Fighting Fire!

by Michael L. Cooper

  FDNY firefighters on their way to the fire. [LOC, USZ62-34985]

  As fire filled the entire ninth floor, a man stepped out of a window and fell one hundred feet to the sidewalk. Then another man helped four women onto a window ledge and watched them step off before he followed.

  Firefighters spraying the building. [Kheel Center, Cornell University]

  One of the burned-out floors. [Kheel Center, Cornell University]

  Louis Waldman, a witness to the scene, said, “Horrified and helpless, the crowds—I among them—looked up at the burning building, saw girl after girl appear at the reddened windows, pause for a terrified moment, and then leap to the pavement below.… This went on for what seemed a ghastly eternity. Occasionally a girl who had hesitated too long was licked by pursuing flames and, screaming with clothing and hair ablaze, plunged like a living torch to the street.” About fifty people jumped or fell to their deaths.

  Mourners line the streets during a funeral procession for victims of the Triangle fire, April 5, 1911. [Kheel Center, Cornell University]

  In only 12 minutes, the fire had raced through three floors. By the time the firefighters extinguished it, 146 people had died, some as young as 15.

  Weeks later, the Shirtwaist Kings were on trial for criminal negligence, but their lawyer won an acquittal. Their insurance company paid each victim’s family about $75. A New York State commission investigated safety problems in the state’s industries, which led to increased fire-safety awareness and to new laws protecting workers.

  The Triangle Shirtwaist tragedy sparked many labor protests. [Kheel Center, Cornell University]

  Edward F. Croker, who had joined the Fire Department of New York at age 18 and was chief by age 33, resigned after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire to start a fire-prevention company. Chief Croker could be called “the father of the fire drill,” because he was among the first to conduct fire drills in factories and offices. He taught employees to stay calm and orderly while quickly leaving by designated exits. Fire drills, Chief Croker believed, were one of the best ways to save lives.

  The man tipping his hat is Fire Chief Edward Croker. [New York City Fire Museum]

  A political cartoon critical of New York’s building code inspectors. [Kheel Center, Cornell University]

  8

  NIGHTCLUB TRAGEDY

  BOSTON, 1942

  At 10:15 P.M. on November 28, 1942, Engine Company No. 35 answered an alarm for a car fire in Boston’s downtown entertainment district. By 10:20, the four firefighters had extinguished the fire and were returning to the engine house, when they saw smoke pouring from the Cocoanut Grove.

  This popular nightclub occupied a yellow stucco building with entrances on Shawmut and Piedmont streets. That first Saturday after Thanksgiving, some one thousand people, nearly double its legal capacity, filled the Cocoanut Grove. More had lined up outside, hoping to get in.

  “It was so crowded that you had to turn sideways to get through the tables in the dining room,” said Hewson Gray, who was having dinner with his wife and friends. Many sailors and soldiers were there. Other people in the club had attended that afternoon’s football game between fierce rivals Boston College and Holy Cross.

  The nightclub had several rooms decorated in a tropical theme, with colorful fabric covering the ceiling and artificial seven-foot-tall palm trees made of bamboo and satin. In the basement was the Melody Lounge, where Goody Goodelle played the piano while couples snuggled at tables in the dark shadows and customers at the bar stood four-deep. Upstairs were two more bars, a dance floor, and a dining room full of closely spaced tables draped in white linen. That evening, the house band, Mickey Alpert and His Orchestra, started their performance with the national anthem.

  At about 10:15 in the Melody Lounge, 16-year-old bar boy Stanley Tomaszewski struck a match so that he could see to replace a lightbulb someone had unscrewed, perhaps to have more privacy with his date. The match stayed lit just for a moment, but long enough to ignite a fake palm tree. Waiters and bartenders tried to douse the flames with water and then with a fire extinguisher, but the fire spread too quickly.

