by Sean Flynn
Mike, like everyone else, jerked toward the alley. “Everybody out!” the commanding officer yelled, stopping all of them short. “Only rescue guys. I want everyone else out.” Once part of a building goes, there's no telling what else is waiting to fall. The idea is to limit the exposure, to not risk wounding, or killing, more men than necessary. The rescue guys could get their brethren out.
No firemen died that night. But Perry and Belculfine both retired within a year. And before the collapse, seven other firefighters were hurt. Any one of them could have died, some of them probably should have died, spared only by fate and their friends.
When he went home later that morning, Mike was too wired to sleep. Maybe it was the adrenaline still running through his veins. He replayed every awful scene in his head, tried to distill each into a lesson. They all meshed into one, a single truism that isn't obvious until it is observed. Fire is capricious. It can move faster and more furiously than any human being, no matter how well trained or well armed. “If you're in its way,” Mike told himself, “it's gonna take you.”
The sun was almost down before his eyes closed and he collapsed into a deep, exhausted sleep.
10
BY THE TIME MIKE HAD STRUCK THE SECOND ALARM FOR Worcester Cold Storage, a dozen of his men already were forcing their way inside to search for the flames. Ladder 5 was in front of the building, its big stick already rising to the roof, two men climbing it. Ladder 1 was around the corner from Franklin Street on Arctic, parked parallel to the side of the building with its ladder, 110 feet of high-tensile aluminum, stretched from the turntable on the back. Capt. Mike Coakley and Bert Davis had scrambled up, moving quickly but not frantically. Two other men on Ladder 1, Yogi and John Casello, followed the loading dock to a steel door located in the middle. Most of Rescue 1 hustled up behind them. Paul Brotherton held a flashlight while Yogi forced open the door.
To simplify things in the chaos, firefighters reduced the contours of every building to the first four letters of the alphabet, starting with “A” in front and moving clockwise around the structure. That made Franklin Street the A wall and Arctic B. Robert A. ordered his men to tap a hydrant at the A-B corner, running two three-inch lines from the water main into the pumper. Then Robert A. grabbed another one of his men and headed down the B side to the door Yogi had busted open.
Eight men stepped into a dark and narrow vestibule at the bottom of a stairwell. They could make out a faint smell of smoke through the stink of rotting garbage and human waste, but the air was clear. Six of them turned toward the stairs. Robert A. was leading. He stopped on the second-floor landing, pushed open the door, and stuck his head in, a quick spot-check. No fire. He hustled up to the third floor, did the same thing, then started climbing again. Lt. Dave Halvorsen and Charlie Rogacz, the engine man working overtime on Rescue 1, stopped to do a more thorough search on three.
“Dave, we're going to the roof with the cap'n,” Paul Broth-erton said, meaning himself and Jerry Lucey.
“Got it,” the lieutenant said as he disappeared through the door with Charlie.
Robert A. peeked for fire on three more landings. The stairs came to a dead end at a rooftop bulkhead. He forced it open, then climbed up into the open air. Standing on top, it was easier to figure out the rough dimensions of the warehouse, see how it was put together. It was actually two buildings, one a square eighty-eight feet to a side and the other a rectangle, seventy-two feet deep by one hundred twenty feet long, the two of them fused together into the shape of a stubby capital “L” by a common firewall that poked up like a short parapet. Robert A. and the rest of the men had emerged on the square part, near the B edge. To their right was a skylight, glass reinforced with wire mesh, that capped an elevator shaft.
They crossed the roof, hopped over the firewall. Another skylight, identical to the first, fifteen feet by fifteen feet, sat off-center, closer to the C wall. An obvious vent. Robert A. turned to Brotherton and Jerry Lucey. “Clean it out,” he told them.
Jerry held a flathead ax. Paul was carrying his weapon of choice, a Haligan, the same tool he always took into battle. It was a rod of tempered steel roughly the size of a baseball bat with one end flattened into a two-pronged claw. At the other end, attached at ninety-degree angles to the shaft, were a flat wedge that could slip between a door and a jamb to pry it open and a pear-size steel point that could puncture almost anything Paul swung it at.
