manager Cynthia Boecker, center, cuts through a car frame while Lawrence-Douglas County Fire & Medical personnel Dennis O'Bryon, left, and Capt. Joe Schaumburg help during Saturday's FIREOPS 101 firefighting course.

Janet Reid, 6News reporter, gets helped out of a smoke-filled room as she and other community members learned how to fight fires Saturday during FIREOPS 101, held at Lawrence-Douglas County Fire & Medical 's training center at 19th Street and Haskell Avenue.

I could hear every breath I took. And I was taking a lot more than usual. I could feel my pulse start to quicken a bit as the mask sucked up tight against my face and the air tank began to pull on my shoulders.

I was about to do something I’d never done before. I was about to enter a burning building.

City Manager David Corliss was in front of me. He was the nozzle man in this operation. He held a 1 3/4-inch fire hose in his hands. I was along to help him carry it. Technically, I was the “officer” on this scene – meaning the Journal-World City Hall reporter was giving orders to the city manager. This almost certainly will give Corliss recurring nightmares.

The door gets swung open, and Corliss and I both begin to march forward. A firefighter yells for us to get on our knees. You fight fires on your knees. I did not know this. My knees certainly did not know this.

So, we don’t march so much as we waddle, and tug on a hose that seems to be getting heavier. We avoid a coffee table. I run into a door jamb. Then, we turn the corner and we’re facing fire.

A stack full of pallets in the corner are ablaze. It is the only thing I see clearly, but only for an instant. Corliss throws the water valve on, and my world goes gray. A combination of smoke and steam cover my mask. Only bright orange embers break up the gray. The embers are jumping toward us as the water strikes the fire.

Corliss continues to work the hose in a large circular pattern. That’s the pattern we were told was the most effective at producing steam in a room. And steam – not water – is what actually puts out a fire, our teachers told us.

After a few seconds, the fire’s out. We’re given the order to retreat.

I’m now a wannabe firefighter.

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No, Lawrence-Douglas County Fire & Medical is not that desperate for recruits. Corliss, 14 other community members and I were part of Lawrence’s first FIREOPS 101 event on Saturday.

The event was sponsored and financed by the Lawrence chapter of the firefighters union. The burning “building” Corliss and I “saved” was the burn tower at the department’s training center at 19th Street and Haskell Avenue. The exercise was one of four drills that the participants were run through Saturday morning.

About 50 firefighters volunteered their time to be on-site to teach us, hold our hands and especially make sure that we didn’t break our necks.

“We challenge you to participate, we challenge you to ask questions, and we really challenge you to not get hurt,” Fire Chief Mark Bradford told us before we left the fire station.

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We’re back on our knees again.

And now I’m really hoping that my hand soon finds Bobbie Flory’s foot. Flory, the executive director of the Lawrence Home Builders Association, is in front of me. Our mission is to find an actual firefighter who is “trapped” inside this special covered trailer made to simulate a two-story house.

Flory is leading the way, and I’ve lost contact with her. We’ve just crawled up the stairs, and she’s made a turn. I don’t know which way. I’m feeling for the walls, and my head finds one of them. Then I grab a foot. I’ve reconnected. A couple of seconds later, I feel Corliss grab my foot. It drove the point home of why firefighters always work in teams of at least two. The department also has a strict rule of “two in, two out.” It means that anytime two firefighters go into a burning building, that two more are waiting outside in case something goes wrong.

With the help of a special handheld, electronic device that cuts through the smoke to show objects on a three-inch screen, we find the firefighter. He’s wearing a new version of a firefighter jacket that has a tow strap built in underneath the collar. I grab it and begin to pull approximately 185 pounds of “dead weight,” predominantly with nothing but my upper body.

I pull him no more than 15 feet. I’m nowhere close to getting him out of this building. The real firefighters, though, show mercy. They tell us that is good enough. They pat us on the back, and we do what they would never do – we leave the guy to fend for himself.

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I had just put down a 75-pound hydraulic spreader that popped a car door off its hinges. My triceps were still burning from a 45-pound cutter that I had used to chop the roof off a compact pickup truck.

But that’s when it hit me that the physical part of this job wasn’t the hardest part of it.

We had just conducted an exercise on how to extricate people from badly mangled vehicles. We had gone so far as to pick up an actual firefighter and put him on a backboard and stretcher.

But one thing was missing from the whole scene – the screaming. The real firefighters said that was a common detail of most vehicle extrications. Someone screaming while you lift their badly broken leg onto a stretcher. Or screams of fear as you cover their heads with a tarp so the shards of glass from the windshield that firefighters are breaking don’t cut them.

Or sometimes they can’t scream at all. Those can stick with you for a long time too, the firefighters said.

Steve Weaver – a seven-year veteran of the department – was my group’s “wrangler” or “mother hen” who was responsible for getting us safely through the day. He told the most emotional story of the day.

It was Christmas Eve several years ago. He got called out to a motor vehicle accident. The driver is badly hurt. Christmas presents are in the back seat. His dog was thrown through the front windshield. The car is badly mangled. If Weaver and the others do manage to free him from the car, he’s going to need a trauma surgeon immediately. Like right now, not in the 10 or 15 minutes it would take to get to a hospital.

It did not look good, and indeed it was not.

“He bled out in the front seat of the car,” Weaver said. “You basically just watched a man die on Christmas Eve.”

Firefighters have those type of stories, whether they want them or not. On Saturday, some said they cope by using a dark fire station humor – the type that “would get you slapped or thrown out by your wife if you used it at home.” Others visit the department chaplain. Others just do something else.

“Everybody has their own way of dealing with it,” Weaver said.

I leave glad that the day has left me with no such issues to deal with. Instead, my coping device tonight will be two ice bags – one for each knee.