Fighting oil and gas fires

Last night I got a chance to go down to Salt Lake City and photograph the Tesoro refinery fire fighters do their monthly training. Most of the training is done in the day time, but every once in a while they practice at night.



The practice facility has different stations. Each is designed to look and behave like different parts of the refinery. They process both gas and oil which have different burn characteristics. I like the oil. It burns brighter and prettier in the night.







Think you want to be a firefighter? Want to work in an oil refinery? Then which job is the worst?

You could be the guy at the front of the hose line. Seems a bit close to the heat.



He aims the hose at that valve control.



Or you could be the guy who walks up into the hose spray and the fire and tries to turn the control to close the valve and shut off the flow of fuel. I'm guessing that job goes to the new guy.



These guys are very impressive and it was awesome getting to watch them from so close.

For photography, it would be great to have one of the new high-end dSLRs. They can take pictures at ISOs above 50,000 without a lot of color noise. That would be extremely helpful with these pictures so you could avoid such long shutter times. Perhaps some day...

And to close:

"I used to work in a fire hydrant factory. You couldn't park anywhere near the place." - Steven Wright