Into the Inferno

by Earl Emerson

  Manned by the first arriving volunteer at the station, the tanker would respond to refill our pumper when we ran out of water. Empty, it would then be driven to the nearest hydrant to be refilled. Our engine carried a thousand gallons, enough to put out most structure fires in their incipient stages. The tanker carried an additional five thousand.

  Just below Mount Washington, I spotted a pall of heavy black smoke rising from behind a low hill. The color and the speed with which the smoke was rising were indicators that we had a structure fire.

  On the radio I confirmed that we had a column of black smoke. This would let our volunteers on Wilderness Rim know to bring the engine we kept parked up there at our satellite station. It would also let Snoqualmie, our mutual aid department from the next small town over, know we really had something. It would let the first volunteer to arrive at the station know that he should bring the tanker.

  We exited the freeway and rolled up a narrow road shaded by trees on both sides. Here and there a driveway or an open yard fronted the road. Two horses in a field lashed out with their rear legs and galloped off at the sound of our siren.

  Half a mile from the freeway, we found smoke coming from the rear of a large lot mostly hidden by trees and brush. “It’s Caputo’s place,” Ian Hjorth said, swinging our engine into Caputo’s driveway.

  “I spotted a hydrant about two hundred yards back.”

  “I’ll tell the tanker guy when he gets here.”

  Because I was the first officer on scene, I would automatically become the incident commander, which meant I would remain outside the fire building and coordinate fire-fighting efforts, remain in contact with incoming units on the radio, and dole out assignments to individual firefighters as they showed up in their private vehicles. It would be my responsibility to make sure everybody on the fire ground worked as a team, that rescues were made promptly, that nobody was injured.

  The first rule of fire fighting was: Don’t get hurt.

  If all the civilians weren’t out of the building, or if we didn’t know for certain whether they were out, our priority would be rescue. Most of the time, though, rescue and extinguishment went hand in hand. You put the fire out—the victim was no longer in danger.

  I can’t tell you how much I loved this job.

  Right away I needed to determine whether there were exposures we had to protect with hose lines, whether there were nearby structures that might be damaged by fire. As in all building fires, we needed to ventilate the occupancy at the same time we put water on the fire; otherwise the smoke and steam had nowhere to go. The oldest way to ventilate was to go to the roof and cut a hole over the fire, ideally about four feet by eight feet.

  We would also need firefighters standing by in full gear with an extra hand line just in case our primary team got in trouble.

  Ian would place the apparatus near the building but not so near as to get scorched if the fire got out of hand, nor so far away that the hose lines wouldn’t reach inside. He would get the pump running, open the lines for the firefighters who would crawl inside under the heat, and help hook up a supply line from the tanker.

  House trailers, even double-wides, tended to have fewer exits and smaller windows than wood-frame homes. They also burned hotter inside. In the past ten years, North Bend Fire and Rescue had lost two elderly home owners in trailer fires. You had to worry about losing a firefighter in one, too.

  Karrie Haston and Ben Arden would take in the first hand line. Ideally, I would go in with Karrie, because she was still on probation and so far had been to only one good fire. Crawling inside alongside her would allow me to make sure she didn’t get into trouble and would also give me a chance to see how she reacted to heat, stress, and lack of visibility. Her skills on aid calls were exemplary, and except for her constant questioning of authority around the station, something I viewed as a habit she’d picked up from years of bucking her father’s heavy-handed authoritarianism, she’d acquitted herself well in most arenas. But so far I had yet to see her fight fire. It was pretty simple: you couldn’t fight fire, you couldn’t have the job.

  “It’s Caputo’s place, all right,” Ian Hjorth said again. As we pulled into the driveway and stopped, low-hanging branches tore at the paint on our fire engine and slapped loudly against the light bars on the roof.

  A large maroon Chevrolet sedan blocked our approach.

  The driver, a doughy woman of about seventy, stood thirty feet in front of the idling car pointing at the burning trailer as if we couldn’t see it. It was impossible to hear what she was shouting over the sound of our motor and the stream of radio chatter crossing the airwaves.