  “There was a flash. Fire ran right across the ceiling,” head bartender John Bradley said. As flames ignited the sky blue satin cloth ceiling, some two hundred customers stared for a second in disbelief. Then, knocking over tables and chairs, they rushed to the main stairs, leading up to the club’s front entrance on Piedmont Street. Bradley led a group through the kitchen, which was next to the Melody Lounge, and up the stairs to a rear door leading to an alley. It was locked.

  The Cocoanut Grove had several exits. But the managers didn’t want people skipping out without paying their tabs. They locked or concealed all the doors except the main one to Piedmont Street and the one through the bar to Shawmut Street.

  When the ceiling ignited in the Melody Lounge, Daniel Weiss, a Boston University medical student working behind the bar, grabbed a wet towel to cover his face, dropped to the floor, and took only shallow breaths to avoid inhaling too much smoke. “The closer I was to the floor, the easier it was to breathe,” Weiss said later. Then, holding his breath, he scrambled across the bar and stumbled over lifeless people to get to the kitchen. He was surprised to find some two dozen men and women there, all wondering where to go.

  Unaware the fire had already spread to the main floor, Weiss started up the kitchen stairs to the dining room, but the heat drove him back. Next, he tried another stairway. Weiss told the people in the kitchen to follow him, but they thought it was too dangerous. After groping his way up the dark stairs, Weiss found John Bradley and several other men throwing their weight against the alley door. Suddenly, a firefighter yelled for everyone to step back. Then a fire ax splintered the door, letting in a rush of cold air.

  Toxic smoke hampered the rescue. [Boston Public Library]

  Journalist Martin Sheridan recalled the scene in the dining room: “We had just been served an oyster cocktail when, above the babble someone at the end of our table screamed, ‘Fire!’ Then I heard the loud crackling of flames consuming the tropical decorations.” Drawn by abundant oxygen on the spacious main floor, the fire had burst up the stairwell.

  The diners ran to the Piedmont Street exit, which was a revolving door. People desperately pushed in opposite directions on the revolving door, and no one could get out. They struggled against the glass as onlookers on the street watched helplessly.

  The headwaiter, Frank Balzarini, shouted for customers to follow him through a concealed dining room door to the street. Some thirty to forty people escaped before the lights went out and thick toxic smoke filled the room. Balzarini fought his way back inside, no doubt trying to help others. He died in the fire.

  Firefighter George “Red” Graney of Engine Company No. 35 was connecting a hose to a hydrant on Shawmut Street when he saw his three partners run to help a burning man who had stumbled out of the Cocoanut Grove. Behind the man, the crush of people jammed against the door, which swung inward and couldn’t be opened. The firefighters struggled to force it open. “It was incredible,” Graney recalled. “I couldn’t go forward or to the right because of the bodies. I couldn’t even get in with the hose.”

  He finally managed to push partway in and turn on his high-pressure hose. On the roof, firefighters chopped holes so that heat, smoke, and toxic gases could escape and be less of a danger to rescue workers and survivors inside.

  Soldiers and sailors helped remove the victims. [Boston Public Library]

  After the fire was out, officials found some two hundred bodies piled chest-high behind the revolving door. In the hallway to the stairs down to the Melody Lounge, one investigator said, it looked as though the victims had clawed and fought one another while trying to escape. One firefighter who had been pulling people to safety had scratches on his legs from people desperately clutching at him.

  An injured fireman being helped to an ambulance. [Boston Public Library]

  Graney described the dining room on the main fl
oor: “The tables weren’t all burnt and in some places people, though dead, were only singed, still at their chairs and drooped over their tables. Yet elsewhere other bodies were so badly burned you couldn’t tell the men from the women.”

  Firefighter John Collins said the damage in the Melody Lounge was mostly along the ceiling. “Of all the vivid impressions made upon me that evening,” he added, “perhaps the most unforgettable was … a very pretty girl. She was sitting with her eyes open and her hand on a cocktail glass, as if waiting for someone. As I first looked at her I wondered why she was just sitting there, thinking she was okay. But, of course, she was dead.”

