Firetrap (5 page)

7. SPLATTERFEST

FIREFIGHTER JUSTIN HINKEL, ENGINE 33, C SHIFT
>

The fire came in at 2230 hours. Dowd had already gone to bed, and the lieutenant was in his room on the phone to his wife. Me and Harrington were out in the beanery watching a movie called
Splatterfest.
Cowboys and werewolves.

So we all bunk up and we're screaming down Rainier Avenue, weaving in and out of traffic, and the lieutenant turns around to me and Dowd and says, “It looks like we're going to be first in.”

Harrington says, “I'll pull the preconnect.”

“Unless we see something different when we get there,” says Lieutenant Smith.

The club—well, you know where the club is: two blocks off Rainier, down in Columbia City. It turns out we
are
first in, just like we thought.

It was an old wooden building. Right away I figure balloon construction with a lot of old pipe chases and crap like that. We'll get it out, but we'll be chasing spot fires in the walls all night. The front doors are on fire, actually burning pretty good, with a lot of black smoke and heat flowing into the building. That's the strange part. While there's plenty of smoke and shit—excuse the language—coming onto the street, and there's smoke on the sidewalk, there's also a lot going back into the building, like this funnel effect. We figure out later that somebody left some back windows or doors open, and there's a breeze blowing the fire right through the first floor.

Dowd parks in front of the building—I mean, smack in front of the doorway that's on fire—and when we get a good look at it, you can tell a preconnect isn't going to be big enough, but the lieutenant's busy talking on the radio giving a report and a size-up, so me and Harrington, we go behind the rig and pull out two hundred feet of two-and-a-half. Dowd comes around and helps us, then takes couplings and wrenches across the street to the hydrant.

By the time Harrington and I get all that hose into loops on the sidewalk in front of the building and get our face pieces on and air flowing, we have water. Harrington hits the doorway real good, water splashing us, and then, thinking he's put out most of the fire on the porch, we head inside. Ideally, with the fire in the front of the building, we should be laying lines through the building and coming out the front door instead of going
in
the front door.

That's when all these little Mexicans started busting around the corner of the building yelling there are people inside. So now we're not sure how to proceed. By this time Harrington is in the doorway. There's this big old foyer, and there's fire everywhere. I mean, on the walls, the ceiling, even the floor. And he's hitting it with a two-and-a-half, which should put it out in an instant, only it's not going out. Meanwhile I'm behind him pulling hose. That stuff is heavy when it's full of water. Harrington crawls into the foyer, and he's hitting the ceiling, and he's really going at it because we both know there are people. It's a big building, and we know if we can't put the fire out right away we're in trouble.

We're stuck in the doorway, Harrington using that nozzle like it's a jiffy hose. Then after a few minutes have gone by, he gets tired and we switch off. I get most of the first room knocked down, but by now it's dark and smoky and we can't see anything. About that time some truckmen come up, but they don't have hose lines and don't get very far. They're using the thermal imager and telling us where there's heat in the walls. They keep telling me it's up high, so I hit it with a straight stream thinking I'll bounce it around on the ceiling, but the stream goes right through the wall and there's a ton of fire up in there. I mean, it's boiling inside that wall.

I'm getting tired, so the two truckmen take over the line and I go out the front door, where Harrington's pulling hose, and it occurs to me that there's another set of doors on the front porch. Only these doors are on the other wall, facing kind of into the building toward the north. I try one of the doors and it opens up a couple of inches, and then it kind of shatters and the top falls off, and there are flames leaping out in my face.

That's when we get the line back from the two ladder guys and we aim it up the stairs, but it's like pissing into a hurricane, because absolutely nothing happens. After a while, Harrington looks at me and says, “Are we supposed to go up?”

I'm thinking those stairs are rotten with fire and they're going to collapse if we put any weight on them. “Are you kidding?” I say. “We're staying here.” Lieutenant Smith is just coming up to join us. He asks me what I'm doing, and I tell him we have fire in the stairs. We pour water up those stairs like crazy, but there's a ton of fire just around the corner and we can't get to it because the lower part of the stairway is already falling apart.

