This meant the fire would burn away from them, not toward them. But they were alone, the first on the scene. The call had sounded fairly routine. Nobody said anything about the equivalent of a million wooden match sticks, the sprawling skeleton of an apartment complex rising near where a downed power line was sparking. They couldn't take aim straight at the power line, because they might have died on the spot.
Water is an almost perfect conductor of electricity.
The fire began to climb up the framework of the apartments. The men moved as if in a dance. He got back into the truck and backed it away from the blaze. It unloaded 1,000 gallons of water a minute. But they might as well have been trying to fill the ocean.