The glass shattered with the first jab from the Haligan. A puff of black smoke coughed through the hole. Jerry and Paul kept working, tearing away the mesh, opening a vent the size of a cramped family room. More smoke wheezed from the hole.
Six stories down, Yogi and John Casello were searching the first floor. When everyone else had gone up, they had pushed through the vestibule into the main part of the warehouse, which was huge and empty. Years before, when the Worcester Cold Storage was in business, forklifts had rolled through there, hauling pallets to the freight elevator just off the B wall, so they could be lifted to the meat lockers and refrigerators above. Now it was just a massive, moldering cave.
The ladder men explored the dark, following their flashlights to a brick wall on the far side. No sign of flames. They backtracked toward the door, and went up three short, twisting risers of black steel to the second floor. Instead of an open vault, they stepped into a small chamber approximately fifteen feet wide and twenty-five feet deep. There were steel doors, each with a heavy, circular handle that lay flush inside a pocket, on the side walls that led into large storage lockers. At the far end of the chamber was an identical door. Yogi pulled it open and walked into a third storeroom. It was a massive space, broken every few yards by sixteen-inch columns that held up the floor above. If the lights had still worked, it would have appeared reasonably uncluttered, like a sparsely but evenly wooded forest of square timbers. In the pitch black, though, it would be a maze, the columns seemingly walls, each corner bending into another phantom corridor.
Yogi heard the fire before he could see it, a ferocious popping and snapping, muffled but still close. He kept walking until he reached the firewall, then moved to his left, toward the back of the building. The sounds grew louder. His light caught the outline of a door through the bricks. He nudged at it, expecting it to crack enough to give him a look inside.
The door swung open, away from Yogi, as if a spring inside had jerked it back. A fierce wave of heat rushed out, took his breath away. The room beyond the door was nothing but fire, orange flames writhing thick as jungle grass. It was like standing in front of an incinerator, a blast furnace.
“Hey, Johnny,” he called over his shoulder. “C'mere and take a look at this fucking thing.”
Casello sucked in his breath.
“That's some serious shit, huh?” Yogi was grinning. There was a lot of fire in that small room. Enough fire for everyone. He reached for his radio.
Mike McNamee was striding toward the A-B corner of the warehouse when one of the men from Engine 13 called him on the radio. Those guys had found the fire at the same time as Yogi, but from the opposite angle, having come up to the second floor via a stairwell on the C side of the warehouse.
“Thirteen to Command. The fire is in the elevator shaft on the second and third floor.”
“Ten-four,” Mike radioed back. “Is it localized or is it getting out?”
Yogi keyed his microphone before Engine 13 could answer. “Ladder 100 to Command,” he said. “Urgent.”
“Go ahead Ladder 1”
“This is Ladder 1. I'm on the second floor and I'm in a freezer room, and I've got a room full of fire up here. I need a line on the second floor.”
“Received.”
That was good news. Only seven minutes after the alarm went off, the fire was located and essentially contained. Mike knew men were on the roof, which meant they had more than likely punched at least one hole through it. Mike took another step and his radio crackled again.
“Rescue 600 to Command.” It was Jerry Lu
cey “We're up at the roof. We have heavy smoke and embers showing.” The puffs and wispy streams had turned into a rushing contrail, roiling and oily and flecked with glowing orange highlights. But that was all right, too. At twenty minutes after six o'clock, everything was going the way it was supposed to. The men had entered, vented, and now they were beginning to attack. Routine, the same operation they'd executed a thousand times before.
With Casello downstairs helping gather the hoses, Yogi tried to pull the door closed, keep the fire contained until they could get some water on it. He had to lean back, put his considerable weight into the effort, fight against the draft that dragged the door toward the flames. The physics were all wrong: the heat should have been pushing the door out, away from the flames, not creating a whirlwind draft rushing into the fire.
Robert A. found Yogi wrestling with the door a few moments later. He'd tromped down from the roof after the skylight had been smashed out, then detoured into the second floor when he heard the radio transmissions.