  “What we got here is a nickel holding up a dollar,” I said, trying to push my door open against the bushes. Ian inched the rig forward to help.

  “Caputo’s mother,” Ian said. “She was here when he hacked his toe off with the maul last fall.”

  Something first-in fire personnel always thought about was what the next-in units would see when they got there. Arriving at a fire, each unit got an indelible look at the structure and the work being performed or not being performed, and when the next-in units found us stuck in the bushes, they would laugh their heads off.

  Stalling around outside a fire building was not a reputation I wanted to carry to my grave.

  “You guys stay on board,” I said to Karrie and Ben. Branches shrieked against the door as I worked it open.

  Beyond the Chevrolet lay a small grassy swale and beyond that the trailer, black smoke pouring from a partially open window on the right-hand side. Less concentrated plumes of smoke issued from cracks and seams in the trailer.

  Still facing the domicile, the old woman backed up unsteadily, tottering in a clump of weeds. I asked if this was her car, but she couldn’t hear me over the rumbling of our diesel engine. When I spotted the keys in the ignition, I slid the seat back, got in, placed the car in drive, and parked on the sod just past her, leaving the keys in the ignition.

  “I know he’s in there,” she said, her voice tremulous. “I came over to bring him some greens for dinner.”

  I, too, figured Caputo was in there, since his flatbed truck was parked where he always parked it on the north side of the driveway.

  Our diesel roared past, and I missed the rest of what she said. Ian, Ben, and Karrie disembarked and went to work. I yelled that there was probably a man inside. Behind us, a volunteer jogged into the driveway. “Grab the next guy and lay a backup line to the front door,” I said.

  Then Morgan and my daughters showed up on foot. I caught Morgan’s eye and pointed to the old woman in the bushes. “Don’t move from there.” The three of them went to their assigned position, as cute as porcelain dolls, all three in shorts, deck shoes, and pastel blouses. Too bad nobody had a camera.

  Ian had already switched the transmission out of drive and into pump. The fire was beginning to rip, flame licking out the front door. We were on the verge of losing the trailer, and probably the owner, too. If he wasn’t already dead.

  “Look out for those dogs,” Ian said as I walked around the fire engine. I hadn’t heard any barking, but Caputo’s Dobermans had been in the back of my mind since we arrived.

  26. BEND OVER AND KISS YOUR BIG OLD

  WHATCHAMACALLIT GOOD-BYE

  Ideally, the first-in unit at a structural fire would view three sides of a building as they roll up on it, always making sure to drive all the way past the front to see down that third side. This generally produced a fair idea of what was happening. Because the mobile home was capped at either end by thick brush, viewing three sides without a walk-around was not going to happen.

  We had a couple of minutes before the rest of the units would be asking for instructions, so I set off on a quick 360 of the building.

  The diesel engine, the whining pump, and the volunteers shouting at one another made it impossible to know whether there was anybody yelling for help from inside.

  If you knew him as I did, you’d be as surpris
ed as I was that Max Caputo hadn’t torched his place before now.

  Calamity rained down on the man—divorces, drunkenness, car accidents, multiple manglings prior to the table saw incident yesterday, traumatic loss of teeth in bar fights, skin rashes so severe they required hospitalization. Caputo was the only man I’d ever heard of who’d been attacked by both a bear and a cougar.

  What he’d probably done, I realized in a flash, was wash down the painkillers the doctors had prescribed for his severed fingers with beer, a potent combination of booze and drugs that would disorient you or me or anybody. No doubt he set fire to his own place by accident.

  Black smoke was jetting out the narrow vertical bathroom window and along the roofline. The windows were coated inside with a tarlike substance, a sign the fire had been burning for some time.

  It was close to a backdraft situation, and I told Ben as much when I passed him. “I’ll warn the others,” he said. Under the right conditions a backdraft could throw a door into the street, blow a firefighter across the yard, kill him and all his unborn children.

