Laundry

“I have no ambition in this world but one, and that is to be a fireman. The position may, in the eyes of some, appear to be a lowly one; but we who know the work which the fireman has to do believe that his is a noble calling. There is an adage which says that, "Nothing can be destroyed except by fire." We strive to preserve from destruction the wealth of the world which is the product of the industry of men, necessary for the comfort of both the rich and the poor. We are defenders from fires of the art which has beautified the world, the product of the genius of men and the means of refinement of mankind. But, above all; our proudest endeavor is to save lives of men-the work of God Himself. Under the impulse of such thoughts, the nobility of the occupation thrills us and stimulates us to deeds of daring, even at the supreme sacrifice. Such considerations may not strike the average mind, but they are sufficient to fill to the limit our ambition in life and to make us serve the general purpose of human society.”

-Edward Croker, Chief of the Fire Department of New York from 1899 to 1911

...

July 29, 2023

It was a quiet early morning on a Saturday in the village of Harukawa, a small community numbering no more than seven thousand people located by the sea and bordered by a town and a larger city next door, the former of which also housed an air base and military facility operated jointly by the Japan Air Self-Defense Force and the United States Navy in addition to some civilian air traffic. The sun was beginning to rise in the sky, and most people were not up yet since they did not have work on a weekend. The buildings within the village, most of them dating to the postwar era with a few prewar and newer buildings mixed in, were largely empty aside from houses, shops having not been opened yet and most government buildings being closed for the day.

At one particular building next to village hall, which was two stories tall and had two garage doors, both of which were wide enough to accommodate two vehicles, things were lifeless, devoid of any energy aside from a single room between the two garage doors where a small light was on. The second floor only extended over one of the bay doors, with the other section of the building only being one story tall. On top of the building was a metal tower that reached up to a hypothetical fourth story and had a siren and several speakers attached to it, and above the smaller double bay was a sign reading in Japanese ‘Village of Harukawa Volunteer Fire Brigade, Founded 1895/Meiji 28.”

Inside the room between the garages was a running computer, several binders and books, and two base radios plugged into the wall, with one wired to a small metal box attached to the wall as well with a metal pipe with more wires running up into the ceiling, and the other being next to the computer and having a microphone attached to it. Surrounding the room was an open garage, and inside were several fire engines and an ambulance. In the larger double bay, which was the taller of the two, there sat a regular-sized four-door fire engine, with a much smaller fire engine parked next to it and a large van with a portable pump and hoses in the back of it parked in front of the smaller fire engine. In the smaller double bay, an ambulance and a utility truck, the latter of which was labeled with the words ‘HARUKAWA VOLUNTEER FIRE BRIGADE RESCUE’, sat next to each other.

Behind the ambulance and the rescue truck were rows of lockers, most of them occupied. All of the firefighting gear looked the same initially, consisting of a long black and yellow coat with a pair of silver-colored boots designed to be pulled up to the thigh. However, while some had silver helmets with small green stripes, others had green helmets with white stripes that were lighter and did not have the large ear flaps of the silver helmets. On the top of each locker was a name written in both kanji and in Latin characters on a name tag. A few helmets had special markings on them to indicate ranks they held in the brigade.

At exactly 6:16 AM, the silence was broken when the lights suddenly turned on and several speakers inside the fire station blared an alarm sound. Additionally, a small black pager attached to its charging base, which sat on a desk next to the lockers and was plugged into the wall, beeped loudly. This was followed by the pager and the speakers broadcasting a series of four DTMF tones twice in a row, which caused the metal box inside the radio room to emit a loud clanking sound, followed by the siren on the roof tower roaring to life. The clanking sound repeated several times, making the siren produce a wailing note. From the speakers and the pager then came a voice that calmly relayed information about a call the brigade had just received.

“Harukawa Fire Station, Harukawa Fire Brigade, West Yoshimatsu Fire Station for one engine and a battalion chief, respond to 1-4-1 Janome in the Village of Harukawa for a reported house fire. I have a caller reporting that their dryer is smoking and they are currently evacuating their house. Your time of dispatch is 0617 hours.”

