Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [124]
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 building 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.