Tool of the day ~ flashlight

Imagine one of your most important five senses being taken away from you, your vision. Now imagine trying to navigate through a maze of furniture, stairs and around corners inside a house without knowing the layout. Do this all with being under a huge time crunch and with heavy gear on and you've got a decent idea about what we see as firefighters inside a house fire.

This flashlight gives us a small leg up on regaining some much needed visibility. Typical house fires are not like you see in the movies where you can see the guy or the victim across the hallway. Visibility is sometimes limited to as little as barely being able to see your glove wiping the ash off of your face piece. Good solid high quality flashlights are a must have in every firefighters tool box. Being able to cut through the smoke even if it's only 6 inches above the carpet allows us to better understand building layouts and locate victims easier.

As firefighters we have many tools in our toolbox, each one with a unique and highly desired function we spend whole careers fine tuning what we carry. I've personally spent over 10yrs developing a very specific set of tools that work well for me in most situations. Let me know some tools you use on the job and how you make them work for you!