by Earl Emerson
The scanner tells me Ladder 3 and Attack 6 are both in service.
I dash downstairs to the basement, passing the young women on two. I light the oily rags and race back upstairs screaming, “Fire! Fire!”
The two young women take up the call and begin skipping up and down the hallway pounding on doors, shrieking, “Fire! Fire! Fire!”
As soon as two clears of people, I step back downstairs and light the vacant apartments, one at either end.
Now all I have to do is sit in my window with my babies and wait. Oh, yeah.
71. BABY TAKES A DIVE
The radio is giving out the call information when I climb up into the apparatus, only to be greeted by a brain-splitting sound—Attack 6’s air horn. Gliniewicz has stomped on the button and kept his foot on it, trying to punish a driver who was stalled behind a Metro bus at the bus stop just south of the station. Because of the blast, I miss a good portion of the run information.
I switch the radio to channel one, the fire channel, as Attack 6 launches off the ramp. We head into the pall of gray diesel smoke behind the engine.
I am thinking about the dosimeter. It is a confirmation of what Earl Ward told me about my father struggling with a second SFD member the night he went into the basement. Slaughter had been the firefighter in civilian clothes that night. They struggled, and my father tumbled into the basement. Then, according to Earl Ward, Slaughter didn’t raise a hand to help him.
The fire call is on East Cherry at Twenty-sixth.
“The Harvey,” mutters Towbridge as he swings Ladder 3 wide on Twenty-third to pass cars.
“What’s The Harvey?” I ask.
“It’s an apartment house. Three stories. Tall ones.”
I hear the bells on the MSA air masks in back as Rideout and Crapps slip into their shoulder harnesses and open the main valves. They will be ready when we arrive. The second-in units should have been Engine 25 and Ladder 10. Instead, we were getting Engine 2 from downtown, Engine 8 and Ladder 6 from the top of Queen Anne Hill. They will be lucky to get here inside of ten minutes.
“Attack Six,” says the dispatcher. “Be advised. We’ve had several callers on this. Heavy smoke showing from an apartment house. One caller says she sees jumpers.”
“Attack Six, okay,” says Slaughter.
All the other nearby units are on other calls. It is us and Attack 6 only. This is going to be a bitch.
I review our options. We are eight blocks away. An apartment house. Middle of the night. The life hazard will be appreciable. Virtually everybody will be home.
We see smoke before we round the corner onto Cherry—quick-moving, dense black smoke that signals a structure fire, one that probably has a good toehold.
“Jesus Christ!” blurts Crapps from the crew cab behind us. “Would you look at that?”
“Listen up, people,” I say. “We’ll put the stick up. We’ll take whoever we see first, then we’ll do a systematic search inside. Stay calm and don’t get distracted. You can do a whole building in minutes. Start near the fire and work your way out. Got it?”
“Got it,” says Rideout, her lips dry with anticipation.
“Jesus Christ!” exclaims Crapps.
“We got overhead trolley lines,” Towbridge warns.
“I know.”
“Is there an alley behind?” I ask.
“I don’t know what’s in back, but it ain’t no alley,” says Towbridge.
“Jesus Christ!” says Crapps again.
Our fire is on the right side of the street, a skinny brick building, the tallest for several blocks in either direction. A simple rectangle, the long side facing the street. Smoke is pouring from the front door and from windows on the second floor.
Gliniewicz blows his air horn to move the gawkers. He loves that horn. Slaughter gives his radio report before they come to a full stop. “Attack Six at twenty-six zero one East Cherry. Heavy smoke showing from the front door of a three-story apartment building. We’re laying a two-and-a-half through the front door. Second-in engine, give us a supply. Passing command.”
As we close in, I see one face in a window at the west end of the building. A second face hanging out a third-floor window over the main entranceway, an elderly black woman waving a hanky. While there is heavy smoke elsewhere, there is only light smoke behind her.
As we pass the entrance, three civilian men stumble out the front steps. None of the onlookers in the small cluster at the bottom of the steps moves to help these men. Some are watching the fire engine. Others are holding their collars or scarves over their faces to filter the smoke.
