by Sean Flynn
He was out of the Expedition, standing just outside the building, trying to get a read on it. A dozen men were inside, searching for flames that were hiding deep in the bowels, somewhere behind the solid brick walls. With no open windows, there was no telltale glow, no bright orange marker to give away the fire to the men on the street. It could be in a corner or in the middle or everywhere and on the first floor or the third or the fourth. Mike scanned the walls again. He realized he couldn't even tell how many floors were in the warehouse.
He clicked on his radio. “Franklin Command to the second alarm companies. I want you to stage under 290 until you hear from me. Just stage under 290 until you hear from me.”
“Engine 16 has that.”
“Scope 2 has that.”
“Engine 2”
“All companies stage on Franklin Street,” Mike said again. “Back away until we get a handle on this.”
He started toward a corner door, then stopped, looked up at the warehouse again, up into the sky. The smoke was still lazy, no worse than a factory smoke stack on the swing shift. Mike put his radio back to his mouth.
“Command to Fire Alarm,” he said. “Do we have any building information on this?”
A three-second pause before the reply: “I'm checking, Chief.”
Jay Lyons jumped from his seat in the Grove Street station when the second alarm sounded, three tones pricking his adrenal gland. On instinct, an overeager reflex, he took a hurried step toward Engine 3 before dispatch assigned any units.
Randy Chavoor chortled at him, brought Jay up short. “C'mon,” he said. “Sit down. You don't go on the second—it's 2 and 16”
A sheepish grin crept over Jay's face. “Yeah,” he said. “I knew that.”
Randy chuckled again. He liked Jay, admired his enthusiasm. Good fireman. He'd get his chance. Everyone did eventually.
9
MIKE HAD BEEN IN BAD BUILDINGS BEFORE. MORE THAN HE could count, and each dodgy in its own particular way. Some were dangerous because of they way they'd been constructed, like that warehouse on Jacques Street, with its reinforced storerooms and heat-sealing fire doors. Cellars, stone-walled pits with only one way in or out, were always risky. In the 1970s and 1980s, arsonists booby-trapped triple-deckers with plastic bags filled with gasoline tucked between the ceiling joists, little bombs that kept the fire spreading. A man pulling down plaster, if he wasn't careful, could get ten gallons of fuel dumped on his head.
Sometimes a building went bad for reasons no one could predict. There were too many variables in a fire. Maybe the flames would tickle a hidden stash of propane or maybe the wind would shift direction or maybe the rafters were rotted with age and moisture and would burn away twice as fast as the men chopping through the roof had guessed. Sometimes, the fire just got a head start, ran wild before the engines, ladders, and rescue could scream out of their stations, devoured the walls and the floors and the furniture, turned everything orange and hot and black and choking. Sometimes the men had to stand back, let the flames feed, corral the fire with the spray from a dozen hoses until there was nothing left to burn.
The worst fire in Worcester, Massachusetts, the inferno that killed the most people, eleven civilians, happened in the hours before dawn on July 11, 1973. Mike was a rookie, six months on the job, working Ladder 7 out of the Winslow Street station, a decrepit old wreck a few blocks west of downtown. There had been a shower late the night before, a light and misty rain, not hard enough to wash away the sticky summer heat. In a flophouse at 728 Main Street, five stories framed from timbers cut a hundred years earlier and faced in brick, the tenants kept their windows open to the breeze that blew in from the west. They were poor folks and low-rung working stiffs, janitors and transient laborers, aged shut-ins and welfare cases, the same demographic mix as the rest of Main South. People paying nineteen bucks a week to a flophouse landlord didn't get air-conditioning.
At about two-thirty on the morning of July 11, two teenage girls climbed a wooden porch attached to the second floor on the backside of 728 Main. Below them was an alley and, if they looked off the porch toward the horizon, the breeze would have brushed against their faces. Each one had a can filled with gasoline, which they splashed around the decking, and matches, which they lit and tossed into the puddles. Fire raced across the porch, a jagged seam of orange flitting and twisting on a blue cushion of hot gas, almost as if it were floating, hovering a centimeter above the floor. A tentacle of flame licked at the railing, then bit, found a hold, and started to climb. A lovely sight, beautiful and hypnotizing. They wanted to see the porch burn, but only the porch, wanted to watch the tangerine flickers and sparks, to gawk at the firemen who would stomp up the stairs with their hoses and axes, the night and the alley throbbing red and white.
Such fires were not unusual in Main South. Firemen on that side of Worcester had scrambled from one scene to the next for months, starting one night in February when a surly drinker threw a Molotov cocktail at a waitress in Longo's Lounge. From then on, it seemed that something was always burning, and quite often several things at once. On one day in April, two kids lit up an abandoned flophouse, a toddler with a pack of matches burned up his family's apartment, a bathroom was set on fire at 667 Main Street, followed by a garage on Charlton Street. The rooming houses on Main were favorite targets: the building across the street from 728 was destroyed on May 27, and the rear porches on the one next door had been set on fire twice that spring.
But this one, a kicky little arson on a run-down deck, overran the building. The wind from the west pushed the flames toward the brick facade, fed them fresh oxygen, teased them higher. At an open window, the fire reached inside, felt for something to cling to, grabbed hard and pulled itself in. Then it nearly exploded. The interior turned into a blast furnace, fresh air huffing through the windows, the bricks holding in the heat, the two forces complementing each other, the flames mating and multiplying. Five minutes before three o'clock, as the heat shattered glass and smoke clogged hallways, tenants started choking awake. The flames were already eating through the roof.