Meanwhile, Engine 30 shows up and parks across the street on the hydrant, and they bring another line off our rig. They're fresh, so they go inside while we stay in front holding the fire in the stairs. But by now the fire's built up a little bit on the first floor, and they don't get more than fifteen feet inside the front door.

We never do see any civilians come out. Don't see them and don't hear them.

Whatever is in that big hall, it takes off and is boiling. It was Chief Hillbourn's order later to line up the dead people under the canvas tarp. I guess some of the media didn't think that was cool. Like if you're on a drinking binge and you line up all the dead soldiers on the windowsill or something.

The worst part is the crowd. The Hispanics are one thing, but we get this crowd of black folks, you know, in their late teens or early twenties, and they start to get angry. They all have cell phones and they are calling their friends, getting more people to come down, and the cops can't handle them. Then they start yelling things like “Put the fire out!” and “If this was a white neighborhood, you would be saving the building!”

One guy tries to tackle Harrington when he goes to get a fresh bottle, tells him he's going the wrong way. They arrest five or six people near us. I mean, by then fire is starting to come out every crevice on the front of the building. Finally they send some black chief—I think it's Lennox—around the crowd to explain what we're doing and why we're doing it. In the end, the cops have to come and pull Lennox out of there to save his butt. I think that's where the rumors start, right there that night on the fire ground, people standing around with bottles of malt liquor and flipping us shit. In the end we don't get to help with the bodies. They were having truck companies from the north end do that, guys who are fresh and haven't fought the fire, guys going in with ropes and stuff.

8. SUDDENLY TREY BROWN LOOKS WHITE

JAMIE ESTEVEZ
>

Hinkel's voice was actually quivering during parts of his testimony. I let him talk without interruption, and when he finished, asked if he had anything to add, then turned to Brown, who thought about it a while and said, “Did anybody call out to you for help from inside?”

“No, sir.”

“And you didn't pass anybody in there?”

“No, sir. Not that I knew of.”

We shook hands, and Hinkel left. I shut off my recorder and looked at Brown. “This is going to be tough.”

“Yeah.”

“The fire seemed to spread pretty fast.”

“In the old days, builders didn't put fire stops in the walls. A fire stop is a simple two-by-four, usually, nailed in crossways between the uprights. You get a fire in a building as old as the Z Club, it's easy for a basement fire to travel all the way to the roof running right up through the walls. In newer buildings, fire stops hold the fire back for a while.”

“Hinkel said they should have gone in the back door and worked their way to the front, instead of the other way about. Is that right?”

“Generally when you hit fire with a hose line, you want to work from the uninvolved portion of the building to the involved portion. Otherwise you push the fire to parts of the building it might not spread to on its own. A water stream pushes the fire, just like sweeping a pile of debris.”

“So this might be the mistake that underlies this whole situation?”

“There was no way they could have been sure they would have gotten in on the other side of the building, and the wind was blowing the wrong way. On the other hand, it might have been a mistake.”

“And then there was the door to the upstairs. Don't you think if they'd found that sooner they might have saved the stairs?”

“Nobody can say for sure. But if they had, a lot of people could have come down those stairs.”

“Okay. A few more questions. What's a jiffy hose?”

“You really took notes, didn't you?”

“I always do.”

“A jiffy hose is a standard garden hose. We carry them for cleaning off our gear after a fire.”

“And a thermal imager?”

“It's a handheld camera that shows heat. Like infrared. It sees through smoke and through walls. We've got one on the truck right outside. I'll show it to you.”

Trey took me out to the apparatus bay, where he climbed into the truck and came out with what appeared to be a handheld camera the size of a tiny portable TV. “Truckies carry this into a fire, and it can essentially see through smoke. It senses heat and has a scale along the side here that tells you the temperatures you're looking at.” He turned it on, and a small black-and-white screen lit up. Then he pressed his palm against the side of the ladder truck for a few moments, and when he removed it, the camera showed the heat from his palm print on the sheet metal of the truck. Everything warm in the camera was white. His face and arms were white.