When the engine stops in front of us, Towbridge looks at me and I signal to keep moving.
I instruct Towbridge to angle the aerial apparatus at the east end of the building, far enough off Cherry to avoid the power lines and trolley wires, but close enough so we can shoot the stick up along the face of the building if need be. We can also access the east end of the roof from here.
I turn to the two firefighters in the crew cab. “Go inside. I saw one person on the second floor and one on the third.
“Put up the stick,” I say to Towbridge. I get on the radio. “Ladder Three at. We have a three-story residential apartment complex approximately eighty by two hundred feet. We’re initiating search and rescue and putting up the aerial on side B. Passing command.”
When the dispatcher doesn’t acknowledge, I repeat the message. Around the corner I hear Gliniewicz revving the pump engine. Several teenage girls in front of us are screaming. When the dispatcher doesn’t respond to my second message, I say, “Dispatch from Ladder Three?”
“Ladder Three, switch to channel two.”
Damn. Most fire responses are on channel one, but tonight the channel is full, so they’ve sent us on channel two. I missed it back at the station in all the noise of the engines and Gliniewicz’s air horn. I’d heard Slaughter’s report due to the scanner feature on the radio. Losing precious seconds, I repeat my report on channel two.
I slip my MSA backpack and bottle out of the compartment and walk around the corner to evaluate the situation. Zeke and Slaughter haven’t gone in yet. Across the street LaSalle and Connor are hauling a long section of four-inch hose toward a second hydrant down the street. They’ve followed us from Station 6 and found an opportunity to be useful. The closer hydrant is blocked by a car.
There are no other fire department vehicles in sight. Just Ladder 3 and Attack 6 and the FIU Suburban.
Rideout is heading up the stairs at the front of the building, but Crapps is on the sidewalk looking up. The elderly black woman in the third-floor window appears to be in danger of falling out. In her arms is a baby wrapped in a blanket.
Crapps is yelling at her, but I can’t hear what he says over the sound of Engine 6’s motor. I’m sure the old woman can’t either. She offers the bundle out the window as if to drop it. More smoke is pushing out the opening behind her.
“Don’t do it!” Crapps yells frantically. But she’s old and confused, and anybody can see she is about to drop the baby.
Next thing I know the baby blanket and whatever is inside is sailing through the air. My brain is racing. Below, Crapps has dropped the axe and battle lantern and has stretched out both arms.
Crapps is just over six feet, muscular, a star ball player, according to the guys at Thirteen’s, a man who can dunk a basketball one-handed. If anybody can catch a baby, it is Crapps.
The bundle hits his arms and knocks him down, exploding across his legs in a burst of gray material. Dust spreads around Crapps’s supine figure in a small mushroom cloud.
I get to him just before Rideout does. “Oh, God!” Crapps says. “I think it’s broken.”
“What? What’s broken?” I ask.
“My leg. I think my knee’s broken. Oh, God!”
“Where’s the baby?” Rideout asks, unfurling the plaid baby blanket and finding nothing but a ripped-open sack of cement. All three of us are choking in the dust. I reach down and
palpate Crapps’s right leg gently. It’s broken, all right.
“Where’s the baby?” Rideout asks.
“There’s no baby,” I say. “It’s the pyro.”
Together we begin dragging Crapps out of range. We get about eight feet when the second sack of mortar mix, this one without a blanket, splatters behind us. We feel the sidewalk shudder with the impact. “Look out!” Rideout yells.
Together Rideout and I park Crapps in front of Attack 6, where the first-in medic unit will find him.
“Let’s go search,” I say to Rideout. The window above us is empty now.
Before we go up the steps, I collar Gliniewicz and tell him to warn incoming firefighters about the cement bags. He hears me, but I cannot tell if it’s registering. He is watching LaSalle and Connor at the hydrant across the street. His supply lines are still flat.
As we are going in, two civilians emerge from the building. A man and a woman, mid-twenties, tattoos and body piercings, barely dressed, barefoot. I tell them to go left, that somebody is throwing things out of the windows to the right. Once outside, the woman screams, “Save them. Aren’t you going to save them?”
