by Earl Emerson
Inside at the security desk they found a bewildered county chief surrounded by three county firefighters and a couple of building security people. There were alarms on twenty of the seventy-six floors, floor sixteen being the lowest, the highest seventy-six, although the report by phone to the security desk was that the smoke on seventy-six was extremely light. The first real smoke was on sixteen.
Nobody’d been able to make the elevators work, so a team of county firefighters ran up the stairs to sixteen, where they reported via portable radio that the stairwell was full of thick, black smoke. They’d been forced to axe open the door to sixteen, which should have unlocked automatically when the building went into alarm.
They investigated sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen, and twelve minutes later reported a small room fire on what they believed was the north side of the building on eighteen. They radioed that they were going to hook up the two hundred feet of hose line a second team had lugged up to the standpipe in the stairwell and make an attack on the fire. The officer in charge was a county lieutenant, and he seemed to know his stuff. He said they thought the fire was being fed fresh air from an unknown source, possibly a broken window.
Diana hoped it was only a room fire on eighteen and that the smoke on the other floors had drifted up or been pumped down through ductwork. A room fire on eighteen was doable. More likely it was the malfunctioning ventilation system in the building, Diana thought. There was smoke on too many floors. The elevators were not running. Doors that should have been open were locked. Finney had predicted this.
Three minutes later, the upstairs team reported they were not receiving water from the stairwell standpipe. Outside, Diana had seen Engine 10 pumping into the building’s connections, so there should have been water. The county chief dispatched a pair of firefighters to trace down the problem, then told the firefighters on eighteen they’d have to wait.
At the incident command post on four, the county chief, two of Seattle’s newly arrived lieutenants, and a pair of firefighters from Station 10 who were familiar with the building began poring over the heavy, yellow, looseleaf binders that held the prefire plan for the building.
The lobby was filling rapidly with weepy civilians who’d straggled down one or another of the smoky stairwells and were stumbling around the open spaces on four, trying to figure out where to go next. Many had come down without car keys or purses or coats. All were coughing; one woman vomited. Several more mutual aid companies from outside the city showed up, most from jurisdictions where the tallest buildings were four or five stories. An alarm in a seventy-six-story building had to be daunting for them. Diana knew it was certainly daunting for her.
Diana remembered a fire they’d had at the Morrison Hotel. The Morrison was only five stories, but one of the elevators hadn’t worked, so they’d been jamming men and equipment into the remaining tiny, slow-moving elevator. Most of their lines, pump cans, ladders, and fans had been hauled up four flights of stairs, and she still remembered how so many of the firefighters, after a couple of trips up and down those stairs wearing fifty pounds of protective equipment and carrying another twenty or thirty of firefighting gear, had knelt by open windows in the hallway, gasping for breath.
An Engine 10 lieutenant, Wilder from A-shift, quickly took the overtimers and the personnel from outside fire departments and began forming them into teams, passing out assignments as they came up. They established a medical area downstairs in the food court. A team of three firefighters was sent outside to set up a base area well away from the building, where the incoming apparatus would park. They announced the command post would be on floor four, which was actually at street level from the Fifth Avenue side of the building.
“What about all these other floors in alarm?” asked the county chief, who turned out to be from Bothell, a small city at the north end of Lake Washington. “When do we send somebody to investigate?”
Lieutenant Wilder said, “Use sixteen for staging. Send a backup team for the first crew, an RIT to back up both of them in case they get into trouble, and then have extra crews investigate the higher floors one by one. Bottom to top. We’re going to have to send runners up with spare bottles so they can change right there in the stairs. It’s all we can do.”
“What good’s a backup team without water?” asked the chief.
“We’ll get water. We also have to pressurize those stairwells. The building engineer is on his way.”
During the next few minutes they received reports over in-house phones—just before they inexplicably conked out—that there was smoke on floors eighteen through twenty, on twenty-six, sixty and sixty-one, seventy-six, as well as unconfirmed reports that smoke had been sighted drifting off the roof. “Probably coming out the vents,” said one of the nearby county firemen, but even as Diana wondered how anyone could see smoke coming off the roof in this fog, she began to doubt the veracity of some of the information they were receiving.
By now forty or fifty civilians were wandering the lower floors, cleaning personnel and office workers who’d been putting in overtime. There were gawkers and a couple of homeless men who’d walked in off the street carrying bedrolls. Even as they organized the rest of the fire, the command post area began to deteriorate into bedlam.
Diana remembered reading about the First-Interstate Bank fire in Los Angeles, where the flames could be seen from eight miles away. She hated to compare this to the First-Interstate, because she had a gut feeling this was going to be worse. For starters, L.A. had poured four hundred firefighters into the effort. Seattle had two hundred on-duty firefighters, so even if they used the entire shift, they would need another two hundred to duplicate L.A.’s effort, as well as another fifty or so to give minimal coverage to the rest of the city.