Down the road, the ten firefighters on duty who were affiliated with the Yoshimatsu Area Fire Department, which provided paid firefighters for Harukawa and several other municipalities, jumped into their fire engine, which was a pumper with a small aerial ladder, their water tanker, which held 7500 liters of water, and their ambulance and got ready to respond. Then, just as they pulled out of their fire station, a man on a bicycle rode up to the volunteer fire station and then parked his bike next to a door on the side before pulling out a set of keys and quickly unlocking it, flinging the door open and running in to grab his gear.

He was soon joined by a girl who was running down the street as the station siren roared above, still wearing her pajamas as she raced into the station. As she ran to her locker and kicked her shoes off, he asked the man who had used his bicycle, “You’re up early.”

“I couldn’t fall back asleep,” replied the man, who was in his fifties and had graying hair. “So I went out for an early morning bike ride.” As they both slipped on their boots, they pulled them up all the way before then grabbing their coats and quickly putting them on and zipping them up, the siren atop the station shutting down for the last time. Once they grabbed their silver helmets, they ran to the main fire engine used by the brigade, which had six seats, five of which had air packs built into them for them to put on. As they hopped in and began to put packs on, two more volunteer firefighters ran in, both of whom were older and had green helmets, which indicated they were not cleared to use the air packs those with silver helmets had. Even so, they still could be incredibly useful in other ways, with the oldest of the two men walking over to the engine after getting his gear on and hopping into the driver’s seat. The man in the back asked him, “Kasuya-san, it’s just us in the back so far.”

“I know, I know,” he replied. “I’m surprised you didn’t hop up front, Okubo-san.”

“I didn’t just in case Lieutenant Ueda gets here soon enough.”

“Speaking of him,” then said the girl as she saw a man in his thirties get in the seat next to the driver. “There he is now.”

“Huh?” Lieutenant Ueda looked around, confused. “What’s up?”

“Oh, nothing,” replied the driver Kasuya. “We were just wondering when you’d get on.”

“Oh, okay.” When another older man with a green helmet got into the back of the engine, he pressed a button in the front of the cab to open the garage door before the driver Kasuya turned the fire engine on and Lieutenant Ueda flipped the lights on. He then grabbed a radio and called out over it, “Engine 31 is responding.” With that, the fire engine sped away from the station, its sirens going at full blast as the lieutenant flipped on a secondary warning that consisted of a voice that warned drivers to look out for the fire engine, a common feature on emergency vehicles in Japan. It had been just four and a half minutes since the initial dispatch.

As all six firefighters on board got ready, they saw two cars speeding to the firehouse pass by them. The girl on board, named Tomoko Morishima, said to Hiro Okubo, the same middle-aged man from before, “A thousand yen says they’ll hold it to just us and the paid crew when we get there.” She then tightened down the shoulder and waist straps on her air pack.

About seven minutes after they had been dispatched, Engine 31 arrived, parking behind a fire engine with a small aerial ladder on top of it. Already, a hose line had been rolled out, stretched, and charged with water, running from the pump to the inside of a two-story house. Nearby was a water tanker unit and an ambulance, both of which had parked out of the way. As Lieutenant Michio Ueda jumped off the truck with his crew, his older brother Fumio, who had an all-white helmet to indicate he was a fire chief, turned to him and told him, “Roll out a second line, but we probably won’t need to fill it with water. The paid crew on Engine-Aerial 4 got a good knock on the fire.”

Michio turned to his crew and ordered, “Get me a line!”

Tomoko replied to him as she pulled off two rolls of hose from the fire engine, “Got it!” Hiro joined her, rolling out two rolls herself while the older man in the back with them, named Daisuke Miyagi, rolled out a fifth roll and then grabbed a nozzle, handing it off to Tomoko. “Can you connect the hoses for us?”

“Yeah,” replied Daisuke as he quickly went around and hooked up each length of the hose by himself while Tomoko hooked the nozzle onto the end of the last length and Hiro grabbed a set of irons, a term used to describe a flathead axe and a halligan bar tied together with straps. “Alright,” Daisuke told her after connecting the last length. “You’re all set!”

