Sooner or later in your firefighting career, you come across an incident that you really didn't fully anticipate. You find yourself looking at the hellish reality in front of you and think, "Now what?"

On the evening of March 30, 2017, a stockpile of what the DOT called "non-combustible" material caught fire under a large elevated span of Interstate 85 approximately a mile north of the skyscrapers of downtown Atlanta. As the fire rapidly unfolded on most Atlanta residents' televisions, those of us not on scene watched as a 100' long, five lane wide section of interstate pancaked to the ground below. One of our regular moderators, Hatch, just happened to have had a front row seat as the incident commander.

For this podcast, we sit down with Hatch and let him walk us through how he ended up on scene, what he was thinking, and how he processed what was going to have to be done.