by Earl Emerson
Although the wind was from the north that night, Engine 22 set up the command post on the south side of the building, so that officers and firefighters were immersed in clots of drifting smoke for almost an hour before the command post was moved.
Nobody ever did a walk-around to survey all four sides of the building. Had they done so, the IC would have known early on that there were other buildings connected to the warehouse, that those buildings were also involved, and that the crews of Engine 31 and Ladder 5 were actually fighting a fire in those smaller, older buildings while Vaughn thought they were supporting his efforts in the warehouse. After Ladder 5 opened holes in the older building, Vaughn couldn’t figure out why the smoke didn’t clear in the warehouse.
The report said Captain Cordifis shouldn’t have split his crew and made a mistake ordering fans for ventilation. Supposedly, the early introduction of fans had fed the fire and made it larger before it could be located by hose crews. Yet, by all accounts, the fire started in the older buildings to the north and only spread into the warehouse later, probably after the wall collapse. When the first units arrived, the warehouse was filled with smoke, smoke that had leaked through from the older part of the complex. Finney still thought Cordifis’s original plan was viable. Using fans, they would have cleared the warehouse in minutes. They would have searched it, realized the fire and possible victims were elsewhere, and been on their way. As it was, Ladder 1, Engine 22, and later Engines 5 and 25 lost precious minutes bumbling around in zero visibility.
Radio traffic had been problematical. Owing to confusion from the fires going on in the south end and to the fact that Leary Way was fought on channel 2 while the normal fire channel was channel 1, several units at Leary Way had been addressing the IC in the south end on channel 1 when they thought they were addressing Captain Vaughn. Quite a few of their transmissions either were not answered or were answered by the wrong IC. Even the dispatchers were confused.
Because several units had done their monitoring and broadcasting on channel 1, they missed key portions of Cordifis’s search instructions and went into the complex without any notion of where to look.
The units that did hear Cordifis’s transmission knew from what he reported that opening the door to his room would jeopardize his life, so these hastily organized rescue teams did not open any doors unless they swung out. Instead, using chain saws, they cut small holes in each door they encountered, a procedure that slowed the search to a snail’s pace.
The older complex had a fire wall running along the spine of the building, north to south, with only two doorways in it. For reasons Finney had yet to discover, most of the searchers had been told to remain on the west side of the fire wall in the older complex; in reality, he and Cordifis had been on the east side. Only Reese and Kirby entered from the east.
The report said Finney was in the final stages of exhaustion by the time he tried to fight his way out of the building, that he and Cordifis should have taken a rest break after changing bottles, as if his exhaustion derived from not taking a break. What the report didn’t indicate was how much criticism they would have drawn for taking a rest break while victims may have been dying inside.
Nowhere did the report implicate Finney in Bill’s death.
Nowhere did it suggest that if he’d reacted differently Bill Cordifis would be alive.
Dozens of firefighters had told him it wasn’t his fault, that he should consider his own escape and Cordifis’s death as acts of God. Yet the unofficial accusation lingered in the air. G. A. had passed it along to Emily, and Finney knew others were uttering it.
After some minutes of skimming the report, he curled up on the sofa under a waterside window and, reading from page one, he used up the last of the afternoon light reflecting off the lake.
The part that disgruntled him most was Reese’s statement, the same statement that had been clipped from newspapers, highlighted with yellow grease markers, and tacked to the beanery bulletin board in almost every fire station in the city: “We went in and within a minute we’d found one firefighter wandering around alone. He was in a panic and wasn’t any help as far as indicating where his partner was. We guided him outside and then went back down the direction he’d come from, but there wasn’t anything there. We searched as long as we could but were finally forced out by the heat.”
The way Finney remembered it, they’d pointed him in the direction he was already headed and then turned their backs without even knowing if he could get up from his squat. Had Finney taken a misstep or collapsed in that last two dozen paces, Reese and Kub would hardly have seen him as they were chased out of the building by flame.
But he thought he also remembered counting exactly twenty-eight paces straight down the corridor from the small hole he’d hacked into the wall with his service axe. And he thought he told them as much, yet Reese said he hadn’t been able to give them any help. If it was true that Cordifis was only twenty-eight steps away, they should have reached Bill in less than a minute with or without Finney’s directions. He’d left his chirping PASS device outside the hole as a beacon. But maybe nothing Finney remembered after he left Cordifis was true. Maybe he’d been hallucinating the entire time.
The doctors said people with very high body core temperatures suffered debilitating weakness, hallucinations, seizures, and coma, roughly in that order. Finney had not escaped the hallucinations, which he knew he’d entertained in the medic unit and later in the hospital. But he could have sworn he was thinking straight when he spoke to Reese and Kub.
God, he wished he could keep from thinking about Leary Way.
Robert Kub was uneasy talking about the subject with Finney, obviously wanting to spare his feelings. The most Finney could get him to say was, “As far as I’m concerned, we all did our best. You could barely stand, and we were lucky to get out of there alive.”