“Thank you.” Tomoko then began to haul her end of the line up to the building while Michio took up a spot on the line behind her. “Lieutenant, I’m ready.”

“Same here,” Michio replied as the two of them walked into the house through the front door. There was a light smoke condition inside, indicating that there had indeed been a fire, although the smoke was not yet thick enough to warrant them to use their air packs. As they turned a corner while following the charged hand line belonging to the crew from Engine-Aerial 4, they passed by two of the paid firefighters, both of whom held hand tools and were dressed in full bunker gear unlike the volunteers. Michio asked them, “Hey guys, what’s going on up there?”

“The fire’s out,” said one of them as he breathed through his mask. “We’re just going around and opening windows to vent the house.”

Then, they all saw the captain of the paid crew emerge from what was the laundry room as he took the regulator of his air pack off of his mask and told them all, “We can drop our masks. We got a few windows open here. Just get the rest of the windows in the house opened up.” He then turned to Michio and told him, “We should be good with just the one hand line. If you want, check the rest of the house with a thermal imager. We haven’t been upstairs yet if you wanna go there first.”

“Alright.” Michio then patted Tomoko on the shoulder and told her, “Let’s head upstairs.” As the two of them turned around, Michio saw Hiro walking in and told him, “We’re heading upstairs to check with the thermal imager. They’re all set down here.”

“Got it,” he replied as he walked up the stairs first, followed by Tomoko and Michio.

The girl at the nozzle remarked to the others, “Man, that sucks. We couldn’t even get any water in our line.”

“There’ll be a next time,” Michio assured her. “I’m surprised your sister didn’t show up in time for the first engine.”

“She had to get dressed. She sleeps with no clothes on in the summer.”

“Ah, I see.”

“Besides,” Tomoko pointed out. “She’s only been in since May, so she can’t do much anyway right now, and she’s got a firefighting class later on in like two hours. I’m sure she’s on Utility 35.”

When they got up to the second floor, Michio began to check the walls with the thermal imager, seeing if there were any unusual heat signatures. “These people got lucky. If the paid crew had gotten here a minute later, the fire would have spread beyond the laundry room.” He then checked a wall behind a bed that happened to be right over the laundry room. “By the way, where’s Koda-san? She usually makes the first engine if she’s at home.”

“Shiori-chan is away at a piano competition for the weekend.” They both were referring to another third-year alongside Tomoko named Shiori Koda, who was also a pianist in addition to being a volunteer firefighter. “It seems like every time she’s away, we get something serious.”

Both Michio and Tomoko shared a laugh, with the former remarking, “Sounds like she’s a ‘white cloud’ then if shit only happens when she can’t be here.”

“We had that nasty car wreck last year when she went to Tokyo for a weekend back in January, and the year before then, we had that fire in the Pellson’s next to the post office in November when she was on a family trip. Oh man, she was pissed when she got the email for that call on her phone.”

“I bet she was. Oh well, though. When you’ve been doing it long enough like me, you’ll find out there will always be more fires and accidents.” Michio then put the thermal imager down and told Tomoko, “Yeah, I got nothing here. You can back the line out and start breaking it down outside.”

“Sounds good to me.” As Tomoko began to leave, she told Hiro, “We’re going outside to break the line down.”

“Got it.” As the two of them pulled the hose out and left the building, they saw two paid firefighters and a volunteer firefighter begin to carry the burned laundry machine out of the laundry room, the fire being fully extinguished at this point.

Then, the silence was broken when Michio walked over to the two of them and said, “Hey, we’re about to get another call.”

Tomoko asked him, “Another?” Just as she did, the siren on top of their firehouse nearby went off again.

“Sounds like a downed power line,” Michio replied to her. “We’re gonna have Utility 35 cover that call. We should be all set here. The chief’s going, too. My brother will stay here to command this call.”

Hiro and Tomoko looked over and saw an older man in his late sixties wearing normal clothes and a radio strap walk towards a red car with some markings on the side and a light bar on top. As he got into the car, he told Michio and his brother Fumio, “You’ll be in charge of our guys!”