So far, including the county chief, who was overwhelmed with the situation, Diana counted sixteen firefighters on the command floor, a few more upstairs, another handful outside. The building security people were tied up trying to explain to the firefighters how the fire suppression systems worked, even though none of the fire suppression systems seemed to have activated properly, none that is but the piercing whistle and loud honking from the alarms. A firefighter from 6’s finally took the bull by the horns and broke the closest speakers off the wall with a pike pole. It was remarkable how much confusion the noise alone had caused.
A Seattle air rig arrived, and spare masks and bottles were brought in for the overtimers to use. The man running the up elevator would take people up and come down empty. The man in the down elevator would go up empty and come down full. Trouble was, the elevators weren’t working.
Waiting for an assignment with the others, Diana drifted over to a console of television monitors in the security enclosure, where she was astonished to see one of the upper floors had dozens of people milling about in formal dress.
“What’s this?” she asked a short, balding man of around thirty, who sat in front of the monitors reading a magazine called Combat Readiness Quarterly. The building security personnel all wore dark gray blazers, and she’d heard rumors they were ex-FBI men, though that was hard to believe. This guy seemed particularly unimpressed with their predicament.
“Some sort of wedding party,” he replied, growing more interested when he looked up and saw Diana.
“Those people don’t even look like they know the building’s in alarm.”
“Oh, they know all right.” He sat up straight. “They’re on emergency power up there right now.”
“How many people are in the building, total?”
“Probably a couple hundred.”
“What floor is that?”
“Seventy-five.”
“So why don’t we send someone up there to bring them down?”
“The elevators above forty aren’t working. In fact, we’ve been having trouble with these down here. We’re trying to figure it out now.”
“What about the stairwells? I thought they were automatically pressurized with clean air when the build
ing went into alarm? Why don’t they come down the stairs?”
“Maybe they’re supposed to be pressurized, but they’re all smoky now. I don’t know how that’s supposed to work, but you could be right. Hey, is it hard to get in the fire department?”
“It’s not hard at all,” Diana lied. “I think you should sign up.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely.”
Diana knew that in L.A. the First-Interstate Bank fire had burned at temperatures close to two thousand degrees, that it had taken most of the night to extinguish. Yet there was one notable difference between that fire and this: Except for a few stranded office workers and about forty maintenance personnel, L.A.’s building had been vacant. The Columbia Tower was like a bee colony.
It was all too easy for smoke and heat to travel upward and sometimes downward in a high-rise building via plumbing and electrical chases, ventilation shafts, air-conditioning ducts, elevator wells, and tenant staircases. It was possible for a fire to be contained on a lower floor while people twenty or thirty stories higher were dying from smoke inhalation. It was even possible for this to happen with almost no smoke on the floors in between. And this was not a building where people could open windows for fresh air. Diana had seen a 250-pound man slam away at similar windows using a pick-head axe with absolutely no effect. None of the windows opened in the conventional sense, and the only ones that could be broken were those designated by small decals in the lower corner.
There were two ways of looking at this. The first as a tactical fire problem. The second as a trap. John had been right. Leary Way had been rigged. Bowman Pork had been rigged. And this building was rigged, too. They were standing on a big piece of cheese in a very tall mousetrap, cheese oozing up between their toes.
In L.A. they’d done their rescues with fire department helicopters and teams of specially trained paramedics who’d rappelled down the outside of the building from the roof. Seattle didn’t have any helicopters, nor did they have rappelling paramedics. Even if they did, Diana knew the roof of this building was filled with antennae and microwave dishes and wouldn’t accommodate helicopters on a good night, much less in the fog.
Floor four, which acted as the lobby from Fifth Avenue and accessed most of the elevators, was still accepting stragglers from the smoky stairwells. These latecomers had traveled farther and looked worse than the earlier escapees. Because the doors to the stairwells kept opening and closing, the area soon began to reek of smoke.
Moments later Chief Reese rushed in, flanked by two administration chiefs who hadn’t seen combat in some time. This was going to be good.
Chief Reese began reorganizing in a surprisingly calm and methodical manner. After assigning division commanders, mostly lieutenants who would later be replaced with captains or chiefs, Reese ordered SPD to clear floor four of nonessential personnel and to have any civilian who’d been in the smoke taken downstairs to the medics.
Thirty-five minutes into it they managed to get water to floor eighteen. Thirty-five minutes was an unacceptable amount of time to leave a fire burning, and now reports from upstairs said it had spread to the entire wing. The original teams had been replaced by fresh troops, a move that had all but exhausted their meager resources. Diana was one of the few people left in staging, a factor she attributed to the county staging officer’s reluctance to put a female at risk. She could wait. There was going to be plenty of fire to fight.
Now that she was witnessing it firsthand, the whole thing seemed so much easier to pull off than she’d imagined. A natural gas leak at Northwest Hospital, twenty-one firefighters and assorted hospital personnel tied up in the process of evacuating two wings. A multicar accident on the 520 floating bridge with persons trapped. Eighteen firefighters and five units sent to that one, the bridge gridlocked with thousands of cars backed up into town. Two additional engines locked up in traffic because of the backup from the accident on 520. A warehouse burning in Ballard. A ship fire, also in Ballard. Short of a once-in-a-lifetime natural calamity, it was improbable, if not impossible, for this many large incidents to occur coincidentally at once. On the other hand, it would be easy for an individual to break a gas line at the hospital. Easier still to drop some debris from a moving truck and cause an accident on either of the two floating bridges that spanned Lake Washington.