  I wore multilayered bunking pants, tall rubber boots, a bunking coat and helmet. I put on my heavy firefighting gloves, gloves you could pick up a hot ingot with, then gave my radio report.

  “Dispatch from Engine One. We have smoke from a single-story double-wide trailer approximately twenty by forty. Brush on three sides. We’re getting water on it now.”

  In my experience dogs tended to act predictably in a fire: There were those that pooped and those that ran away. Sometimes both at the same time. A third type of dog would bark and snap at anything that moved. I had the feeling Caputo’s Dobermans weren’t running and had, by now, about pooped themselves silly. That left only the third response.

  Yesterday, they had been chained at the south side of the house, but now when I stepped through the brambles, there were no dogs to be seen. The paths back here were low tunnel-like affairs beaten down by the Dobermans. At the rear of the trailer I reached a clearing and found an abandoned dog chain lying next to a tree stump, food bowls nearby.

  In an open space between the rear of the double-wide and the encroaching woods, two large oil drums were on their sides, each with a capacity of maybe thirty gallons, along with half a dozen large brown paper sacks. The area smelled of dog shit. I kicked one of the drums and got a hollow sound for my trouble; the oil on the spout looked fresh. We hadn’t seen any of this yesterday, but then, we hadn’t been back here.

  The property sloped away from the trailer so that the back door was accessed via seven or eight wooden steps. The door was locked, the window blacked over on the inside from the smoke. There were no water streams inside, not yet.

  Even though only a minute or two had passed since our arrival, it seemed to me as if we’d been jick-jacking around for a week.

  I was rounding the corner at the far end of the trailer, headed back around toward the front, when something in the brush caught my eye.

  Against my better judgment, I waded up to my hips in blackberries and dug deep into the prickly vines until I had my hands on a dog collar.

  It was still attached to the animal.

  He was breathing rapidly, more or less positioned as if he’d been thrown there. Dark lips curled off his canines as the Doberman growled at me. I saw no blood and figured he was either drugged or dying.

  If somebody had come here to attack Caputo and his animals, Max wouldn’t have been able to put up much of a fight with his mangled hand. Even if they’d reattached his fingers yesterday at the hospital, which I did not believe had happened, he wasn’t going to be able to form a fist or hold a weapon.

  After I waded out of the blackberries, my eyes fell once again on the oil drums.

  There was something wrong here.

  My thoughts turned to six dead firefighters in Kansas City back in the eighties, to another incident in Texas City, Texas, that happened long before I was born, where twenty-seven firefighters and almost six hundred civilians were killed when a ship blew up at dockside.

  Dashing along the back of the mobile home, I picked up one of the empty brown paper sacks and sniffed it.

  Fertilizer. Ammonium nitrate!

  The combination of ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel was the same explosive compound that had been used to blow up the World Trade Center in New York the first time, as well as the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

  There was a good chance the trailer was going to blow up.

  My daughters!

  Before I could think the situation through, I found myself on the ground. On my butt. I’d landed hard. With no warning.

  With even less warning, I was on my back, staring up at ribbons of black smoke in a blue sky. I hadn’t fainted. Nor had I tripped. There had been no explosion. Not yet.

  Struggling to a sitting position, I peered around to see what had taken my legs out from under me. There was nothing around me, no man or woman, no dog, no offending object.

  I rolled to one knee and regained my feet, only to fall again.

  Day 3: Worse headache, dizziness, falling down.

  It was the second time today I’d fallen.

  Taking a glove off and placing the radio mike to my lips, I said, “Dispatcher from Edgewick Command, we’re going to evacuate. We have indications of large quantities of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil on the premises. All incoming North Bend units stand by one-half mile away. We have ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. Lots of it.”

  Reaching my feet unsteadily, I grabbed the sidewall of the trailer for support and then let go. The metal wall was as hot as a pancake griddle. I moved slowly at first, more confidently after a few steps.