“Hey, Yogi,” he said, “that don't look too good.” His tone was mock worry, his grammar deliberately garbled for effect.
“No, it don't,” Yogi said. “Come and look what I found.” He was still smiling, playful, like a kid who'd just found a steep and bumpy hill to roll down on his bike. Sure, it looked dangerous. But that was the fun of it.
He gave Robert A. a look into the room, then wrenched the door closed again. Within seconds, four other men arrived with the hoses, a pair of two-and-a-half-inch lines and one inch-and-three-quarter line. It took a moment to charge them all, to get water from the engines up two floors and across the warehouse to the nozzle.
“Better put your masks on, boys,” Yogi said once the lines were charged. He was still grinning. “This could get ugly.”
He let the door swing open and stepped toward the flames with a hose. The shutoff valve on the smaller line got snagged on something screwed to the wall just inside the doorway, taking one hose out of commission. With the two larger ones, the men moved to their right, spraying a deluge into the fire, almost five hundred gallons a minute between them. They knocked down the first bank of flames quickly enough, then advanced through a burned-out doorway to a second front.
The fire in there was more intense, a howling orange wind. The hoses were useless against gases so hot; the streams of water were vaporized into steam a few inches out of the nozzle, then whooshed away by flames that moved like the afterburners of a jet, streaked with cobalt blue and screaming horizontally into the elevator shaft, following a wide path to the vent in the roof.
The heat was eating through the ceiling, melting away the staples and the joists that held the electrical system in place. Yogi was near the firewall, trying to advance the line, when a tangle of wires fell from above, knocked him off balance. He wobbled, stumbled, fell backward, through the doorway, landing flat with a view of the ceiling. Above him, he saw something strange. Smoke was streaming into the fire, like the ribbons of a thunderhead racing into a funnel cloud. He stared at it for a second or two, perplexed. “Hey, Cap,” he hollered to Robert A. “Something don't look right. Everything's moving the wrong way.”
He got to his feet. He wondered how much air he had left in his tank. Reinforcements, a fresh crew of firemen, were on the way to relieve the guys handling the hoses. Yogi headed for the door, going down for a new bottle of air.
At 6:23, Mike McNamee was making his way into the ground floor of the warehouse for a firsthand look at the conditions. His men were radioing updates from all over the building, telling him where the fire was burning, how it was moving. George Zinkus told him there was heavy fire showing at the C-D corner, where the cold storage offices used to be, one of two areas of the building with windows cut through the exterior walls. The flames weren't spreading outward, though, just burning up into the elevator shaft. Mike Coakley, up on the roof, reported that a swirl of embers was rushing out through the open skylight.
So far, so good. The blaze was contained in the center of the building, the heat and the smoke blowing straight up through the vent. He had five hoses moving into position, three from the B stairs and two from the C side, effectively surrounding the flames. And nothing was spreading. Mike was about fifty feet from the firewall, coming from the entrance on Arctic Street, and he could hear the fire and smell the smoke. But the air wasn't noticeably warm, and it was still clear, not even enough stray vapors to sting his eyes or scratch his throat. The only thing that struck him as unusual was how bright the inside was on that floor.
He saw Mike Conley, the captain from Engine 13, and one of his men dragging a two-and-half-inch across the warehouse, toward the stairs on the C side. “Just cool the shaft,” Mike told the captain. “We don't want to lose the stairs.”
He heard his call sign on the radio. Fire Alarm trying to raise him. He pressed the talk button. “Go ahead, Fire Alarm.”
“Command, be advised that a citizen just reported to a police officer that there may be two people that live in that building.”
“Received.”
Mike wasn't concerned. He knew the rescue teams would be searching the building as a matter of course. Rescue men always assumed someone could be lost inside, and they kept looking until the heat or the smoke forced them out. Twenty minutes after the first alarm, most of Worcester Cold Storage seemed less menacing than the average house fire. Away from the actual flames, none of the men had even bothered to put their masks on.
For the next few minutes, Mike kept in contact with the engine crews trying to position the lines. Engine 16 tapped a dead hydrant, which required rerouting a water supply through another pumper. He keyed his radio again. “Engine 2, can you feed a couple of lines into their lines from the next nearest hydrant?”
