The fire extinguisher – 2
As I said before, the fire extinguishers saw little use, but on the one occasion they were needed, they sure turned into an instrument of calamity.
In the old days, before computers became widespread even at airports as small as ours, the message switching center was of the torn-tape type.
This noisy clearing house of thousands of aeronautical messages was in fact one, long room, with a few dozen clattering telex machines and the same number of harried operators, feeding perforated tape into their machines and tearing off messages arriving for local addressees. It was mostly women working here and their ages ranged from the ripe young to the definitely stale. As there was no air conditioning and the windows had to be kept closed even in summer to keep the aircraft noise out, the amount of skin exposed by the younger operators grew in step with the outside air temperature. Little wonder that some controllers spent an undue amount of their rest time checking messages…
The mountains of paper generated by the center were kept in the basement in nice rolls to be sold eventually for recycling but there were also old fashioned wicker baskets in the center itself for collecting the odd pieces of perforated tape and the confetti from the perforators. Towards the end of a shift, these tended to fill to overflowing.
When, one afternoon, smoke started streaming from one of the baskets, the girls at first stood paralyzed. Then, remembering her training, one of them grabbed the now flaming container and ran out into the corridor, depositing it in a corner. This and some water would have put an end to the fireworks had not a radio operator, who happened to walk by, also remembered his training. He grabbed one of the fire extinguishers from the wall and with impeccable aim blew into the basket. This had the totally unexpected effect of spreading flaming paper all over the corridor. By this time someone had the sense of alerting the airport fire brigade, who arrived in force, breaking through one of the windows, and in short order putting out the flames.
This episode had the further, far more unpleasant, consequence of all of us having to go through the fire prevention training once again…