  When I reached the front of the trailer, I realized nobody on scene had heard my radio transmission.

  Ben and Karrie were still in the smoky front doorway. I reached into the smoke and slapped Ben on the rump. “The place is filled with ammonium nitrate. Abandon the building. Now!” Twisting her head around, Karrie looked at me through the mask of her SurviveAir face piece. “I mean it! Out!”

  Reaching up into the cab, I turned the siren on and switched it to the abandon building warning, a tone we’d never used except in practice.

  I dashed to where my daughters and Morgan had been. The old woman was there, but my girls and Morgan were missing. Choking on my own dry throat, I called out my daughter’s names. “Britney? Allyson?”

  “Daddy?”

  The three of them were watching me curiously from the other side of the maroon Chevrolet. Judging from the looks on their faces, I’d been bleating their names like a maniac.

  I stepped between them, picking up Allyson under one arm, Britney under the other, adjusting their skinny little bodies as I ran. “Follow us, Morgan. You, too, lady. Everybody out of the yard. It’s going to blow up.”

  Behind me, I heard the old woman complaining that her purse was in her car, that her Robitussin was in her purse. I didn’t have time to quibble and was happy to see that despite the complaining she followed us.

  On the other side of the street, I set my daughters down and looked back as Ben, Karrie, and Ian ran across the road behind us. “You girls hide behind that motor home. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  Something in my voice told them not to ask questions.

  I jogged back to Caputo’s driveway just as a black pickup truck pulled into the drive and plugged the opening.

  I stepped around to the darkened driver’s window and found myself confronting Steve Haston. He wore full bunking gear and a white chief’s helmet. He’d never been a chief. For the last five years he hadn’t even been a volunteer. Then, I noticed he had Newcastle’s gear on, Newcastle’s gear that had been hanging on a hook in the firehouse for the past month, the gear nobody had the heart to dispose of. The coat was too short in the arms by about five inches.

  He said, “The fire’s behind you, Jim. You got everybody going the wrong direction.”

  “Get your truck out of here. Even if this place wasn’t a
powder keg, nobody parks their personal vehicle in the driveway at a fire scene. You know better than that.”

  “Powder keg? What are you talking about?”

  “The trailer is full of ammonium nitrate.”

  He laughed. “Ammonium nitrate? Isn’t that fertilizer? By the way, you’d better tell Snoqualmie to get down here. They’re back a ways pulled off the road.”

  “The trailer is on fire, and it’s going to blow. Now get the hell out of here.”

  “No can do, buddy boy. I’m taking over as incident commander.” By now everybody else was off the premises. Accompanied by a thick, fast-moving plume of black smoke, flame began to emerge out the front door of the trailer. The pump on Engine 1 was still running, although somebody’d shut off the siren. “I’ve decided, in light of how you people lost control of the department with the health issues and so forth, that somebody needs to get on board and take charge. I guess that’s going to be me. Now you get those people back in here and fight some fire.”

  “Good-bye, Steve,” I said, walking away. “I’ll see you get the best funeral the city can afford.”

  “What?” he shouted out his window. “What?”

  Moments later Haston’s truck sped across the road in front of me. In reverse. He parked on the lawn in front of a ranch-style house about seventy feet beyond where my girls had taken refuge. The way he was driving, we were lucky he hadn’t run over anybody.

  We were not quite directly opposite Caputo’s place, shielded by a motor home, as well as by a small hillock on the edge of Caputo’s property. I figured we were almost two hundred yards away, but somehow it didn’t seem far enough. I had no idea how much ammonium nitrate was in the trailer or how much of an explosion it might produce, or even if it would explode. Years ago in Kansas City, when a burning construction trailer blew up and killed six firefighters, windows were knocked out over a mile distant. The noise was heard ten miles away.

  Like a mother bird spreading her wings, I opened my bunking coat and enveloped my daughters under the fire-retardant Nomex material. When I motioned to Morgan, she gathered close, too. “Is there really a bomb?” she asked in a small voice.