Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [128]
The shorter firefighter, Murphy, said, “Doesn’t matter. If it’s not two, it will be. They don’t have water on it yet, so you know it’s going to lap. It’s going to gut the whole building. I wish I could remember what temperature steel loses its integrity at.”
“Two thousand degrees,” Diana said.
“It won’t be the heat,” said the second firefighter. “The smoke’ll kill those people upstairs long before the fire reaches them.”
“They better start evacuating this whole downtown core area,” said Murphy. “I think this is coming down.”
“Where is he?” asked the tallest policeman, approaching the firefighters. “Have you seen our prisoner?”
There was nothing in the street now but three engines, severed hose lines, and spurts of water taller than a man.
Diana watched as the officers spread out on the sidewalk trying to locate their prisoner. One by one, the fire department drivers ran to their rigs and moved them out of range. Somebody yelled to the drivers that base was being set up two blocks away on Sixth Avenue between Cherry and Columbia. While the police officers warned her to stay out of the street, she crossed Fifth Avenue on foot.
She found him two blocks away staring at her from the shelter of a darkened doorway, his hands still cuffed behind his back. Their eyes met. He seemed surprisingly calm, as if waiting for a bus. Or for her. “Just a minute,” she said, and walked to Ladder 9, opening compartment after compartment until she found their bolt cutters, then, sans cuffs, they walked back down the hill together. The police were gone. More hose lines were being laid to standpipe and sprinkler connections outside the tower, while other firefighters stood guard for falling objects; pumpers were set up to pump in tandem in order to build more pressure. They were going to have to raise the water an appreciable distance. No sooner had firefighters laid a line to a nearby sprinkler connection than a large wedge of glass fell and severed it, water gushing into the street like blood from an artery. Firefighters began raiding a construction site half a block away, carting plywood sheets to protect their hose lines. A group of civilians from a restaurant down the street helped.
Finney said, “They’re pumping all that water onto an open floor somewhere. They’re going to have to lay hose up the stairs as high as the fire.”
“The fire’s on eighteen,” Diana said.
“You mean the first fire’s on eighteen.”
They could hear trucks and engines as, two blocks away, the base area began filling with new arrivals. Most of the newcomers had sped from earlier emergencies with empty water tanks, half-empty air bottles, and dirty or missing equipment. Most of the firefighters Finney and Diana saw coming down the street were already exhausted.
Carrying a ladder at waist height, a tarp laid out on the rungs, equipment stacked on the tarp, a quartet of firefighters trudged down the sidewalk. Their load was so heavy they could barely walk. Although Diana warned the officer that, in order to avoid falling glass, the ongoing procedure now was to enter the Columbia Tower via the tunnel in the building across the street, he ignored her and made a beeline across the carpet of broken glass on Fifth Avenue. When one of them dropped a portable radio unnoticed, Finney pocketed it.
Listening to the division reports on the radio, they heard the officer who was running the operation upstairs say, “Columbia Command from Division Sixteen. We have a report from our standpipe team. They’re on fifty-one. They’re okay for now, but they’re trapped and out of air. They’ve encountered a lot of heat but no fire. No sign of any more survivors. None of the standpipe outlets they checked were open. The water’s coming from above them. I’m not going to send anybody else up. Repeat. It’s too dangerous to send anybody else up. The stairs are getting hotter every minute.”
Finney looked up at the fog.
“What are you going to do?” Diana asked.
“What makes