The first alarm came in at 2:59. Mike and the rest of the Winslow Street shift bolted out of their bunks. Mike had just cleared the pole down to the apparatus floor when the second alarm was sounded. He pulled on his boots and hauled himself onto Ladder 7, the truck already rumbling. The rear wheels hadn't hit the blacktop on the street when a third alarm was sounded. The fourth and fifth—which signify hellfire has been loosed on earth—were struck twelve minutes after the first, at 3:11.
The first engines on the scene tapped hydrants on the far side of the alley behind the building. But by then the fire had too much of an advantage. The rear was a sheet of flame, a lavish curtain that rose from the pavement, up the wall and eighty feet beyond, lighting a bank of smoke held low by the humidity. The fire had spread so far so fast that half the tenants never had time to stumble down the stairways. A few found ladders made from metal links or knotted rope in boxes beneath their windows. The rest were dangling from ledges or leaning over the sills, weighing the odds of surviving a multistory drop against the odds of being incinerated. Alexander Shemeth was one of those trying to decide, trapped in his fifth-floor apartment. He was sixty years old and everyone called him Hooks, on account of the prosthetics that had replaced the hands that were blown off by a dynamite cap twenty-one years earlier. He couldn't force his way through the smoke in the hallway, but he couldn't last much longer in his room, either. So he climbed through the window, twisted around until his chest was flush with the building, and set his hooks into the sill. He could operate a factory blowtorch with those hooks, could even cook with them. Maybe he could hang from a piece of limestone with them, too.
The hooks held to the ledge, but not to the man. When Ladder 7 pulled up to 728 Main, Hooks was crumpled on the ground, dead. The first thing Mike saw were the prosthetics, still dangling from the sill four stories above, wobbling against the building like small cornices that had broken loose.
People, backlit from the flames, screamed from almost every window above the second floor, their faces disappearing behind a draft of smoke, reappearing, vanishing again. A firefighter on the back of Ladder 1 scanned the upper floors, calculating who was in the most peril, steering the truck's long, steel arm from one window to the next. “Hang on,” he screamed. “Don't jump. Do not jump. I'm comin’ to get you. Just hang on.”
Mike was scared. He'd been in dozens of fires already, but only small ones, one alarms, two at most. Never something like this, something this bad, rampaging, voracious. “Lieutenant,” he asked his boss, “are people gonna die here tonight?”
Walter Rydzewski barely looked at him, too focused on the job. “They already have, kid,” he said.
The two of them grabbed a thirty-five-foot ladder and started toward the left side of the building, moving at a quick trot. Mike kept pace with Rydzewski, the ladder heavy on his shoulder. Halfway down the alley, he saw a blur of downward movement from the corner of his eye, just at the edge of his peripheral vision. A dull smack came next. Mike stopped short. A middle-aged woman lay on the pavement, mangled, her legs bent unnaturally beneath her torso, all of her still and quiet.
Mike tried to take a step toward her. Rydzewski felt the tug on the ladder, turned, barked. “What are you doin'?” he snapped, sounding both annoyed and incredulous.
“I'm trying to help her,” Mike said.
“What are you, nuts?” the lieutenant yelled at the rookie. “Forget her. She's down.” He jerked his head up and over his left shoulder, flung his arm toward the people wailing from the higher windows. “They're not. Let's go.”
Mike swallowed hard, then turned away. He matched his steps with Rydzewski's, the two of them humping down the alley to a spot where they could raise the ladder. He knew his lieutenant was right. A fire scene, like a battlefield, sometimes demands triage. There is no sense in trying to save the ones already out of danger. Once a body is out of the building, regardless of how it got there or in what condition, it becomes a concern for the medics. In any case, no one can save the dead.
Worcester firemen got twenty-two people out of 728 Main Street that night. For the next thirty minutes, they moved ladders along the perimeter of the building, setting them against the searing bricks, one man climbing up into the smoke and coming back down with a body slung over his shoulder. After the left side was clear, Mike was routed to the other end on a crew working a forty-five-foot ladder, one so long that it requires men to use long rods, called tormentor poles, to guide the tip into place. Once the ladder is raised, two men—or one if they're short-staffed, which the Worcester Fire Department was in the middle of the July vacation season—haul on a rope to raise the extension. Metal clasps, called pawls, eventually catch a rung to lock the whole contraption in place.
A young voice, a teenager at most, yelled from above. The ladder crew couldn't see through the smoke, couldn't see where the screams came from. They triangulated by the sound, put the forty-five-footer beneath where it seemed to be the loudest, and started raising, clipping the poles into place.
“Get rid of those fucking poles!” The district chief was next to them, hollering orders. “Put the poles down and get that fucking ladder up.”
The tormentors hit the ground and the ladder was manhandled into position, brute strength and adrenaline forcing it up. Less stable, less precise, but faster. Smoke swallowed the tip. Mike pulled on the rope, wrestling the extension. He felt a tug, then a deadweight. The ladder started to tip, lurching twenty degrees to one side. Someone, the screaming kid, was on it. The clasps hadn't set. The extension started to slide down. Mike fought the weight from above. “Get on this thing,” Mike yelled. “Someone get on this, the pawls aren't locked. The fucking pawls aren't locked!”
Another set of hands grabbed the rope, held it firm, pulled. A firefighter named Dennis Collins flashed past them, put his boot on the first rung, scrambled up into the cloud. As soon as he touched him, the kid passed out cold. Dennis caught him, lugged him to the ground.
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 en
ough. 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.
