Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [133]
The first officer, a heavyset man with a florid face and webs of burst blood vessels across his bulbous nose, took off his helmet and said, “I heard stairwell B was shitty already.”
“It is. We’re working on it.”
“Why not put up our own fans? We can clear a stairwell.”
“That’s been tried. It made it hotter. It also fed the fire on eighteen. Okay. Now, there’s a restaurant on seventy-six. The Tower Club. There was a wedding banquet going on below that. We think there’s around two hundred people up there, including staff.”
“No sprinklers anywhere?” asked a firefighter.
“All we know is they’re not working on the lower fire floors.”
“What do you mean lower fire floors?” asked the first officer. “We were told there was one fire. On eighteen.”
“Figuring out which floors are involved and which are not is going to be one of your assignments. We have TV cameras, but there’s so much smoke they’re not telling us much.” Oscar might have told him about the fire on fifty-six, which had been raging for some time, but he thought that was better coming as a surprise; besides, he didn’t officially know about it yet.
“How long are these bottles going to last?” asked the officer. “Going up stairs.”
“What you’ve got here is a seventy-eight-story building—seventy-six actual tenant floors. When they run the Columbia Challenge each spring, even the fittest athlete firefighters running these stairs in full bunkers need a change of bottles before the top. One firefighter who’s run it said he used two bottles and ended up unscrewing his low-pressure hose so he wouldn’t suffocate when he ran the second one dry. Remember, you move slower, you use less air. I’m no physiologist. I couldn’t give you the numbers.
“Okay. Listen, it’s going to lap on you. It’s going to break out the windows and work its way outside the building to the floor above. There are plumbing and electrical chases cut through the floors, so it’s traveling up in that manner, too. Remember the three firefighters in Philadelphia? They ran out of air, called for help, and gave the wrong floor number? By the time they found them, they were dead. Keep an eye on those gauges. Know which floor you’re on. This isn’t a pissy little house fire, where you can bail out a window. You bail out of one of these windows, you better sprout wings.
“Now, one important fact we do know is that none of these doors have unlocked the way they’re supposed to unlock when the building’s in fire mode. If it hasn’t already been broken into, you’ll have to break into every floor you enter.”
“What about master keys?” somebody asked.
“We got some keys, but for some reason they don’t work. This also means any civilians coming down are in serious trouble unless they can hold their breath for seventy-odd stories; they won’t be able to rest up on a clean floor. Hasta la vista, amigos.”
After the group left, Oscar began to wonder why he felt so smug. A typical house fire drew temperatures around twelve hundred degrees. This would be a lot hotter. Cold-drawn steel, such as that used in the elevator cables in this building, failed at eight hundred degrees. The building was constructed around a steel core, and the heat would eventually deform that at around two thousand degrees. More than one of these boys probably weren’t coming back. Still, he felt smug.
Oscar couldn’t even imagine the commissions they were going to convene trying to explain tonight. Not that he had to worry about it. When this was finished, there would be no evidence and no witnesses. The others would be long gone and he would be in Costa Rica reading about it four days late in the Wall Street Journal.
The question was, did he feel