  Rescue workers rushed the injured to hospitals and carried the dead across the street to a garage being used as a temporary morgue. “At the time we had no idea how many were killed,” Graney said, “and we guessed that maybe 200 people had been lost.”

  One of the Cocoanut Grove bars. [Boston Public Library]

  Many of the victims didn’t burn to death; they died from inhaling smoke and toxic gas from chemicals in the furniture and leather-covered walls. To protect themselves from smoke and lethal gases, some survivors, like Daniel Weiss, had the presence of mind to cover their noses and mouths with wet towels or clothing. One man used a napkin he had urinated on.

  The charred nightclub a day after the fire. [Boston Public Library]

  The fire killed 492 people. That’s more than in all of Boston’s great fires of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries combined. The Cocoanut Grove fire is the deadliest nightclub fire in U.S. history.

  Stacks of coffins for the victims. [Boston Public Library]

  Over the following months, Boston officials strengthened building- and fire-safety codes. New regulations banned flammable decorations in restaurants and other public establishments. And they required lighted exit signs, doors that open outward, and regular doors flanking revolving doors.

  Research doctors at Boston’s academic hospitals learned a great deal about treating burns as well as trauma and grief while attending to the Cocoanut Grove victims. Little was known about trauma and the grieving process until Dr. Erich Lindemann, a Harvard University psychiatrist, interviewed survivors of the fire and relatives of the deceased for the first formal study of grief. That study helped develop new ways of coping with bereavement. Researchers also discovered that blood-plasma transfusions helped patients in severe shock. And they credited penicillin, a new drug being tested, for helping third-degree-burn victims recover.

  A victim being treated at a Boston hospital. [Boston Public Library]

  9

  9/11: FIRE IN THE SKY

  NEW YORK, 2001

  At 8:46 A.M. on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, Battalion Chief Joseph Pfeifer and the New York City firefighters of Engine Company No. 7 were investigating a gas leak in lower Manhattan when they heard an airliner roar overhead. They saw the blue-and-white markings of an American Airlines passenger jet just before it crashed into the upper floors of the North Tower, one of the twin skyscrapers at the World Trade Center.

  Chief Pfeifer jumped into the department’s red SUV and, lights flashing and Klaxon blaring, sped fifteen blocks down Church Street to the Trade Center. On the way, he called in first, second, and third alarms, summoning nineteen fire trucks.

  On the wide Trade Center plaza, Pfeifer had to dodge falling concrete, steel, glass, and pieces of the airliner. Jet fuel inside the North Tower had flooded the elevator shaft, causing a fiery explosion on the ground floor that blew elevator doors open, cracked the marble-tiled walls, and shattered the thick glass wrapped around the cavernous lobby. Several people were badly burned.

  Within five minutes of Chief Pfeifer’s call, the first engine companies arrived. Lieutenant Kevin Pfeifer, the chief’s younger brother by three years, was with Engine Company No. 33. The chief sent his brother and five other firefighters up the stairs to report on conditions on the higher floors.

  Back in 1968, construction on the $1.5 billion World Trade Center began, and the two 110-story towers were finished by 1972. At that time, the two buildings, popularly known as the Twin Towers, were the world’s tallest structures. They were slightly higher than thirteen hundred feet. That’s a quarter of a mile straight up.

  The Twin Towers before September 11, 2001. [LOC-DIG--15556]

  Below street level was a six-story basement with more space than the entire Empire State Building. The Mall at the World Trade Center—with some 55 stores and restaurants, such as the Gap, Borders bookstore, and Sbarro—occupied the concourse level where tens of thousands of people daily flowed from the World Trade Center’s two subway stations.

  The World Trade Center rented offices to brokerage firms, advertising agencies, insurance companies, banks, and government agencies like the FBI and CIA. A sculptor had a studio on the North Tower’s 92nd floor. On weekdays, about forty thousand people worked in the Trade Center and thousands more visited. At the beginning of that Tuesday’s workday, about sixteen thousand people were in the complex.

