When a firefighter goes into a fire, their tally, a tag with their name and their set's cylinder pressure, goes on the entry control board with the time, and the board officer works out when they must be out. On every job the board carries one tally that nobody put there, with a name, a set number, a pressure, and a time in, and the time out it calculates has already passed.
I am an entry control officer, which means on a job I hold the board and I count people in and out.
How the board works.
Each firefighter's tally is a plastic tag with their name and the pressure in their cylinder when they went in. It slots into the board, the time goes beside it, and the board calculates the time they must be out by, and I watch the clock. When they come out, the tally comes off and goes back in their hand.
A tally on the board is a person inside. There is no other meaning.
On every job with breathing apparatus, when I set up the board, there is a tally on it already.
A name, a set number, a pressure, a time in. The set number is one we have, and the set is on the appliance, and nobody is wearing it. The name is not on the watch. The time in is earlier than the time I set up the board.
The board calculates a time out. It has always already passed.
The board is a board. It is plastic with slots and a clock. I take it off the appliance, open it, and the tally is in it.
I have taken it off the appliance at the station, in the bay, in daylight, with nobody on a job. It is empty. I have carried it to a job in my own hands, unopened, and opened it at the entry point, and the tally is in the first slot.
What has been checked.
The board, replaced. The tallies, replaced. The tally in the slot is one of ours, with the name engraved in the way ours are engraved, and I have the box of blank tallies and the engraver is at brigade headquarters, and they have no record of cutting that name.
The name. It is in the brigade's roll. He was on this watch, on this station, and he went in at a job in 1993 with a set of the same number as the one on the tally, at a pressure that is the one on the tally, at a time that is the one on the tally, and the board officer that night worked out his time out, and he did not come out at it, and the board still shows the time.
What it does to a job.
A tally on the board with a time out passed is an emergency. The procedure is that the board officer declares it, and a rescue team goes in for the person.
The first time I saw it I declared it. A team went in for a firefighter who was not in the building, and came out, and the incident commander, who had been on that watch in 1993, took the tally off the board and put it in his pocket and said nothing, and after the job he gave it back to me and said to keep it on the board.
What is done about it.
It is on the board. Every job. I set the board up with it in the first slot, and I do not declare it, and the crews know, and new crew are told on their first night by the oldest hand, in the way things are told on a watch, which is once and not again.
The brigade knows, in the way the brigade knows things it cannot write down.
What I do.
I hold the board.
The one thing I have changed is that when the last real tally comes off the board at the end of a job, I say his name, and the time, out loud, to the board, and take his tally off and put it in my pocket, and it is in the first slot again at the next job.
The reason I started is a job in the winter, a big one, with six sets in, and one of my crew was overdue by two minutes and I was about to declare, and the tally in the first slot, his, moved. It came half out of the slot, on its own, the way a tally is pulled when the person is coming out, and the door of the building opened and my overdue man came out of it, walking, with his hand on his set, and he said, on the way past me to the tender, that somebody had shown him the way to the door.