Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [36]
At 8:36, while he was mopping floors, 26’s big metal bell began clanging. The tones on the station speaker signified that it was an aid call, the address only a few blocks north of the station. As the doors rolled up, Monahan fired up the Spartan, turning on the emergency lights, and they rolled out onto Cloverdale and into the mid-morning Boeing traffic. Around the corner the residential streets were empty.
After they stopped in front of the address, Finney procured the aid kit, O2 kit, and Lifepak and carried them into the house. Their ninety-two-year-old patient had flu symptoms. They called an ambulance, and ten minutes later, as Finney was wheeling the empty ambulance stretcher through the front entrance of the home, a fire call came in on his portable radio. Engine 26 received only two or three alarms a day, and it was rare to miss one because they were already out of service.
“Engines Twenty-seven, Eleven, and Thirty-six; Ladders Seven and Eleven; Aid Fourteen, Medic Twenty-eight; Battalion Seven: Eight Avenue South and South Elmgrove Street. Smoke from the building.” The location was only a few blocks away, but they wouldn’t be included until Lieutenant Sadler radioed the dispatchers that Engine 26 was back in service. In all probability, Engine 27 would get there first.
18. BLIND MEN TOSSING HORSESHOES
Even though Lieutenant Sadler cautioned Monahan to slow down and keep an eye out for the other rigs responding in the fog, Monahan drove too fast and ended up skidding the 34,000-pound apparatus to a halt just inches shy of Engine 27’s tailboard. They were lucky he hadn’t killed anyone.
Finney had been smelling smoke for blocks, and now it mingled with the odor of hot brakes and the back-of-the-throat tang of a week’s worth of big-city pollution suspended in the fog. Between the smoke and the fog, they would be like blind men tossing horseshoes.
For a split second Finney glimpsed the roofline and a wind-blown chimney, dense black smoke pumping from a dormer at one end. Then the smoke and fog damped out his view.
After conferring quickly with the driver of Engine 27, Lieutenant Sadler twisted around in his seat and spoke to Finney through the crew-cab window. “McKittrick says he thinks there’s a hydrant about a hundred yards down. I’m going to send Jerry. You and me are going to take a second line off Engine 27 and back them up.”
“Right.”
Finney couldn’t have been more pleased. They were taking a line inside. They were going to fight fire. He lived for times like this.
The smoke was thick and acrid, and they coughed as they moved through it. Even Sadler, the hardened nicotine junkie. Even McKittrick, who operated Engine 27’s pump panel, his nostrils yielding a steady stream of snot after only a few minutes’ exposure to the smoke in the street.
Air cylinder on his back, Finney climbed down off the rig and went around the back of Engine 27, where he pulled out the first hundred feet of inch-and-three-quarter hose load with the gated wye. By the time he got it on his shoulder, McKittrick had shouldered the second hundred feet. Ian McKittrick had almost twenty-five years in the department, fifteen of those behind the wheel of Engine 27. He was a fast talker and knew his job better than he knew his kids. Bald-headed and slack-jawed, McKittrick placed the gated wye and ten feet of line near a hose-port on the fire side of the rig—he would connect it later—then followed Finney through the fog, dropping dry hose flakes onto the ground behind them as they proceeded. Finney, unable to see the house, followed the first line on the ground.
It wasn’t until Finney was on the front doorstep that he realized this was the vacant house