A sheepish Standby Call

I should have known this was going to be different. It was very unusual for my fire pager to go off and request a crew without being specific what the need was. This was one of those unusual calls.

It began about 2:00 in the morning. I don’t recall what year, but it was a wintery night. My pager went off like this, “Attention Bishop Volunteers, Attention Bishop Volunteers, We need a standby crew to report to Station 1 for assignment”. My assumption was that we were receiving snow and needed to chain up trucks “just in case”.

I got dressed into my turnouts and drove to the firehouse with a bit less urgency than normal. My thoughts raced as questions entered my mind. If we needed to chain trucks, wouldn’t we do so at all 3 stations? And, how come I don’t see any snow at all?

I arrived at station 1 within minutes of the call. I stood and waited with the others until Chief Phil Moxley explained our assignment. North of town there was a wide sweeping turn near the “town” of Laws. It was a turn that could be taken at 50 mph, but not on an icy night. This particular night a tractor and trailer rig hauling a load of sheep was heading south and had not successfully negotiated this turn. It was on its side with the sheep trapped in the trailer. We needed to get the sheep out before a Class 1 wrecker could even attempt to right it.

We arrived on scene to find the scene exactly as described. There were about 200 sheep in this trailer that lay on its side. We had access to the side door but because the way the trailer was, that door was about 8 feet in the air. There was no way we could lift that many sheep to safety.

We made the decision to cut a section out of the back of the trailer, using a metal cutting saw blade and the Jaws of Life. It was harder work than imagined and we only opened a hole large enough to send small men in and sheep out. There was no way these sheep would exit on their own. Many sheep had not survived the accident and others were trapped beneath them. Those that were free were so scared from the accident and then from the equipment we used that they weren’t going anywhere near the hole we had just created.

We sent 3 men in; John Williamson, Dick Weller and Donny Kunze. All 3 were about 5’6” or so and weighed about 150 lbs. The sheep were scared beyond imagination. Most had urinated on themselves or each other. Add that smell to the natural sweet smell of 200 sheep, coupled with a cold crisp windless night and you had a situation that was nearly unbearable. It was great to be 6’1” at that time because the work inside the trailer was horrific.

My job along with the other 15 or so guys was to herd the sheep as they exited. Once the 3 men inside got a “victim” outside, the sheep would run the first direction it saw, which in most cases was back towards the highway. We had to grab and stop them, settle them down and give them a shove back towards the rest of the herd that was slowly growing about 75 yards from US Hwy 6.

After about 4 or 5 hours, we eventually extricated all of the living sheep but there were more than 80 that did not survive. Even though they were “just sheep” it remains a tragedy that could have been avoided by a more cautious driver.

Oh…my turnouts were not allowed in the house for weeks. They continued to smell like sheep urine and the only way to resolve this was to continuously scrub them and let them sit in the sun day after day after day, until the smell was gone.