  The airliner, its wings tilted, hit the North Tower, traveling at 450 miles per hour. The long wings sliced through the 93rd to 99th floors. The impact caused the tower to sway and the earth to tremble, registering on seismographs 22 miles away. The explosion of eleven thousand gallons of jet fuel created a fireball so hot that people inside the South Tower, two hundred feet away, felt the heat. The crash knocked out the North Tower’s public-address system, the overhead sprinklers, and most of the 99 elevators, stranding passengers inside the cars.

  A United Airlines passenger jet crashes into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. [AP Photo/Carmen Taylor]

  In the first ten minutes after the crash, New York’s 911 system received some three thousand calls. Many were from people trapped above the 99th floor. They said smoke was filling their offices and they wanted to know what they should do. The three stairwells in the middle of the building—the only way down when the elevators didn’t work—were blocked with rubble or filled with smoke and flames. The emergency operators could offer only standard advice: Stay low to avoid breathing smoke and wait for emergency personnel.

  The airliner’s jet fuel exploded when it hit the South Tower. [AP Photo/Carmen Taylor]

  The New York City Police Department dispatched some one thousand officers to lower Manhattan. Two NYPD helicopters hovered near the towers to report on conditions on the upper floors. Police closed the nearby West Side Highway and other major arteries to all traffic except emergency vehicles.

  FDNY dispatchers sent 21 engine companies and 11 ladder companies manned by a total of two hundred firefighters. And hundreds of off-duty firefighters rushed downtown to help. The department’s top brass set up a command center, which is called a staging area, across the street from the North Tower, while mid-level commanders gave orders from the lobby.

  The commanders knew, as one of them later explained, that a “large volume of fire on the upper floors” would be impossible to put out. And knowing several floors might collapse, “we determined, very early on, that this was going to be strictly a rescue mission. We were going to vacate the building, get everybody out, and then we were going to get out.”

  Division Chief Peter Hayden said, “We had a very strong sense we would lose firefighters and that we were in deep trouble.”

  People trapped above the North Tower’s 99th floor sent e-mails or made cell phone calls to wives and husbands, mothers and fathers, children and friends. Two New York Times reporters collected e-mails and messages left on answering machines and interviewed relatives of victims to piece together the scene inside the tower.

  At street level near the World Trade Center. [LOC-DIG-ppmsca-02121-0064]

  Pete Alderman, who was attending a meeting in the famous Windows on the World restaurant on the 106th floor, exchanged e-mails with his sister Jane.

  “I’m SCARED,” he wrote, “THERE IS A lot OF SMOKE.”

  “can you get out of there?” she asked.

  “No we are
stuck.”

  Down on the North Tower’s 88th floor, Frank De Martini was having coffee in his office with his wife, Nicole, who worked in the South Tower. De Martini was the construction manager in charge of renovations at the World Trade Center. When the airliner struck, De Martini told his wife and his employees, about thirty people, to start down the one passable stairwell below the 93rd floor. De Martini and three other men went from office to office on the 88th floor, making sure no one was left behind.

  When the men started down the stairs, they heard banging on the stairwell door from the floor above. Grabbing hard hats, a flashlight, and a crowbar, they went up to the 89th floor. The stairwell door was jammed. De Martini used the crowbar to break through the drywall around the frame and dislodge the door. As people hurried down the stairs, the four men searched the floor for others who were trapped or didn’t know that one stairwell offered an escape.

  Office workers in the South Tower heard the horrific crash but didn’t know what had happened. On the upper floors, workers on the tower’s northern side crowded around the tall, narrow windows and saw thick black smoke flowing from gashes in the North Tower.

  Some of these people had been at the Trade Center in 1993, when terrorists tried to topple the North Tower by detonating a thirteen-hundred-pound truck bomb in the underground garage. It wrecked the huge basement, killed six people, and injured one thousand. Evacuating both towers took hours.