9. SHOE SALE

FIREFIGHTER HERBIE SCHMIDT, AID 14, C SHIFT
>

We help Ladder 7 put up their aerial on the B side of the building, but just as we're getting ready to go to the roof, somebody asks for the aid car on the C side, so me and Alan Francher drive the aid car around the block and park. I look up and there's a ground ladder going up to this smoky window on the second story, a good twenty-five feet to the window.

There's four or five civilians crumpled on the ground at the base of the ladder, all kind of lying there like they're hurt. Another guy's limping toward me. There's a woman coming down the ladder and one just getting off at the base. And there's a firefighter trying to go up the ladder while these civilians are trying to get down. There's only two firefighters there, and from what I can see, it's a mess.

It's pretty clear that the second floor is full of people, that the fire's about to flash over, and that we need six ladders, not one. Francher talks to the first person we see limping toward us. He's African American and dressed pretty nice, except he doesn't have any shoes. It turns out his ankle's broken. Francher takes him to the triage area and I move ahead.

I find two women on the hood of a car. The hood's all bashed in. They're kind of dazed, and there's smoke oozing out the walls next to them. The first is heavyset and she's got a broken tib-fib. I'm trying to figure out if I can carry her by myself, because, like I said, she's heavyset. The other woman, I'm not sure what's wrong with her. I do a scoop and run on the first one, picking her up like a kid, and just as I get her off the car I look up. There's a firefighter in the window, and he's dangling a woman out the window by one arm, and before I can say beans she lands on the roof of the same car. Boom! They're throwing them out the windows! I've never seen anything like it.

I yell up at him. “What the hell do you think you're doing?”

He yells back, “Clear some space. Get those people out of there!”

About that time another engine company throws up a second ladder a couple of cars to the left of us, but there's a shitload of flame coming out that window. I cart my first victim maybe thirty feet, set her down in the parking lot, and start ferrying the others out as fast as I can. They're flying out the windows. Hitting the cars. And that first car is just getting more and more pancaked.

We set up this relay. Me and Francher and some other firefighter whose name I never get. We transport the victims away from the building as fast as we can, most of them with broken legs, a few with no injuries except smoke inhalation. We're moving as fast as we can so we won't get hit by the next falling body. It's like some game thought up by a maniac.

After a while the bodies stop coming out of the dark so quickly, and then not much later they aren't coming out at all. If the firefighter who's been throwing people out gets out of there, I don't see it. I don't know what happens after that, because Francher and I both get drafted to help splint leg fractures. We have four broken femurs, one bleeding out pretty good. I think her blood pressure was something like eighty palp. Twenty-three broken legs, they told us later. Only a couple of people coming out of that window didn't get hurt. But hell, better a broken leg than another funeral, wouldn't you say? If they'd lined up inside that window and waited until the ladder was free, we would have lost another ten people, easy.

Six hours later, when it's winding down and we're thinking about going inside to look for bodies, somebody notices all these shoes in the parking lot. More than two dozen shoes lying all over the place.

In the middle of it all, Francher wears himself out and decides to have a heart attack. He's a smoker, so the worst part for him is they wouldn't let him have a fag in the hospital, you know. So later we go up there with a pack of Marlboros on the end of a fishing line with a pole and everything, and throw it into his room and reel it out into the hallway a few times. It was about the only fun we had out of the whole thing.

10. KITTY TALKS AND TALKS AND…

JAMIE ESTEVEZ
>

“What did Schmidt mean when he referred to the B and the C sides of the building?”

“Wherever the command post is,” Trey said, “that becomes side A, which at the Z Club fire was the south side of the building. The other three sides are lettered in a clockwise direction from side A, so that Ladder Seven and Aid Fourteen started out on side B. C was in back on the north side, where the parking lot and alley were, and the doors where Engine Thirty-three stopped initially and began fighting fire was D, to the right of the command post. The designations all depend on where the command post is.”

“So people were being dropped out the second-story window over the cars parked behind the building,” I said, pointing to the sketch he'd drawn earlier.

“Right.”

“And that was because there was only one ladder up in the back and all those people couldn't have gotten down it quickly enough?”

“Right.”

“Why was there just the one ladder?”

