Report From Engine Co. 82 - Dennis Smith [97]
I climb the stairs to the bunk room, hoping for an hour’s respite, but the bells intercede as I reach the top step, the twenty-third step.
We are at Charlotte Street again, and it is a false alarm. The men on the back step say nothing as Chief Niebrock radios the ten-ninety-two, the signal of a malicious false alarm. Knipps, Boyle, Royce, Valenzio, Lieutenant Welch—all of them are conditioned to accepting false alarms as a way of life, like climbing into pants in the morning, or stopping at an intersection for a red light. Things that must be done. False alarms that must be answered. But will it ever stop? Almost ninety thousand of them last year in this town, and the number rises from year to year. I am enraged. I won’t accept them as part of the job, not until the courts decide to send even a virgin child to jail for the malicious act. If a judge and his family were immolated in a downtown fire because firefighters were answering a false alarm elsewhere, then the judiciary would think of false alarms as a problem. But, it never happens that way. It happens here in the South Bronx, where people are poor, and not important enough to be concerned about.
Calm. Be calm, I tell myself. There are less tragic hypotheses to make. Think about the wear and tear of the pumper’s tires, and the cost of diesel fuel. Think about a burned and forgotten roast smoking in an oven, or a sparking chimney, or an overflowing bathtub. Things less serious than death.
I am looking at the bunkroom ceiling again, but I don’t bother to count the nails. I close my eyes. Each minute’s rest seems like an hour of sleep. It is eleven o’clock, and I have an hour before I begin housewatch duty.
We almost ate the elephant’s ears uninterrupted, but a woman stopped by in passing, and told of a garbage fire around the corner. Lieutenant Welch called the dispatcher, and we took it as a single unit call. The men of Ladder 712 were satisfied that we would extinguish the fire before someone pulled the alarm box, saving them a response. The pumper has left quarters seven times since we were at Charlotte Street. Three were false alarms. Two were abandoned cars, derelict, stolen, and stripped, and two were garbage fires, “outside rubbish” as they are called on the fire report.
Engine 85 and Ladder 712 caught a job on Longfellow Avenue. They were washing dishes and cleaning pots as the alarm came in. Chief Niebrock transmitted a second alarm on arrival, when he saw three frame houses afire. Fire in wooden frame buildings spreads like a fire on a dry prairie, and the flames soon grew to three-alarm intensity. But they held it to a third. Eighty-five will be there most of the night, and Seven-twelve will go off duty at twelve-thirty, their tour completed.
The hour passes quickly. I do not sleep, but the sixty minutes of inaction purges the fatigue and gives me new energy. Vinny Royce’s voice echoes from the apparatus floor, “You got it, Dennis.” I arise swiftly, and slide to the floor below. It’s time to begin my housewatch duty—three hours of recording bell transmissions, and answering telephones. From midnight to 3:00 A.M.
Vinny picks up a pack of cigarettes from the housewatch desk, smiles an appreciation of relief, and heads for the kitchen, free from the confinement of the housewatch area. I sit at the desk, the eighteen-inch department journal in front of me. The last entry logged in the book was “Engine 82 and Ladder 712 in service from Box 2700—MFA” (malicious false alarm). Directly under it I write the time in the margin: 2400 hours, midnight in military time. Next to the time I write, “Fireman Smith relieved Fireman Royce at housewatch. Department property, apparatus, and quarters in good condition.” I don’t know for sure that anything is in good condition, but the department regulations mandate the entry. If anything is stolen or broken now, everyone but me is covered. I am responsible for the next three hours, until I