It was either '99 or 2000 where there were something like 17 days above 100. High was 107. I do remember that.

It was either '99 or 2000 where there were something like 17 days above 100. High was 107. I do remember that.

August 2005, western Iraq, 130 degrees.

In a house fire with a metal roof. I’ve probably been in around 200 structure fires but this was by far the hottest, i will always remember it. Looked like a normal house fire, flames showing from one front window. I kicked the door in and walked in and instantly found myself on my knees, i ran directly into the back of a couch and finally found my way around the couch and started trying to go toward the fire but my ears were about to melt and the guy with me said this ain’t right, let’s get out of here. Keep in mind, in a bad house fire you can’t see anything more than about 2 inches in front of your face and whatever that is has to have a light on it, so we are basically blind in an oven on high broil.We went back to the front door and i was on my knees in the doorway and i heard my captain yell at someone “put on a fu**in air pack and go up there with him and put that fu**in fire out.” The unnamed guy comes and he has a thermal imager with him and we go back in and get closer to the fire than i was before still trying to find the door to the fire room and we get in a hallway that is more like a closet and we are rolling around in pain and he shows me the imager screen and the whole thing is white and flashing max on the screen. We unassed that house after that and ended up putting it out from the window. When we got it put out, the fire had burned the studs and Sheetrock off that room from about 3 feet off the floor up to the roof and burned a hole in the floor but that metal roof trapped all that heat. I’m still not sure how it didn’t flash but we definitely shouldn’t have been in there. I’d guess it was somewhere between 500 and 700 degrees but i really don’t know. That’s been years ago and thank god I’m wiser now and know when to walk out of them.

In a house fire with a metal roof. I’ve probably been in around 200 structure fires but this was by far the hottest, i will always remember it. Looked like a normal house fire, flames showing from one front window. I kicked the door in and walked in and instantly found myself on my knees, i ran directly into the back of a couch and finally found my way around the couch and started trying to go toward the fire but my ears were about to melt and the guy with me said this ain’t right, let’s get out of here. Keep in mind, in a bad house fire you can’t see anything more than about 2 inches in front of your face and whatever that is has to have a light on it, so we are basically blind in an oven on high broil.We went back to the front door and i was on my knees in the doorway and i heard my captain yell at someone “put on a fu**in air pack and go up there with him and put that fu**in fire out.” The unnamed guy comes and he has a thermal imager with him and we go back in and get closer to the fire than i was before still trying to find the door to the fire room and we get in a hallway that is more like a closet and we are rolling around in pain and he shows me the imager screen and the whole thing is white and flashing max on the screen. We unassed that house after that and ended up putting it out from the window. When we got it put out, the fire had burned the studs and Sheetrock off that room from about 3 feet off the floor up to the roof and burned a hole in the floor but that metal roof trapped all that heat. I’m still not sure how it didn’t flash but we definitely shouldn’t have been in there. I’d guess it was somewhere between 500 and 700 degrees but i really don’t know. That’s been years ago and thank god I’m wiser now and know when to walk out of them.

It was either '99 or 2000 where there were something like 17 days above 100. High was 107. I do remember that.

you win

It doesn't matter how hot it is, or how hot anybody got. If my dad heard any of you tell your story, his comment would be, "you should have been 30 foot up a phone pole." I built houses for 2 years when I graduated from HS. The guy I worked for, did it all. One summer we hot mopped a roof. Being the newest and youngest guy I had to crawl under a too wide overhang over the garage roof and smear the hot tar where the poles wouldn't reach. I got that hot crap all over me. It blistered my skin on my arms and legs. When I got home, my blue shirt had dried and it had white streaks on it. My mother said that was the salt in my sweat. I don't know. So anyway, my dad who was a lineman for the phone company at the time comes walking in while I'm trying to clean tar off every square inch of my body. He asks me what I had been doing all day and I told him. My last comment was it was awfully hot on that roof with hot tar all day. His response, "you should have been 30 foot up a phone pole."

We could have changed the hinges on the gates of hell and he would have claimed it was hotter 30' in the air. LOL

I guess I can say any summer between 87 and 92 while working at CB&I in cordova. welding submarine hulls. inside tanks in said hulls. preheat temp had to be 200 degrees before you could strike a arc on it. we actually had air condition hoses blowing on us. once after a shift change weekend which no one worked account of a holiday. I got lined up on a hole to weld and stuck my head into the hole, to see what I needed. all my hair that wasn't covered by hard hat and skull cap, singed....

scott

I set a transformer today to power an AC unit for that very purpose. I’ll do heights, I’m not doing confined spaces.

Y’all remember the summer of 07? In August that year we had at least 10 consecutive days of 100+ degree temperatures. I was a sawyer feeding wood into a saw 12 hours a day. No air moving through that metal building at all. I was acclimated to working in the hot weather then but that was brutal.