Michio gave him a thumbs-up and replied, “Got it, Chief!”

…

A few minutes later, the chief of the fire brigade and Utility 35 pulled up to another location in the village, finding that a power line had come down and was sparking on the road. As the crew on Utility 35 got out, three of them were also girls around the same age as Tomoko. The two youngest were first-year high school students, one of them having dark red hair and the same eye color as Tomoko and the other having shoulder-length black hair and noticeable burn scars on the right side of her face. The oldest of the three girls was a third-year like Tomoko and had dark blue hair tied back in a ponytail. The officer on the rig was a woman in her thirties, while the driver was another older man similar in age to the chief.

The chief, named Taichi Mikazuki, got out of his car and looked at the wire from a distance, and as he did, he radioed out, “Chief 30-Alpha to dispatch.”

A dispatcher replied back to him, “Chief 30-Alpha, go ahead.”

“I can confirm a power line is down and is sparking,” he began. “The pole number is 92562. Do you have an estimated time of arrival for the Hokuriku Electric Power Company?”

“When we called, they said they had a fifteen-minute arrival time.”

“Received.” Taichi then told the officer of Utility 35, “Yamada-san, start setting up cones and help the police shut this road down.”

“Got it,” replied Masako Yamada, one of the lieutenants of the brigade and a former student firefighter herself when she was a teenager. She told her crew, “Get traffic cones off the truck and start putting them down. Redirect all traffic onto the side streets.”

“Yes, Lieutenant,” replied the older girl. She then told the two first-years as she pointed to an intersection on the road, “Rumiko-chan, Sumire-chan, go shut down the road near that intersection over here. I’ll take care of this intersection over there.”

“Be careful, Yui-senpai,” Rumiko, who was Tomoko’s younger sister, told the older girl, who was named Yui Kitagawa.

“She’ll be fine,” Masako assured her. “She’ll be safe as long as she sticks to the sidewalk away from the wire.”

At that moment, the wire sparked rather loudly, causing Rumiko to jump slightly from fright. “Eep!”

Masako looked at the wire and told Yui, “Alright, I’ll go with you.” All four then began to pull cones off of the back of Utility 35.

As Masako and Yui walked past the wire on the other side of the street from where it was, Rumiko and Sumire began to put their cones down just as a police car showed up. Sumire remarked to her friend, “Looks like you got pretty scared by that.”

“I wasn’t expecting that,” Rumiko replied with a slight pout. “Electricity is scary.”

Sumire then took her helmet off and pulled out a hair band from her coat, but as she was about to tie her hair back, she stopped and saw two police officers look at her, causing her to put the hair band down. She sighed and thought to herself, “He looked at my scars, didn’t he?” Once the two police officers were past them, she looked around to see if anyone else was watching.

Rumiko asked her, “Hey, are you alright, Sumire-chan?”

“I’m-… I’m fine,” she replied, not wanting to get into it with her. She then looked at her hair band and sighed, whispering to herself, “Ah, screw it.” As she tied her hair back into a bun, which further exposed the scars on the right side of her face, she did so quickly to try to minimize how much others had to see them. Once she was done, she put her helmet back on, the flaps of which also helped cover the scars as she pulled them down.

Rumiko then noticed a car coming up towards them. “Oh, hey, look.”

The car, instead of turning onto the side street detour, stopped in front of them. The driver, a middle-aged man, looked out the driver’s side window and said to the two girls in an annoyed tone of voice, “Hey, what’s going on here?!”

“You, uh… You can’t go down here.”

“Why not?!”

“There’s a wire… Uh…” Rumiko knew that the man was starting to get belligerent, which scared her. “There’s a wire across the road over there.”

“It’s not across the road! Come on!” The man then pointed at the street before him and exclaimed, “I should be able to go past that! Give me a God damn chance!”

“Sir,” Sumire told him firmly but politely. “I’m sorry, but you can’t go down this way. You’ll have to take a side street. That’s your only option.”