“If they’d only asked me in that medic unit I could have told them where to look,” Finney told his brother, Tony, weeks after the fire.
“Not when I saw you,” replied his brother. “When I saw you, you weren’t making any sense at all.”
In addition to a broken collarbone, heat exhaustion, and burns, Finney had so much carbon monoxide circulating in his system that one of the doctors at the Harborview ER told Tony he wasn’t going to survive. And everyone knew one of the first effects of CO poisoning was confusion.
He’d still been confused at the funeral three days later.
When Finney was released from the hospital long enough to attend the funeral service, of which he recalled next to nothing, he remembered people saying they were sorry, which somehow was the last thing he wanted to hear. By the time Diana Moore approached, he had reached some sort of limit. “How are you doing?” she had asked.
“How the hell do you think? I’ve got enough Demerol on board to knock down a football team. I can’t feel my fingertips. My neck hurts like hell, and I killed my partner.”
“You didn’t kill him,” Diana replied quietly.
“Why don’t you get out of my face?”
“You know you don’t—”
“Just get the fuck away from me. And tell your shit-eating friends to stay away, too.” The words had come out of a generic anger that picked targets at random, Diana the luckless target that day.
The next time they spoke was the day of his appointment with Reese, when he was turned down for promotion.
24. THINGS THAT WENT WORSE
Firefighters went in from the north thinking they were fighting a fire in a group of two-story wooden buildings. Others went in from the south, thinking they were fighting a fire in a large concrete-walled warehouse. It was almost forty minutes before anybody knew the scope of the problem.
It was forty-six minutes into the fire before a crew reported putting water on the fire.
Cordifis’s radio, still in working order, was found buried two feet under his body. Finney’s radio, what was left of it, lay next to the body. A service axe was still strap
ped to Cordifis’s waist. Another, Finney’s, was found forty-five feet away in what had been another room. Cordifis’s inactivated PASS device was still clipped to the belt of his MSA backpack. Finney’s PASS device was found twenty-five feet from the body under a pile of rubble. It had beeped long into the night and was heard by dozens of frustrated and grieving firefighters outside.
The autopsy found Cordifis had died of smoke inhalation. Prior to death, he’d sustained multiple fractures of his tibia and fibula on both legs and a broken index finger on his left hand. What the report glossed over was that Cordifis died inhaling heat so hot it cauterized his lungs. Dying from smoke inhalation implies taking in smoke and losing consciousness. But Bill had died inhaling flames. Every firefighter who saw the report would read between the lines.
25. MAKING FRIENDS IN TAMPA
“We’ve got a CISD this morning at nine,” said Lieutenant Sadler.
“It’s such a waste of time,” Finney said.
“Now don’t get your briefs in a knot. You know it’s mandatory for everyone who was on the alarm. There were probably some guys who’ve never seen a burn victim before.”
A request for a critical incident stress debriefing from any member who’d been on an alarm spurred the department to convene one. One had been called after the Wah Mee massacre, where Seattle firefighters found thirteen patrons of an illegal gambling club bound and gagged and shot in the head. They convened one after the Pang Fire, where four firefighters fell through a floor to a fiery death. They held one after Leary Way. A CISD was meant to be an emotional analgesic, although in Finney’s experience they only added more stress.
For Finney, the only positive aspect to having a CISD for Riverside Drive was that somebody might say something to shed light on his plight. It was tempting to believe Annie had appropriated his jacket after wandering into the station through an unlocked door, perhaps while they were out on an alarm. He could see the whole scenario: Annie steals his coat; a firefighter decides to play a practical joke with the phone call; Annie lights a warming fire, loses control of it, gets confused, and makes accusations; afterward, G. A. Montgomery comes along and flips happenstance into a full-fledged lynching. It could have happened that way.
The meeting was at the Four Seasons Olympic, arguably the ritziest hotel in Seattle, certainly one of the most venerable. After Sam Hoskins parked Engine 26 on Seneca, Gary Sadler and John Finney made their way through the sumptuous lobby, then upstairs to a thickly carpeted room off the mezzanine, where several dozen chairs were arranged in the shape of an oval. It was the same room they’d used for the debriefing after Leary Way, the same chairs, and Finney felt himself floundering in the same murky swamp of guilt and nervous anticipation.
Marshal 5 was building a case against him, and unless something extraordinary happened, he would be behind bars in a week. He would lose his job, and these people who’d once been his friends would abandon him without a second thought.
When all thirty-eight firefighters were seated, Finney saw G. A. Montgomery and Robert Kub station themselves near the door, arms across their chests like bailiffs. He had an uneasy feeling they were planning to arrest him in front of the group.
Just before the meeting came to order, Jerry Monahan popped through the door in his civvies and squeezed a chair into the oval next to Finney’s. As contrary as Monahan could be in his private affairs, Finney thought, he was amazingly docile when it came to fire department dictums; he was there on his own hook.
