Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [132]
Years from now when people asked Oscar what part he’d played in the Columbia Tower debacle, he would tell them he’d been at the hub of the conflagration, had been head information officer. With time, Reese would, of course, develop into a pitiful and despised figure, especially since he’d personally vouched to the police that Finney’s allegations about the building were spurious. It tickled Oscar to think of Reese trying to explain himself, particularly after Oscar and the others denied Reese had asked him to inspect the Columbia Tower’s fire suppression systems. There was supposed to have been a written report, but Oscar hadn’t turned it in.
Information officer. He liked that. It was a lofty-sounding moniker and would lend credence to the details he would parcel out in the years to come.
So far, most of the groups Oscar briefed were comprised of mutual aid companies from outside the city, young men eager to die in a building they knew little about and had no stake in. Oscar had to admire their gung-ho attitudes and youthful faces, even as he mentally ridiculed their commitment to this folly.
The Columbia Tower had been built with pressurized stairwells to keep the smoke at bay, phones for firefighters on every floor and in the elevators, water tanks on floors twenty-five, thirty-seven, and fifty-eight, as well as a five-thousand-gallon tank on floor seventy-seven, which should have supplied the initial water for the sprinklers. There were fire pumps on level A and floors thirty-six and thirty-eight. On paper the system worked great.
Because of the elaborate preparations Oscar and his partners had made, few of those systems were operable. What they’d left intact were blinking lights and shrieking alarms, anything that might amplify the chaos. The phones didn’t work. They’d scuttled several key sections of sprinklers and standpipes, so that no matter how much water was pumped into the system it would never pressurize. There was little danger in leaving the fire pumps and water tanks intact—any water from them was destined to bleed down the interior stairwells through a series of strategically broken pipes. A torrent in the stairs would not only make work difficult, but would, after some hours, cause ungodly problems in the basement.
As another group approached with hose lines on their shoulders, Oscar collared the officer and tried to gather everybody together. It took a full minute. Firefighters. Unless they saw flame, it was like herding cats.
“Okay,” Oscar said, surveying the eight firefighters and two officers. It tickled him the way the officers made their men stand with hose loads on their shoulders while he spoke, even though in an hour none of them would have the strength to lift a dirty sock. If they’d been his men, he would have been filling their gullets with Gatorade and making them rest before the ordeal.
Oscar pointed to the diagram on the wall. “You’ll find that most floors in this building will have this approximate layout. The elevators are in the center. They’re not working now, but we have a specialist looking into it. The two main stairwells are fairly close to each other. You are about to enter stairwell A, which we have designated as the firefighting stairwell. When you get inside, you’ll notice lines have been laid. That’s because there’s a problem with the standpipes. The building engineers tell us they’re going to get that licked in the next half hour or so.”
Oscar pulled open the stairway door to reveal a dark and noisy stairwell with eight inches of fast-running water blurring the steps, enough to knock a careless man off his feet. A cloud of smoke drifted out as he closed the door. Water might have escaped, too, but somebody’d diked the inside of the doorway with rolled-up canvas tarps. The whole thing was turning into a delightful clutter. The worse it became, the harder it was for Oscar to stifle his laughter. He’d even heard a story about a dead firefighter in the street. These county guys were so panicked they were inventing their own urban legends on the spot.
“We’ve had smoke problems