The pole has a sensor at the top that counts descents for the safety audit, because a pole is the one thing in a station that has hurt more firefighters than fire. It logs one descent a night at twenty to four, with the pole hatch shut, the watch in their bunks, and the bay camera showing an empty pole and the mat at the bottom taking the weight of somebody landing.
I am the watch manager, and the pole audit is a form I fill in monthly from the sensor's log.
How the pole is counted.
A sensor at the top of the pole, in the hatch housing, registers a body going through, and the mat at the bottom has a pressure pad that registers a landing. The two are logged together: a descent is a top event and a bottom event a second apart. The hatch is closed at night by a sprung lid that the sensor also monitors, because an open hatch is a fall waiting.
The watch sleep upstairs and come down the pole on the bells. Without the bells, nobody comes down at night.
Every night at twenty to four the log shows a descent.
The hatch lid stays closed, by its own sensor. The top sensor registers a body through the hatch. A second later the mat registers a landing, at about a hundred kilos.
The watch are in their bunks. I have been on the landing outside the bunk room at twenty to four with a torch, and nobody is up, and the hatch lid is closed under my hand, and the log shows a body through it and a landing on the mat below.
The mat is on the bay camera. It shows an empty mat, with nothing on it, taking a landing: the mat's surface compressing in the shape of two feet, and holding, and springing back, the way it does when somebody lands and steps off.
What has been checked.
The sensors. Replaced. The mat, replaced with a different make. The hatch lid, whose sensor shows closed at the moment the top sensor shows a body through it, which the sensors' manufacturer has told me is impossible, in a letter I have kept.
The log's time. Twenty to four, every night, to the minute, which is the time on the plaque by the door for the turnout on the night in 1993, when the bells rang eleven rounds and the watch came down this pole, all of them, and one of them did not come back up.
What the descent sounds like.
A pole in a quiet station at night makes a sound when it is used: the slide, which is a rising note on the brass, and the landing, which is a thump on the mat.
I have heard it. From the watch room, at twenty to four, with the door open onto the bay: the slide, and the thump, and then the sound of boots on the bay floor, four or five steps, towards the appliance, and stopping.
What is done about it.
The audit shows one descent a night more than the turnouts account for, and the safety people have asked, and I have told them the sensor is over sensitive, and they have accepted that, and the pole has been surveyed and found safe.
The mat has been replaced twice for wear. It wears in the shape of two feet, in one place, off centre, on the side of the pole facing the appliance, where nobody on the watch lands, because they all land facing the door.
What I do.
I fill in the form.
The one thing I have changed is that I have moved the mat.
It used to sit centred under the pole. It sits a foot towards the appliance now, so that the worn place is under the pole, and since I moved it the landings on the camera are on the mat's centre, and the wear has stopped growing.
The reason I moved it is a night in the winter when the landing on the camera missed the mat and came down on the bay floor beside it, where the mat had crept during the day, and the log recorded the landing on the mat's pad anyway, and the floor beside the mat, in the morning, had two marks on it, boot shaped, in the dust the appliances leave, and the boot was a size I did not recognise, and a pattern the brigade stopped issuing in 1995.