Saturday downtown: Fire in the Belly

Forget the heat. Move as fast as you can. Lives are at stake.

You don approximately 50 pounds of firefighting gear, from boots, helmet and face mask to oxygen tank and ax. You connect a hose to a nearby hydrant, rush to the other end of the hose and start connecting extensions. You might have to force your way through a metal door. Then, your final task is to drag a 185-pound dummy — an incapacitated victim of fire — all the way out of harm’s way.

Those were the basics of the firefighter challenge at Fire in the Park, a showcase and friendly competition among local firefighters that’s aimed at educating the public, as well as raising money for Share, the charity that houses and feeds the homeless and hungry. The event was held Saturday in Esther Short Park; it’s sponsored every year by Vancouver Firefighters local union 452.

Also benefiting Share, and probably garnering far more attention due to its complete capture of Main Street from Fourth Plain on down, was Cruisin’ the Gut. That’s an annual classic-car-lovers festival that has grown from a modest outing to a total downtown road hog.

Back to basics was the unsung theme of the sixth annual Fire in the Park, according to organizer Matt Thierfelder, a Vancouver firefighter. This year’s focus was entirely upon the life-and-death business of firefighting — the skills and strength that firefighters need to have, as well as a few things the public ought to know.

That’s why Vancouver fire Capt. Cody Robinett had gathered a gaggle of young children around him for a review of basics such as: What phone number do you call when there’s an emergency? (The kids had that one cold, and they corrected Robinett when he said, “Right! 1, 2, 3!”) Where is the very center of your chest? (That was easy.)

Then Robinett had the kids line up to practice chest compressions on a couple of CPR mannequins. “How long do you keep doing this?” he quizzed them. “Til you graduate from high school — or until we show up. We’ll thank you for your help and take over from there.”

If you have been CPR-certified, Robinett said, there’s a smartphone application sponsored by the Vancouver Fire Department that can pull you and your skill into service. It’s called PulsePoint, and it can notify you when anybody within 500 feet of you has phoned 911 with a cardiac emergency. Plus, the app also directs you to the exact location of the closest public-access automated external defibrillator. It’s already saved one life in Clark County, Robinett said.

For someone experiencing cardiac arrest, Robinett said, your chance of survival drops by 10 percent for every minute that goes by without CPR.

Tough test, no chili

The firefighter challenge “simulates what entry-level firefighters need to be able to do to pass their agility test,” said organizer Thierfelder. “It’s a simulation of a worst-case scenario.”

He was chatting in the cool of a first-aid station while a firefighter who’d just done the test was lying in the dark with a cold bottle of water against his forehead.

“I don’t know if the population has a grasp on just how taxing it is, how much strength it takes and how expensive it can be too,” Thierfelder said. People who call the fire department may get a quick crash course in all that, he said, but most people have no idea.

That’s why the Fire In The Park event exists, he said. “We hear people’s stories and we hear their questions. ‘Why do you have to cut a hole in the roof? Why do you have to use that ax?’ This is education.” The event also offered displays of hazardous materials and heavy rescue apparatus and a demonstration of a technical rescue.

Meanwhile, Thierfelder added, organizing frills like musical performers, chili-cooking restaurant contestants, food vendors and a beer garden on top of the mandatory event insurance and permitting, has taught him the lessons that volunteers frequently learn: “No good deed goes unpunished,” he said. “It was a nightmare to organize.”

In previous years, a chili-cooking contest pitted local restaurants against firefighters with their own recipes. This year, all the heat came from the sun — and from the efforts of those hard-working, hard-sweating firefighters.

Thierfelder said the event usually draws approximately 3,000 people.

Classic cruise

Over on Main Street, auto admirers occupied curbs and folding chairs on the sidewalks, stuffed restaurants and cafes, and strolled up and down Main in the sunshine as a parade of roaring, rumbling vehicles crawled the street. “Look at that!” was the most common overheard outburst.

There was no better place to get a quick primer on the history and anthropology of class-car cruising than down near Turtle Place, where Portlanders Tom Kargman, 67, and Bill Montgomery, 72, were stationed for the day.

The pals remembered the glory days of cruising Portland’s gut, back in the 1950s and 1960s, when the term referred to hitting all the local hamburger stands, or downtown’s Broadway. There was also drag racing in the ruined remains of Vanport, the waterfront community that was all but destroyed by a massive flood in 1948. In the years since, Kargman said, Vanport was a favorite spot for young drag racers because it was an isolated network of empty streets and building foundations. When and if the police finally showed up, he said with a laugh, the kids would just stand around maintaining their innocence until the coast was clear again.

Sometimes you’d get up to 100 mph in a quarter mile, Kargman added with a gleam in his eye.

Nowadays, Montgomery said, classic cars are mostly an old guys’ game. The restored classics that gleam with eye-catching shades of gold, aqua, ruby, purple and lime — to name a few — cost the kind of money that only retirees can afford, he said. Attached to one red-hot roadster from yesteryear was a license plate that could just as easily have been a price tag for all the work it took to make it look so good: A 4CHUN.

But in addition to those costly classics and hot rods, Montgomery pointed out some new trends cruising up and down Main Street: “Rat rods,” he said, are classic cars intentionally made to look stripped-down, chopped-up or missing exterior panels, often with engines and passenger compartments exposed; that’s a protest against the huge sums and fancy looks of expensively restored classics, he said. And, a “barn find” is a vehicle that literally was discovered — or made to look like it was discovered — in a barn or other forgotten place after years of deterioration. That means paint that’s rusty, chipped or just plain gone.

It wasn’t just classic cars of the macho, muscular variety that came out to play on Saturday; also there was Heather Elliott and her 1973 Volkswagen “The Thing.”

“Are you laughing at my car?” Elliott demanded, good-naturedly, more than once as people’s jaws dropped.

“It appeals to children. I had it restored and it’s in tip-top shape. It’s just fun,” she said.