The session was overseen by an African-American chief from the administration, Caldwell, a man who wanted nothing to do with field operations but who elbowed himself into the chairman’s seat on any committee, always hustling to build his résumé. Finney didn’t catch the psychiatrist’s name, but in a room full of rough-hewn, aggressive firefighters, he stood out as a milquetoast.
The third member of the committee was, oddly enough, Marion Balitnikoff, who, although recognized department-wide for his firefighting skills, was just as widely known for being a jerk. Five years ago he’d been sent to Florida for a rescue and extrication conference and came back early behind a strongly worded letter from Tampa’s police chief requesting Seattle never send him to their city again. Scuttlebutt had it that his offenses included an assault on two underaged prostitutes, wrestling in the street with a cabdriver, and urinating on a woman’s pant leg, presumably while trying to urinate into a nearby fountain, this last performed in a hotel lobby full of tourists. After all this, the Tampa authorities had let him off without charges. You had to know Balitnikoff. Sober, he could be almost charming.
26. SAVING THE MAN IN THE HOLE
Conversation in the room died down when Chief Caldwell stood up to announce the ground rules. Everything was to be kept within these four walls, said Caldwell. Nobody was to repeat anything heard in the debriefing, not to a spouse or a crew member or a pastor. It was, he explained, only under such a covenant that people would feel free to speak openly.
For five months people had been looking sideways at Finney, and today wasn’t any different. They evaluated his neck for scars, stared into his eyes for signs of guilt, listened to his speech for indications of trauma, for substantiation of the persistent rumors that he was on the verge of retiring due to nervous breakdown.
During the meeting firefighters were instructed to announce who they were, how many years they had in the department, what rig they were working on the day of the fire, what they did at the fire, what they saw, and how they felt about it. Finney could see stress levels skyrocketing as each man or woman waited to address the group. Firefighters were a select denomination, chosen for physical abilities, brute strength, endurance, the knack of calculating on the fly, physical bravery, mechanical aptitude, a desire for public service. Nobody was selected for an ability to speak in front of a group or for the gift of soul-searching.
There was a preliminary overview of the basic facts given by Chief Caldwell—the time of the fire, number of units dispatched, the order of their arrival. Clearly Caldwell had done his homework. When he didn’t mention that the house had been on their dangerous buildings list, Finney realized he hadn’t heard the standard warning from the dispatchers during the alarm either. It hadn’t occurred to him until now, but they should have fought that fire from outside, which was the procedure for handling any building on the list. He raised his hand and asked Caldwell about it, well aware that all eyes in the room were now on him. “Not on the list,” Caldwell replied, curtly.
Finney and G. A. Montgomery exchanged glances, though Finney could not read G. A.’s face. Beside him, Monahan stared straight ahead.
They proceeded around the oval in the rough order in which the rigs had arrived at the fire location. When the members of Engine 27’s crew told their stories, McKittrick stuttered and his officer got a case of dry mouth. Sadler told of their arrival, his orders to Monahan, McKittrick’s notification that there was a victim, advising Finney they were going up the stairs, and discovering later that Finney had gone outside alone and put up a ladder. Sadler’s disapproval was duly noted and Finney knew it would be passed around the city like a bad cold.
Monahan told a simple story of looking for the hydrant and nearly driving into the river in the fog.
Having paid scant attention to the others, G. A. swung his stern gaze onto Finney when it was Finney’s turn to speak.
“We went through the front door behind Twenty-seven’s crew. None of us got in very far. Then McKittrick came and told us there was a victim. I got a ladder off Engine Twenty-seven, went to the roof, and found our victim inside the window. Moore brought a line up and cooled off the room while I got her out. After a while the medics showed up.”
“That’s a little sketchy,” said Lieutenant Balitnikoff, the only facilitator who hadn’t spoken until now. “I’m just trying to get us all on the same page here. What about the part where you left your partner?”
All eyes in the room turned to Finney. “I thought this meeting was suppose
d to be about our feelings.”
“Just curious as to how you felt when you left him.” The room grew quiet. People weren’t stirring. Weren’t breathing. “Don’t you think you should have learned your lesson at the beginning of the summer? The way I remember it, this is a team effort. We work as a team.” Balitnikoff looked pointedly at Diana Moore. It was clear he was including her in his critique. “We’re all family or I wouldn’t speak like this. I don’t think I could bear it if anybody else got hurt.”
Finney couldn’t believe that under the guise of a brotherly admonition, Balitnikoff was publicly chastising him for both Leary Way and Riverside Drive.
“Maybe we’ll think about our partners next time?” Balitnikoff said, to no one in particular.
Finney looked around the group and said, “If I hadn’t done it, that woman would be dead.”
A few people shuffled their feet under their chairs. More than one pair of eyes fell on Diana Moore, who was sitting on both hands looking at the carpet. Finney remembered the scene Balitnikoff had made at Cordifis’s funeral, shouting in the foyer of the church until G. A. Montgomery escorted him outside. Finney never found out what it was about.