Pike poles are long poles usually 4-12 feet in length used by firefighter

Firefighter

Firefighters are rescuers extensively trained primarily to put out hazardous fires that threaten civilian populations and property, to rescue people from car incidents, collapsed and burning buildings and other such situations...

s to search for fires hidden behind the sheetrock in the walls and ceiling. These days they are made out of fiberglass

Fiberglass

Glass fiber is a material consisting of numerous extremely fine fibers of glass.Glassmakers throughout history have experimented with glass fibers, but mass manufacture of glass fiber was only made possible with the invention of finer machine tooling...

 with metal hooks on the end, and are used to pull items from an area of intense heat and flame, and ventilating

Ventilation (firefighting)

In firefighting, ventilation is an important part of structural firefighting tactics, and involves the expulsion of heat and smoke from fire building, permitting the firefighters more easily and safely find trapped individuals and attack the fire...

 structures by breaking windows. In some jurisdictions, it is referred to as a ceiling hook, and is the 'hook' referred to in 'hook and ladder'. These pike poles are also used by linemen.

The pole's original use in the fire service was to pull down walls and neighboring buildings to stop the spread of fire to exposures. The tool can also be used in salvage events in such things as constructing water chutes to displace water.

Pike poles have other uses including reaching, holding or pulling. They have been used helping to lift the sides of a timber framed structure like a barn raising. It is also used in lumbering (i.e., log rafting) to control logs while floating them on a river and/or constructing log rafts. Pike poles used in log rafting were originally made of wood, typically spruce or fir. More modern pike poles (beginning in the mid-1960s) were made of aluminum tubing with a wooden knob to plug the open end, thus keeping them buoyant. Pike poles are also used for rescue work to grab people or objects floating by in a flood for instance.

Pike pole fishing

In the past, the Ural Cossacks used pike poles (known in Russian as bagor) as a tool for fishing for the sturgeon

Sturgeon

Sturgeon is the common name used for some 26 species of fish in the family Acipenseridae, including the genera Acipenser, Huso, Scaphirhynchus and Pseudoscaphirhynchus. The term includes over 20 species commonly referred to as sturgeon and several closely related species that have distinct common...

 in the Ural River

Ural River

The Ural or Jayıq/Zhayyq , known as Yaik before 1775, is a river flowing through Russia and Kazakhstan. It arises in the southern Ural Mountains and ends at the Caspian Sea. Its total length is 1,511 mi making it the third longest river in Europe after the Volga and the Danube...

. The pike-pole ice fishing, known as bagrenye, would be allowed on only one day in a year, some time after the Orthodox Christmas. On that day, the Cossacks would break the river ice at the known sturgeon hibernating locations, and pull out the disturbed fish with their pike poles. A successful Cossack would sometimes catch as many as 50 sturgeon on this day, and occasionally a Beluga (sturgeon) as well.

See also

• Cant hook
  Cant Hook
  A cant hook is a traditional logging tool consisting of a wooden lever handle with a movable metal hook at one end, used for handling and moving logs...