“Who the Hell are you?! You look like a little girl!”

Sumire, irritated by his response, reiterated her words in a slightly more nervous tone, “Take the side street. You cannot go down this way, sir.” She thought to herself throughout this, “This guy is starting to scare me. He won’t take the side street even though it’s clearly open for him. What’s he planning?”

“Why should I listen to some little kid?!”

Then, Taichi walked over, having heard the commotion, and yelled out in a commanding tone, “Hey, what’s going on here?!”

A bit nervous that she had done something wrong, Rumiko stuttered a bit as she told Taichi, “He, um… This guy won’t move… He won’t go, uh… Down the side street like we told him to.”

The driver then yelled at Sumire again within earshot of Taichi, “Why do they have girls doing this shit anyway?! Let me through, for God’s sake!”

“Hang on,” Taichi then told her as he walked over to the irate man in the car. When he spoke to the driver, he was very firm and to the point with the warning he gave him. “Sir, you can’t go down this way. You also can’t harass or insult my firefighters. Not on my watch. Now go down the side street or I’ll have you arrested for impeding emergency services!”

Seeing Taichi tell him what he needed to do or else immediately shut him up. Intimidated, the man sighed, “Okay, fine.” He then quietly shifted his car back into drive and reversed before going down the side street as originally asked of him.

Sumire turned to Taichi and thanked him with, “Thanks for that, Chief. That guy was starting to scare us.”

“Fuck that guy,” Taichi bluntly told her and Rumiko. “Don’t let assholes like him get to you. If another driver does that shit, tell me or one of the cops, and we’ll shut them up. If they start getting belligerent or get out of their car, back away, and if they actually attack you, well… I didn’t see anything. I don’t know how those cones got shoved up their ass.” Taichi’s implicit permission for the two girls to use physical force to defend themselves earned a chuckle from all of them.

Then, all of them heard another arc of electricity and turned around just in time to see a second wire fall from the same pole, this time striking a small gray kei car parked near the first wire and immediately causing a fire to start on the hood of the car. Rumiko’s eyes widened with fear as she said to herself, “A second wire…”

“Oh shit,” Taichi then said before he grabbed his radio. “Chief 30-Alpha to dispatch.”

“Go ahead,” replied a dispatcher.

“Re-dispatch the Harukawa Fire Brigade and tell the Hokuriku Electric Power Company to step it up. I just had a second wire fall on a parked car and set it on fire.”

“Received.”

“Harukawa Fire Brigade to Chief 30-Alpha,” then said a firefighter back at the station. “What apparatus do you want us to roll first?”

“Get me Mini-Pumper 32 first, and then Ambulance 33.”

“Received.”

As the engine compartment of the car began to burn, Taichi told Rumiko and Sumire, “Pull the portable pump off the back of Utility 35, roll out a hose line, and grab two air packs for Kitagawa-san and Lieutenant Yamada. We’ll have to wait for the power company to secure the power before we can fight the fire, but we can at least get ready before they get here.”

“Got it,” Rumiko replied. She turned to Sumire and told her as they all heard the siren of the fire brigade go off again in the distance, “Let’s go!” The two then ran to Utility 35 and opened up a large compartment, pulling off a heavy portable pump and setting it on the ground before Sumire grabbed a length of black hard suction hose and hooked it up to it before hooking the other end up to an above-ground hydrant. Meanwhile, Rumiko grabbed several donut rolls of hose and began to roll them out before grabbing a nozzle as Masako and Yui ran over to help.

“Of all the damn times we get a car fire,” Masako remarked as she grabbed a pack and rapidly put it on alongside Yui. “It’s when we’re already tied up somewhere else.”

Rumiko’s third and final roll did not come out as planned, hitting a mailbox on the other side of the street and stopping before it was fully laid out. “Hang on, sorry,” she said as she ran over and picked up what was left of the roll before throwing it down the street again, feeling embarrassed by her mistake.

“Come on,” Masako told her in an annoyed tone. “Don’t do that shit. Roll it right the first time, Morishima.”

“Yes, Lieutenant!”