She was thinking about all this when she saw Finney enter the building in his bulky yellow bunking suit.
61. CARRIED AWAY BY THE CROCODILE
Engine 10 was parked at the base of the Columbia Tower on Fourth Avenue, the motor roaring as it powered the dual stage internal water pump, hose lines sucking water from a nearby hydrant. Finney walked over to the engine and ran his hand along the underside of the wheel well on the driver’s side before going inside the building.
Once inside, he was directed up the frozen escalators to the command post on four where Chief Smith had been temporarily left in charge.
“John?” Diana came toward him in full bunkers, her coat unbuttoned, flashes of a Hawaii Ironman triathlon T-shirt underneath. “John? I should have believed you. I’m sorry.”
“You would have been crazy to believe me.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Try to get them to listen.”
“They have to listen now.”
“Don’t bet on it.”
Several homeless people who’d been asked to leave were protesting their ouster. On the other side of the room firefighters still awaiting assignments lugged equipment inside from Fifth Avenue, building a stockpile of compressed air cylinders, hoses, spare nozzles, chain saws, pike poles, forcible entry equipment, gas-powered fans.
Chief Smith was talking on a cell phone when Finney arrived. “Chief, whatever you think you know about a high-rise fire, put it out of your mind.”
“I’ll call you back,” Smith said into the telephone. “You know something I don’t, John?”
“I know if you fight this according to Hoyle, you’re going to lose people.”
Chief Smith grew more alert; he’d already lost two firefighters that year and didn’t need to lose more. “Did you have anything to do with this?”
“Of course not. But I know this place is booby trapped. Whatever you try, it’s going to backfire. Don’t go by the numbers, and don’t count on any of the building’s systems kicking in. I wouldn’t count on water from that engine outside either.”
“What engine? What are you talking about?”
“The engine pumping into the standpipe is a phony. All it’s doing is tying up the standpipe connection.”
“What do you mean a phony?”
“It’s not the real Engine Ten. It’s a fake built just for tonight.”
Staring resolutely at Finney, Chief Smith picked his white helmet up off the counter and held it under one arm. “Look around. Nobody has to tamper with any systems to make this bad! This is as bad as it gets. We’ve got what? Thirty firefighters? We need five hundred? Don’t tell me to break the rules. And don’t try to feed me any more of your harebrained conspiracy theories.”
Several people had been clamoring for Smith’s ear, and as he turned his attention to a police sergeant at his side, a large volume of ankle-deep water came gushing out the doorway of the nearest stairwell. Smith turned to Finney and said, “I guess that phony engine outside is pumping phony water, huh?” Several firefighters ran over to contain it, stacking rolled canvas tarps inside the landing to dike the flow. Even so, long fingers of water spread across the floor.
After a couple of minutes, Finney found Chief Reese speaking to Oscar Stillman in a cubbyhole on the other side of the elevators. Finney stopped just short of the corner and listened. “No, you will not call in a task force from Tacoma. Or from Bellevue. You will limit your losses, and you will fight a defensive fire.”
“Damn it, Oscar. I’m the chief, not you. And I am not going to let all those people upstairs die. You think that’s what I want as my legacy?”
“Screw
your legacy. Get those guys out of the stairwells. Then get as many civilians out as you can. After that, pull back. What we’re talking about here is saving firefighters’ lives.”
“I’m not going to pull twenty firefighters out so I can lose two hundred civilians.”
“You want me to spill my guts about Leary Way?” Oscar asked, lowering his voice.
“You do what you have to. Our first directive is to save lives.”
When Finney stepped around the corner, he looked at Reese. “God, I thought you were part of this. One day I saw you coming out of this building behind one of them.”
“I come out of this building every day. My wife works here.”
“I hope she’s not here now.”
“She’s home.”
“And you’re being blackmailed.”
Reese considered Finney for a moment. “Did you have anything to do with setting this?”
“Don’t look at me. Who checked out the building and told you it was invulnerable? Who’s telling you to pull out? Look, Charlie. Get somebody from the company that installed these systems and get them here fast.”
“I suppose we’re fakes, too?” Marion Balitnikoff stepped around the corner behind Finney, followed by Michael Lazenby in full battle gear. “And I suppose that rig we’ve got out in the street is a fake.”
“They’re part of it,” Finney said. “And yes, that rig outside is a fake.”
Reese said, “You’re going to have to leave, John. You’re in the way.”
1932 HOURS
Everyone’s attention was captured by four burly SPD officers wrestling with a firefighter in yellow bunkers. Diana’s heart leaped into her throat when she recognized Finney. Working together, they wrestled him to the ground and snapped handcuffs onto his wrists, one officer’s knee on his back, another putting his full weight on his neck. They dragged him through the foyer toward the doors on Fifth Avenue, past Reese and Smith, who both ignored the commotion, past the building security guards. It looked as if Finney were being carried away in the jaws of an animal, perhaps a great crocodile.
