Report From Engine Co. 82 - Dennis Smith [1]
Engine Company 82, where I worked from 1966 to 1973, was then the busiest fire company in the most desperate neighborhood of the country’s largest city, a place where the American records were held for crime, poverty, illness, and deprivation of all kinds. The South Bronx also held the record for fires. Engine Company 82 responded to about nine thousand alarms each year, about a third of them for emergencies like shootings, knifings, car accidents, suicides, drug overdoses, and any one of a hundred terrible things that can happen to a person who has no money, no education, no job, and no future.
The next third were false alarms, a strange but predictable by-product of the lawlessness and ignorance that inhabits impoverished neighborhoods. The random and seemingly innocuous pulling of a false alarm can and often does end up being an act of malicious criminal manslaughter, for when the fire trucks are responding to a false alarm at one end of the district, they’re unable to save lives at the other.
The final third were the alarms for fire. In our district alone, an average day brought about ten or twelve fires, almost all of them deliberately set. Two or three each day grew into second, third, or fourth alarm fires that entailed heavy risk for the firefighters trying to contain them. The South Bronx was a dangerous place, and even today I’m not sure whether it was more dangerous for the firefighter or the average citizen.
Katherine Anne Porter once suggested that sometimes a book will find its author, rather than the other way around, and I think that’s true of this book. The story of the extraordinary and selfless work of firefighters needed to be told; by happenstance, I wanted to be a writer, I wore a helmet already dark with the soot of a hundred fires, and I worked in the busiest fire company in the history of the New York Fire Department—and perhaps the world. So a book that needed to be written found me.
Not long after my letter appeared in the Times, The New Yorker published an article about me titled “Fireman Smith” in which 1 discussed literature in general and William Butler Yeats specifically. This article in turn prompted an editor at McCall Books to query whether I’d ever considered writing a book about being a firefighter. I responded like, well, a fireman responding to an alarm. I knew that before me was a story few people knew, and I felt challenged by the act of writing the way mountain climbers are confronted by mountains.
I loved writing about the never-ending excitement, the bravado of the firefighters, and the countless stories of human adversity and trial. Some days I found myself sitting on the edge of my chair as excited by the writing as by a fourth alarm fire. When the last sentence was typed, I felt my modest goal had been accomplished: to honestly depict the everyday trials of an urban fireman.
The 1960s was a tempestuous period for America, a time that might be remembered as the age of riots. The “Burn-baby-burn” syndrome, coupled with a growing distrust of any authority figure—be it government, police officers, or firefighters—led to a historically high rate of fire. And in the deprived, impoverished world of the South Bronx, people believed it was better to burn the neighborhood called ghetto than to continue to acquiesce in its everyday life.
Three decades later, I returned to the streets of the South Bronx, accompanying the fire chief as he worked the night shift. As I studied the look, the smell, and the feel of the streets, I realized so many things had not changed: families living in unkempt, inadequate housing, filthy alleys and backyards, the polluted air that comes with overcrowding. The firefighters, though, are responding to far fewer fires than before, mostly due to a heightened intolerance of crime and the dissipation of the radical political mentality of the Vietnam era. Engine Co. 82 now responds to about 3,800 alarms a year, down from 9,000 when this book was written. Yet, the firefighters still crawl through garbage- and debris-smutted hallways, still respond