When I go back out to see what she’s pointing at, I spot two African American males in a window, one of them bloody, probably from breaking the window. They are waving a dish towel, holding their shirts over their faces, heavy black smoke billowing out behind them.
“Change of plans,” I tell Rideout. “Ladder.”
As Rideout and I walk around the ring of gray dust on the sidewalk, I hear more sirens in the distance. I yell to the two men in the window that we are getting a ladder for them.
We secure a thirty-five, carry it at waist height, and throw it up. I get behind while Rideout grabs the halyard and raises it, then we drop it against the building. Rideout scrambles up while I foot the ladder to keep it from walking out. She uses her axe to clean the glass out of the window, then brings the first man down, her arms grasping the beam of the ladder around him.
She goes back up immediately. “You all right?” I ask the man, who wears only a pair of black jeans. Both forearms are covered in blood. He is staring at something behind me. When I turn around, I see Crapps lying in the street on his back, his head propped on his helmet. He has a .357 pistol gripped in both hands and is pointing it at the third-floor window where the old woman had been. I can’t see anybody in the window, but that doesn’t mean Crapps can’t. The revolver is cocked.
Across the street a red Suburban with Battalion 5 plates on the doors comes to a screeching halt. Kay Eddings leaves the siren on for a moment after she parks, deafening anyone nearby. I see Gliniewicz, aka Mr. Airhorn, at the pump panel shaking his head over the siren. Rideout comes down the ladder with the second victim.
“What now, Lieutenant?” Rideout asks.
“Keep an eye on the windows for more victims.”
Heavier black smoke is coming out the front door now. Two medics appear from behind Ladder 3. One asks if anybody needs help. The other stops in her tracks, staring at Crapps and his Magnum.
Eddings comes across the street toward me in a fast waddle. “Wollf? What the fuck’s happening here? The second-in unit is supposed to take command. Shit! You know that!”
When I reach Crapps, I bend down and put my gloved hand between the hammer and the frame of the pistol, then pull it out of his hands. “Give that back,” Crapps says. “That old lady’s going to kill somebody.”
The medics come in while I let the hammer down on the pistol and walk toward our rig with it. Before I can reach the apparatus, somebody grabs my shoulder and tries to spin me around. Chief Eddings. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing with a gun? You know we’re not allowed to have guns in uniform. You stupid shit!”
A second engine finally shows up just as the supply line from the hydrant to Attack 6 begins filling. The crew from Engine 2 is climbing off. Smoke is beginning to pour out the east end of the building near our truck now.
“Attack Six reporting a basement fire,” says Slaughter over the radio. “We’re getting water on it now.”
“It’s a basement fire,” Eddings says, looking at me. “I want you to ventilate so all these people can get out. Put fans up. Now!”
“There’s more than one fire. The fans aren’t going to help.”
“He said it was a basement fire. Now ventilate this motherfucker.” Eddings heads toward the front door of the building to intercept Engine 2’s crew, who are hooking up a hose line to Attack 6. A policewoman who’d listened to Eddings’s tirade gives me a look I wish I could save on videotape.
As I watch Eddings walk, I realize she is heading through our war zone. “My baby. My baby,” shouts the old woman above us.
It is almost comical to watch Eddings turn around in a complete circle and then finally look up. The figure above has another package wrapped in a blanket.
Judging from the contents of the first two drops, I am confident our “victim“ is about to throw a forty-pound bag of concrete mix at Chief Eddings. Three stories isn’t far, but it’s enough to kill someone. From this angle I see a man in blackface dressed as a woman. He looks at me, and a spark of recognition passes between us. He smirks.
It is Earl Ward.
By now two men from Engine 2’s crew are alongside Eddings under the window.
The baby blanket is teetering on the lip of the windowsill. The firefighters below the window are each more eager than the next to make the catch, to be the hero.
