Adventure Truck Episode #1: How do you like your Burger King cooked?

We own a truck. A big one. Really big – a spiffy new 2008 Ford F350 Super Duty four wheel drive crew cab long bed pickup with a twin-turbo Diesel [insert Tim Allen grunts here]. As it happens, I was also an emergency medical technician amd a former member of a very busy all-volunteer rescue squad, and I have to tell you, once this stuff gets into your blood, it never leaves. So for years I’ve carried a first aid kit. And road flares. And a strobe light bar like you’d find on a tow truck. And I’ve used them all many times.

A couple of nights ago we were out eating a late dinner near Potomac Mills mall, and as we headed home we encountered a large cloud of smoke. We kept driving, and as we went past the Burger King we could see it was coming from the cooking vent. It looked more intense than cooking smoke, and there was a lot of it, so we looked for a place to turn around to head back. About a tenth of a mile up the mall circle we found one, and as we turned around, the smoke had become a lot more intense, so I flipped on the light bar and gunned the engine.

As we rolled into the BK parking lot, mall security was already there and people were coming out of the building. I told my other half to call it in to 911 as I jumped out, and I headed for the door. The interior of the restaurant had no smoke, but it was really intense coming out of the vent. It was clear they had a fire in the exhaust hood vent flue.

I started herding people away from the building and telling them to move all the cars out of the parking lot to make room for the fire equipment. I had to stop the manager from going back inside to get her car keys, and then I went back to the truck to see about progress with 911.

She rolled down the window and told me that the dispatcher didn’t believe her! “I told them we were at the Burger King outside Potomac Mills and that there was a fire,” she said, “but the dispatcher replied that they hadn’t got any other calls! They said it was probably cooking smoke. I said that I knew from cooking smoke, and this was HEAVY smoke, and that mall security was here and they were evacuating the building!”

At this point, I looked back at the structure, and flames were just starting to come out of the vent. I told her, “Call ‘em back and tell them we have visible flames!”

I headed toward the mall security guard and told her we needed to check if we could shut off the power to the building. Together we headed around back and found the main power feed, but there was no visible shut off, so I headed back to the truck to again check progress of the fire units. As I walked towards the truck she yelled that 911 said it was dispatched, and at about the same time I could hear a distant siren, so my next thought was to keep the path to the building clear through the crowd and cars.

I grabbed the canister of road flares from behind my drivers seat and headed towards the driveway entrance shooing people out of the parking lot as I went. I set up a couple of flares across the entrance to keep any new customers out, and waited. And waited. I could hear some sirens, but they were a ways off.

After what seemed like an eternity, the first pumper turned the corner at Gideon and Opitz and swung into the adjacent Silver Diner parking lot. I picked up the flares and stepped out of the way, waving them through. They screamed past and came to a halt at the front entrance. I repeated the process a few more times for a tower, another pumper, and a couple of battalion chiefs. More units arrived and set up on the mall access road, and a second tower was sending firefighters up to the roof. It was quite a scene.

Once it looked like things were under control I told the cop standing nearby (who did nothing but stand there the whole time) that it looked like things were, well, under control. And I left.

As we drove away, I patted the dashboard and said softly, “Good truck.” At that moment, the truck, which I’d always referred to as simply, “truck,” got a new name: Adventure Truck.

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Here is the link to the news article.