3000 Degrees (11 page)

Once the windows had been cleared of survivors, the lieutenant from Rescue 1 grabbed him by the arm. “I want you to come with me,” he said, leading Mike toward the front door. The rescue guys were working the inside of the building, like they usually do, crawling through the smoke and flames searching for anyone who couldn't get to a window. It was perilous work, performed without a hose or a ladder. Rookies normally didn't work the rescue squad.

Mike followed the lieutenant and two other firefighters up the stairs to the third floor. The clouds, dark as a new-moon midnight, wrapped around him like a steaming sheet, and the heat forced every man down to his knees, almost to his belly. Just inside the hallway, maybe six feet from the stairs, the lieutenant leaned in close to Mike. “I want you to stay here,” he shouted, straining his throat to force the words over the roar. “Turn your light on”—each man had a lamp powered by a brick-size battery clipped to his belt—“and stay in this doorway.”

Mike nodded, switched on the light by his belly. He was going to be the beacon man, the faint point of white shining through the smoke. The rescue guys crawled off into the murk, and Mike was alone in an inferno. The sound was deafening, as if a thousand thunderheads had dropped from the sky and surrounded him, enveloped him, and erupted all at once, rumbling and popping and snapping. He waited only five minutes, maybe six, long enough for the point men to scuttle through a handful of small rooms and follow his light back to the stairs, but it seemed like an hour. He cursed himself. “Shit,” he thought. “What the fuck have you gotten yourself into?” He considered the fact that he could actually die, choking on poison or screaming from third-degree burns.

He hustled down the stairs with the rescue crew, gulped fresh air, wiped smears of sweat and ash across his brow. Then he was sent back inside, this time with Dennis Collins and a squad from Engine 4. They were ordered up to the second floor, where the fire was rooted in rooms that ran down both sides of a narrow hallway. They took up a position a few feet down the corridor, between two doors, one on the left and one on the right, that opened into small rooms howling with flames, fire so dense it appeared as solid, writhing blocks. The nozzle man pivoted to the right and opened the flow. Hundreds of gallons a minute poured into the first room, a torrent that took four men to control. They moved the nozzle in a pattern, sweeping it up, then down, over a few inches, up, down, washing the entire room with cold water.

Finally, the fire cooled, blacked out, the hot orange replaced by heavy smoke. The men on the hose pivoted left and opened the nozzle into the opposite room. Up, down, over, up, down, over. Then, behind them, a rush of boiling heat and the fast, deep whoosh of an explosion. The room they'd just finished washing had reignited, the smoke catching fire from the smoldering heat.

The men held their ground, battling both fronts, washing one room, then the next, then twisting back to attack the one that had blown up again. There was a crack in the air above them, a bang that broke through the drone of the fire. A fiery beam collapsed through the ceiling, crashing down on Dennis. A glancing blow, enough to cut him but not knock him off his feet. He shook it off. He was the senior man on the floor, an ex-marine, disciplined, brave but not foolish enough to stay in a fight he was clearly losing.

“Hey, we're not gonna win in here,” he hollered. “We gotta start backing out. C'mon, back it out.”

“No, we can do it,” one of the men shouted back. “We can do this.”

“No, we can't,” Dennis repeated. “Let's go. Back it out.”

The commanders on the scene were already ordering the building evacuated. With the roof already collapsed and fire everywhere else, there was too much of a risk of another floor giving way, of a man getting disoriented in the fog. All the men fell back to a defensive perimeter, aimed their hoses at 728 Main, and opened them up. “Surround and drown,” they call it. Put the wet stuff on the red stuff until the red stuff gives up.

The red stuff gave up soon enough. The main fire was out by four o'clock, a little more than an hour after the first alarm had sounded. But it seemed like an eternity to Mike. And the night wasn't even close to being over. There were hot spots, stubborn pockets of fire, that needed to be hit up close. And the bodies had to be dug out of the rubble. The firemen found nine corpses that night. The tenth would be recovered almost a week later, buried beneath bricks and charred timbers in the basement. And the eleventh was Olivine Moxley, who was so badly injured when she jumped from a third-floor window that she never got out of the hospital before she died four years later.

An hour after dawn, the pace finally slowed enough that some of the men could take a short break, at least get off their feet. Six of them worked one of the last hot spots, soaking down a pile of embers on the fourth floor for thirty minutes. When the fire was out, they were ordered down a ladder on the south side of the building. Ronald Paradis hauled himself through the window and started feeling his way down the rungs. Above him, three men waited for him to clear the ladder. Below him, in front of the building, Mike was lowering himself onto the rear plate of Ladder 7, thankful to finally sit.

Then a snap, like a desiccated bone cracking in two. Mike looked up. The south wall was collapsing from the second floor up, tumbling into the alley. Paradis looked up. A brick plummeted toward his face. He lunged for the hose dangling next to the ladder, grabbed it hard, pulled it into his chest. The brick hit him square in the face. He hung on, unconscious but instinctive, and slid to the ground. Two firemen broke his fall.

Paul Belculfine reached for a beam as the floor fell out from under his feet, caught it with one hand and one leg, like a cowboy who couldn't quite right himself on his horse. Rubble rained down, smashing his face, breaking his cheekbones. Still, he hung on for almost three minutes, until two men could carry him down a ladder.

The two other men on the fourth floor, Danny O'Keefe and Lt. Russell Perry, dropped with the building, the remnants of the wall avalanching on top of them. They were buried for almost five minutes before their comrades dug them out.

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

B
Y THE TIME
M
IKE 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.

M
ike 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.”