“Chief, the next available hydrant is across Grafton Street, so we'd have to block Grafton.”
Mike considered the logistics, tying up a main access road. Engine 2 radioed again. “Do you want me to lay it across Grafton?”
“No,” Mike said, “I'm going to send you around the other way. You're going to have to go up the long way. Ladder 5 is blocking here. You have to go up and over Wall Street, come back down, lay down.”
A minor annoyance. A short delay in getting some more wet stuff on the red stuff. But nothing critical.
Eight minutes had gone by since Fire Alarm passed on the report of people living in the building. Mike figured it was time to ask for a status report. “Command to Rescue.”
“Rescue.” It was Dave Halvorsen.
“Rescue, did you check the rumor that we have a couple of homeless people living at the rear of this building?”
“Checked the second and third floor,” Dave replied. “Found nothing, Chief. We're moving our way up.”
Another six minutes ticked by. Outside, trucks lumbered through the streets, men screwed connections onto hydrants. Every line was charged, Engine 1 had plenty of water to spare, Engine 2 ended up feeding only its own lines.
At 6:38, Dave Halvorsen called Mike again. “Rescue to Command,” he said.
“Command, go ahead.” Mike had worked his way up to the third floor, where the conditions were the same as the first, only a vague haze of smoke.
“Chief, we're up on the fourth floor. We can hear fire crackling, but we can't see anything. We are in the rear of the building, on the C side.”
Mike misheard the transmission, felt a shudder of worry. “Did you say you have more fire on the fourth floor?”
“We can hear the fire crackling, but we can't see any fire at all. But we can hear it.”
That sounded better. Relief pushed away the dread. “Okay,” Mike said. “That's because it's running right up the shaft.”
Mike moved into the vestibule on the third floor. He pushed through another door, deeper into the warehouse. His eyes followed the beam of his light, picking out the columns. In the gloom, the room looked like a labyrinth. A million bad secrets could be hidden in there. He got on the radio again.
“Interior to Fire Alarm.”
“Fire Alarm.”
“Put out an emergency broadcast to all companies operating inside to use extreme caution,” he said. “There could be holes in the floor, and to use extreme caution as they are moving.”
“Received.”
He heard alert tones over his radio, then Fire Alarm repeating his warning. He took a few more steps, then stopped, considered his own advice. Unlike the men looking for homeless tramps or the guys spraying water, he was alone, wandering deeper into a burning building with no hose to lead him back if things turned bad, no partner to watch his back. And Halvorsen and one of his men had searched this floor a few minutes earlier. Mike knew they'd been thorough. He decided to retreat to the stairs.
He turned around. In front of him were three identical doors. His felt his stomach tighten. He opened all three doors, one at a time. Behind each, he saw another room. Shit. He retraced his steps in his mind. Through two doors, left, straight, right, stop, turn around, left, straight, right. He should have been back where he started. His gut twitched again. This is bad. He took a deep breath, steadied his nerves. Just listen. It's gotta be one of these. He stood stone still, even held his breath for a long moment, focusing on the smothered sounds of boots clomping up stairs, men hollering, axes and Haligans bouncing against railings and walls. He cocked his head toward each door in turn. The noise seemed louder through the middle one, but barely. He reached for the handle.
Mike played his light across the walls of the room behind the door. On the far side, the beam slid across another door, one that looked the same as every other one. He tried that one. It led into the vestibule, which seemed familiar. He scanned the perimeter, found the stairs behind a cement partition. If he'd blinked, he would have missed them.
He let out a heavy breath when he reached the steps, felt a chill in his spine. Firemen were trained to keep their bearings even in total darkness. In most buildings, they could follow the walls because they always led to a window or a door. If that didn't work, they would keep track of their movements, remember the number of steps and direction of each turn. Mike had done that hundreds of times before, crawled miles through blinding black. This time, upright and guided by a flashlight, he was fumbling through a funhouse of matching doors and shifting angles. Creepy building. He decided to check the fourth floor, but not go in as far.