“The only other windows back there weren't accessible because of the parked cars, and even if they had been, we didn't have enough manpower early on to get them laddered and unshuttered. There were just the three of us in the beginning.”

“Unshuttered?”

“They were all boarded over except a second window that a woman had fallen out of.”

Next we spoke to Brown's crew, but after we'd concluded with Garrison and were almost finished with Kitty, they got an alarm and left us like a puff of dust. Clyde Garrison was a big man with a boyish haircut and a tuft of hair he constantly had to throw out of his eyes, a slight hunch in his back, and a twinkle in his eyes. He was a little taller than Trey. He gave a matter-of-fact rendition of the events on September third, delving into the details seemingly without emotion, though I noted that from time to time his voice cracked. He was the oldest firefighter we'd spoken to so far, in his early fifties, and had been driving Engine 28 the night of the Z Club fire.

Garrison stated that Captain Brown had been assigned as C division, which put him in charge of the C side of the building, but had abandoned his post to climb a ladder and crawl inside the building. “I don't think the division commander should be making rescues,” Garrison said, staring at Captain Brown. “I've told the captain before. It's no secret. I told everybody who spoke to me after the fire. But that's just my take on it. Maybe my nose is out of joint because he bumped me out of the way. Not that it does any good to be sore. I mean, in the end, he's the captain and I'm just a driver. I could have made those rescues as easily as he did. He was basically just dropping people out the window.”

“So
you
were the one throwing people out the window?” I asked Brown, somewhat astonished by the revelation. Why hadn't he said so earlier? And why hadn't the official report mentioned it?

He gave me a look. “I wasn't
throwing
them. I was
lowering
them and then dropping them. I would have walked them over to the escalator, but we didn't have one.”

“Okay, whatever. Is that why the department wanted to give you the award that you threw in their faces?”

“I didn't throw anything in anybody's face. I didn't want the whole ceremony thing. Okay?” Again, the look.

“Okay. Sure.”

Yikes.

 

Tall, angular, and a whirlwind of constant motion, Kitty Acton was a different creature altogether from the slow-moving Clyde Garrison. Kitty was near tears at the beginning of her interview; then she teetered away from her emotions as she veered off topic and approached tears again when she returned to it. The upshot was they'd gone to C side and put up a ladder, and then the captain went up and began throwing—uh, lowering—people out of the smoke.

She talked for almost an hour, backtracking willy-nilly, diverting her narrative off that night to other calls they'd been on, hogging the spotlight while she had it, a ballerina dancing on top of a music box. After Engine 28's station bell hit and she ran out of the room to climb onto the fire engine, I turned to Brown. “Is she always like this, or is she just nervous?”

“She's always nervous.”

“Hmm.” I took a deep breath. “Do you want to tell me your story while we're waiting?”

“Everything I have to say is already written down.”

“Everything
everybody
has to say is already written down.”

“I'd rather wait.”

“Sure. Just one question, though. Clyde says you shouldn't have left your post as Division C commander. That he could have handled the rescues as easily. What's your response to that?”

“When it started, there were only three of us back there. Me, Clyde, and Kitty. Kitty isn't strong enough to yard anybody out of a window, and Clyde was moving like molasses. We only had a few minutes to act, and even as it was, we didn't get them all out. I didn't want to take a chance that somebody wouldn't get out because Clyde wasn't strong enough or was moving too slowly.”

“And you knew you were strong enough?”

“I know for a fact I got more people out than Clyde would have.”

“He doesn't want to acknowledge that, does he?”

“Nope.”

When Engine 28 hadn't returned forty minutes later, I realized Kitty Acton's testimonial had degraded into speculation and sidetracking anyway, along with all the trivia about her love life, which Brown told me she was in the habit of talking about endlessly. She tapped into the guys for dating advice, as if they were all her big brothers.

“Oh, I guess I thought she was a lesbian for some reason.”

“She is,” he said. “The dating advice thing can get kind of weird sometimes, like the time she was making out with Miss Ballard behind the station.” He grinned at me.

So, I thought, Trey Brown has a lighter side after all. I grinned back.