Firetrap (29 page)

61. A FAST-RISING COLUMN OF BLACK SMOKE

TREY
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Everybody in the department carries a portable radio into fires, and every portable radio has an emergency button that is capable of sending a signal to the dispatchers indicating the firefighter is in trouble, yet you can count on your fingers the number of people who've activated their emergency buttons even once during their careers. For the most part, emergency buttons are activated by accident. When they're activated purposely, it is usually done too late, because by the time your typical firefighter decides things are hairy enough to push the panic button, he or she is finished anyway.

Nobody wants to appear to have panicked by calling an emergency unnecessarily. Firefighters pride themselves on being cool in all situations, and even if none of us say it aloud, a person who panicked would know at least some of his coworkers no longer felt he or she was trustworthy. At most large fires, Seattle keeps a team ready for downed firefighters, so that in less than a minute at least five people come busting in with hose lines, pry bars, thermal imagers, and extra air, but even then it takes time to locate a person. The rule is, don't run out of air. When modern materials are exposed to the combustion process, the by-products are so toxic a firefighter without a breathing apparatus may have only minutes of consciousness. Or seconds.

The second difficulty with the panic button is that you have to take your glove off to activate it. You can pick up a hot ingot in fire department gloves, climb a ladder, or work a power tool, but you cannot activate the emergency button, which means you'll be taking off at least one glove in an environment hot enough to melt plastic. You will be immediately incapacitated for many of the other tasks at hand. The two dead firefighters I'd seen who'd activated their buttons never got that glove back on.

The third issue with using the emergency button is that the button automatically transfers the sender to channel sixteen, a channel nobody but the dispatchers monitor. The thinking is you will push the button, get switched to sixteen, and avoid all the fire traffic that clutters the fire channel, thus enabling you to converse with the dispatchers in a timely manner. The dispatchers will then relay information from the trapped firefighter to the incident commander, who will relay it to the troops making the rescue. That is the theory. In actuality, the more layers of respondents a message goes through, the more likelihood of a miscommunication. Also, your average trapped firefighter has a lot on his mind, so it is not uncommon for him to forget he's been switched to channel sixteen with access only to the dispatcher.

On Wednesday night when I pushed my emergency button, all three issues came into play.

 

By that morning a lot of things had changed. I still hadn't decided when to drop the hammer on Stone. I had physical proof that he was included in the shenanigans that made the two Z Club managers feel they had the right to sidestep the law and that he was part of a cover-up in the chain of events that resulted in the deaths of thirteen civilians and one firefighter. Yet putting the tape out in the public domain might not get him prosecuted, although I had no doubt it would certainly ruin him politically. I'd been told by a lawyer the tape most likely would not be admitted into a court of law, but it might be used to get a grand jury started.

The previous Sunday I had rode Engine 28 for the first time in over a week. That night from work I surprised myself by asking Estevez to be my date for a dinner I'd reserved a month earlier. I'd planned to ask somebody special but had never settled on whom until then. Or maybe I'd known for a week. So last night we walked from her condo in Belltown to Teatro ZinZanni, a dinner club with a full-scale vaudeville show between courses: clowns, singers, tumblers, jugglers, and a trapeze act. Oddly, our arguments were not only friendlier but downright sexy.

Estevez's report would be ready for me to read in a day or two, and as soon as we were in agreement on its contents, we would release it. The report would be released simultaneously to the mayor, the Z Club Citizens for Truth committee, and the media. Estevez expected the demonstrations to end when the report came out. I expected them to grow worse.

“Care to make a bet?” I'd asked.

“What do you want to bet?”

“How about you lose, you cook a four-course meal for me, my brother, and Rumble.”

“And what are you going to put up against dinner?”

“I'll tune up your bike.”

“What's wrong with my bike?”

“Nothing a little tune-up won't fix.”

