Vertical Burn - Earl Emerson [49]
The report said Captain Cordifis shouldn’t have split his crew and made a mistake ordering fans for ventilation. Supposedly, the early introduction of fans had fed the fire and made it larger before it could be located by hose crews. Yet, by all accounts, the fire started in the older buildings to the north and only spread into the warehouse later, probably after the wall collapse. When the first units arrived, the warehouse was filled with smoke, smoke that had leaked through from the older part of the complex. Finney still thought Cordifis’s original plan was viable. Using fans, they would have cleared the warehouse in minutes. They would have searched it, realized the fire and possible victims were elsewhere, and been on their way. As it was, Ladder 1, Engine 22, and later Engines 5 and 25 lost precious minutes bumbling around in zero visibility.
Radio traffic had been problematical. Owing to confusion from the fires going on in the south end and to the fact that Leary Way was fought on channel 2 while the normal fire channel was channel 1, several units at Leary Way had been addressing the IC in the south end on channel 1 when they thought they were addressing Captain Vaughn. Quite a few of their transmissions either were not answered or were answered by the wrong IC. Even the dispatchers were confused.
Because several units had done their monitoring and broadcasting on channel 1, they missed key portions of Cordifis’s search instructions and went into the complex without any notion of where to look.
The units that did hear Cordifis’s transmission knew from what he reported that opening the door to his room would jeopardize his life, so these hastily organized rescue teams did not open any doors unless they swung out. Instead, using chain saws, they cut small holes in each door they encountered, a procedure that slowed the search to a snail’s pace.
The older complex had a fire wall running along the spine of the building, north to south, with only two doorways in it. For reasons Finney had yet to discover, most of the searchers had been told to remain on the west side of the fire wall in the older complex; in reality, he and Cordifis had been on the east side. Only Reese and Kirby entered from the east.
The report said Finney was in the final stages of exhaustion by the time he tried to fight his way out of the building, that he and Cordifis should have taken a rest break after changing bottles, as if his exhaustion derived from not taking a break. What the report didn’t indicate was how much criticism they would have drawn for taking a rest break while victims may have been dying inside.
Nowhere did the report implicate Finney in Bill’s death.
Nowhere did it suggest that if he’d reacted differently Bill Cordifis would be alive.
Dozens of firefighters had told him it wasn’t his fault, that he should consider his own escape and Cordifis’s death as acts of God. Yet the unofficial accusation lingered in the air. G. A. had passed it along to Emily, and Finney knew others were uttering it.
After some minutes of skimming the report, he curled up on the sofa under a waterside window and, reading from page one, he used up the last of the afternoon light reflecting off the lake.
The part that disgruntled him most was Reese’s statement, the same statement that had been clipped from newspapers, highlighted with yellow grease markers, and tacked to the beanery bulletin board in almost every fire station in the city: “We went in and within a minute we’d found one firefighter wandering around alone. He was in a panic and wasn’t any help as far as indicating where his partner was. We guided him outside and then went back down the direction he’d come from, but there wasn’t anything there. We searched as long as we could but were finally forced out by the heat.”
The way Finney remembered it, they’d pointed him in the direction he was already headed and then turned their backs without even knowing if he could get up from his squat. Had Finney taken a misstep or collapsed in