As the package slowly begins to roll over the lip of the windowsill, I sprint. Hertlein, who’s shown up from nowhere, sees what I am about to do and steps in front of me. I sideslip him. Later, I realize he thinks he is keeping me from saving the baby, that he doesn’t want me to get the glory. I take three long running steps toward the trio under the window and hit them broadside with my body, Eddings first, the other two behind her. We go down like bowling pins, bodies, bunkers, plastic helmets, and compressed air bottles all clattering to the sidewalk.
A fraction of a second after I hit them, the bag explodes in the tangle of our feet.
Above us Ward has disappeared in the smoke.
The collision has broken Eddings’s glasses. She is trying to get out from under somebody’s legs, shrieking that I am an idiot and deserve to be fired, that I am on suspension as of now.
Having seen the event from start to finish, Chief Hertlein discounts her rants and says to me, “Nice move. I want you to get in there and ventilate that building. Right now, mister! Get your troops moving.”
“You’re going to have to assign the next-in truck. We’ve got rescues. Nobody’s searched yet.”
“You ventilate that place and the rescues’ll take care of themselves.”
“The hell they will. We’ve only got a few minutes. Maybe less.” It is usually true that a well-ventilated building is easier to search, but this building is already like a sieve. It has too many openings for the fans to work effectively. Or at all.
“Chief! God damn it, Chief. You gotta get us more teams in there,” says Slaughter, interrupting. “We don’t have any backup, and we’ve got one helluva basement fire.” Slaughter’s face piece is dangling around his neck, his reserve bell ringing. He is furious.
“Nobody’s been giving us a lick of help. We were in that basement all by ourselves! We took a beating you wouldn’t believe. You don’t do something fast, you’re going to lose the whole goddamn building!”
Flames and heavy smoke are coming out at the east end. Heavy black smoke is being pumped out the center window on floor three, where the old woman had been.
“I’m going to call this a defensive fire,” Hertlein says. “I want all our personnel out now.”
I move toward Ladder 3, signaling to Rideout with my eyes that I want her to follow. Behind, I hear Eddings screaming my name, cursing like a sailor. The others know it, but she is too angry to realize I’ve just saved her life.
72. RESCUING HALF-WITS
Rideout a
nd I cover and jog up the painted concrete steps in front of the building, stepping over hoses, feeling more secure as we get under the fascia over the entranceway, where at least we don’t have to worry about sacks of cement falling out of the sky.
I can’t help but wonder why Earl Ward is still in the building. Why he’s throwing projectiles at us like a man in a besieged castle. Usually he’s long gone after setting a fire. Is it possible he’s stuck in his own trap? It’s obvious from the smoke patterns that he’s set multiple ignitions. There is too much smoke on two and three for a lone basement fire.
We are alone inside. The crew of Engine 2 is on the sidewalk, and Zeke and Slaughter are outside getting fresh air bottles. I can only guess why they ran out of air so quickly. The fire has been declared a defensive battle, which means hose streams will be directed from the sidewalk rather than from inside. We aren’t supposed to be in here, but I am not going to leave possible victims to fend for themselves while we squirt water through the windows from the sidewalk.
We search two apartments using the thermal imager; both units are filled with smoke and empty of inhabitants. At the west end of the floor, flames lick out a doorway that leads to the basement. Farther down the hallway near the center of the building we locate another stairwell. It is a long upward flight and is clogged with dense smoke.
Despite the fact that we can’t see the walls, we manage to search the entire first floor in less than two minutes, kicking in locked doors, dashing through each apartment in search of the young, the old, the inebriated, the handicapped, anybody in need of rescue. Some of the apartments have only light smoke in them. Others have smoke down to the floor. Midway through our search we run into two incoming members from Engine 2 who are looking for the basement fire. We point them in the right direction. Apparently they haven’t gotten word that this has turned into a defensive fire. That, or Hertlein has changed his mind.
We hear a phone ringing in one of the apartments. Except for two televisions left on, the first floor is devoid of life. Oddly, one of the smoke-dimmed televisions displays live video of this very building from the KIRO TV chopper. It is shocking to see the thick column of smoke above us.