Anticipating an easy victory, she smiled. “You're on.” When we reached the front door of her building, I kissed her lightly on the lips, then told her I had to get home and get some rest for the twenty-four-hour shift I would be working the next day. For an instant I thought I saw just the faintest glimmer of disappointment that I wasn't coming up.

As for me, my wounds had mostly healed. The facial swelling had gone down and the fracture to my cheekbone would heal on its own. It was good to be back at work with Clyde and Kitty.

Tonight the mayor was planning to throw a bash on the 100-foot level of the Space Needle, ostensibly to celebrate his fifteenth wedding anniversary, but in reality to announce his candidacy for the governor's race that was going to be held in a special election in February, to replace our current governor who was leaving to take care of a wife with Alzheimer's.

During the day, Engine 28 caught five aid calls and a resuscitation. My friend Rumble was working a rare overtime shift on Engine 30. He'd called me at the station several times that day, bugging me about various little matters mostly pertaining to the “date” I had with Estevez the night before and explaining ad nauseam how he'd already spent the overtime money he hadn't yet received.

The trouble started just as we were about to sit down to dinner at Station 28. It was an alarm for a building fire on Martin Luther King Way near where they were tearing up the streets for the new train line, maybe fifteen blocks from the station. We would arrive first, which made me responsible for the initial size-up, fire report, and tactics. By the time we were rolling up Graham Street, already several blocks in front of the slower, heavier ladder truck, we could see it was a good-size blaze.

The dispatcher's radio update said, “Engine Twenty-eight, this is a report of a warehouse fire. We're getting a lot of calls on it.”

“Engine Twenty-eight okay,” I said on the rig radio. “We're on Graham Street, and from here we can see a fast-rising column of black smoke.”

“Okay, Engine Twenty-eight.”

Although we'd had a small house fire on our last shift, this would be the first good fire most of us had been to since the Z Club. “Looks bad,” said Kitty, who was a bundle of nerves at the best of times.

“Piece of cake,” I said. “We'll probably lay a manifold. You stretch the line. I'll give my radio report and meet you at the front door.”

“You got it,” Kitty replied, choking on a dry throat.

Martin Luther King Junior Way was one of two primary north-south arterials running through our district. It was a characterless roadway lined with strip malls, small shopping centers, tire shops, take-out chicken joints, and Vietnamese grocers. The road was four or five lanes across, and this section of it ran through a residential area that was home to African Americans, recent Asian immigrants, East African immigrants, as well as a significant Hispanic and South Sea island population.

It didn't seem like much at first, a forty-five by sixty-foot two-story building that had once housed a restaurant, later had been converted into a small church, and for the last year or two had, according to what I remembered, been vacant. It had a flat roof and windows along the parking lot. The side toward MLK had a door and one high window. All the windows were smoked over from the inside, and a column of black smoke was rising out of a heating/air-conditioning duct on the roof. Greenish-tinged gray smoke was puffing out around the doors. Clyde parked close enough that I could see padlocks on both sets of doors.

There was a hydrant close by, but Clyde signaled he wanted to park directly in front of the building on MLK, which we did. I told Kitty to forget the manifold and stretch the preconnect, two hundred feet of hose already connected to the pump.

On the radio, I said, “Engine Twenty-eight at Martin Luther King Junior Way South and South Lucille. Establishing King Command. We have a two-story wood-frame building with heavy black smoke showing from the roof. Engine Twenty-eight laying a preconnect through the front door. Engine Thirty-three, give us a supply. Engine Thirteen, lay a backup line. Ladder Twelve, use forcible entry on the front door and ventilate.”

The dispatcher was repeating my report and the various units were confirming assignments as I stepped to the rear of the apparatus and slid open my mask compartment. People were stopping their cars on MLK to watch, and I quickly got on the portable radio and said, “Dispatch from King Command, give us SPD for traffic control.”

“Okay, King Command. SPD for traffic control.”

There were more occupancies nearby, a strip mall and some parking spaces and a small Buddhist temple, but I wasn't focusing on any of them. Smoke was coming out from under the door, and it looked to be under pressure. The whole area tasted like a melting boot might.

