Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [123]
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