By the time I got masked up and joined Kitty at the front door, a man from Ladder 12 was breaking the lock off the doors, kicking them open. Kitty and I took the now-charged hose line inside and into a mass of black and greenish smoke. This was one of those times when we prayed the truck company behind us would get a fan running in the doorway or go to the roof and cut a hole, because as soon as we crawled across the threshold, it got hot. The farther inside we went, the hotter it got. Visibility diminished to nothing.

Listening to ourselves breathe through the noisy regulators on our masks, we found ourselves in a long corridor, crawling along the floor, feeling the left wall for doors. Still without having dispensed any water, we found a door and opened it into a cavernous room that had far better visibility than the corridor. The opposite end of the room was filled with junk, old chairs, pews from when this was a church, dining tables, and stacks of personal belongings previous occupants had abandoned.

In the far corner, high up, we could see a smidgen of flame. I was on the pipe and hit it with a burst from a straight stream until steam filled the room and obscured my face piece, which I wiped instinctively with a glove. Now that visibility was decreasing, we moved by the quick memory fragment we'd received upon entering the room, pulling the extremely heavy, water-filled hose line in behind us, gathering an extra loop so we'd be able to negotiate the room freely.

With the hose line shut down, I could hear the fire crackling in the far upper corner of the ceiling, and then, as I stood in the heat, I could see another dab of orange. I hit it one more time, knowing more steam would come down on us.

Instead, the ceiling caved in and ripped the hose out of my hands.

It started behind us, but came down so quickly I wasn't sure which direction to run. It was coming down in chunks, shaking the floor, various objects landing with metallic thunking sounds.

I pulled Kitty's coat to indicate she should follow me, and we high-stepped through the junk toward the doorway, then made our way to the main entrance. There was no point in picking up the hose, which weighed over a hundred pounds with all the water in it and it was pinned to the floor by debris anyway; no point in risking our lives in a vacant building. We needed to get out as quickly as possible. We would fight this from outside.

In the main entranceway it was noticeably cooler, but when I turned to mention this to Kitty, she'd vanished. “Kitty!”

I started back down the corridor toward the room we'd just exited. “What the hell are you doing? Let's get out of here.” More objects crashed through the ceiling, large pieces of building material, judging by the sound. It was sootier and smokier than ever. I could barely see her, and she was only five feet from me. “Kitty, what the hell are you doing?”

“Getting the hose.”

“Screw the hose. We need to move. Let the city pay for it.”

But she wasn't going to let the city pay. She didn't want to write a letter explaining why we'd abandoned the line. Nor did she want to appear panicky by having run out of a building without every piece of equipment she'd hauled in.

I could hear her moving inside the doorway as more junk fell from the rooms above us, and then as I moved toward her, something large and heavy fell behind me, brushing the composite compressed air cylinder on my back and pushing me forward. The floor shuddered, and I stumbled into the room. More crap fell. A slow avalanche. Several lighter pieces hit my helmet and shoulders.

“Kitty! Get the hell out of here. Are you nuts?”

“Yeah, I guess I am. What was that?”

“I don't know. It sounded like an engine block.”

In the corner of the room flames were growing rapidly, but that wasn't our concern now. The hose line was buried under a ton of junk. It was as if we were at the bottom of a garbage chute, stuff hitting my shoulders, bombarding Kitty, raining on us. We would be lucky to get out of here without one of us sustaining a broken neck.

As Kitty reached me and we turned to exit the room, I could feel the heat coming down on us. We got low, almost in a crawl, and headed for the door, but before we reached the doorway, another volley of debris dropped out of the ceiling, large chunks landing in front of us. The building shuddered, and it all stopped.

“You okay?” I asked Kitty.

“I don't know. I think my shoulder's hurt.”

“Can you move?”

“As soon as I get all this crap off myself. Geez, it's getting hot.”