3000 Degrees Read online

  Copyright © 2002 by Sean Flynn

  All rights reserved.

  This book is based on the author's “The Perfect Fire,” which appeared in Esquire magazine July 2000.

  Warner Books, Inc., Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: March 2002

  ISBN: 978-0-446-55503-6

  The Warner Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Text design by Stanley S. Drate / Folio Graphics Co. Inc.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  For Louise

  Acknowledgments

  In the beginning, which was December 1999, there was David Granger, who is the editor of Esquire magazine. He told me about watching, with tears in his eyes, a memorial service for six firemen who had died inside an old warehouse in Worcester, Massachusetts. Yet as tragic as the specific event had been, he recognized—and asked me to write about—the deeper themes involved: the courage, loyalty, and honor among men who risked their lives for one another. The story he wanted was less about one fire than about the dozens of men who fought it and the thousands of others like them in small towns and big cities who would have done the same.

  David had to wait six months for that story, but he was patient. He assigned Andy Ward, the finest editor working in magazines, to help me shape it, and Luke Zaleski, a dogged researcher, to check each of the facts. And the final product, which was published in July 2000, became the frame upon which this book was eventually built. For all of that, David, I am extremely grateful.

  There were others, of course, who helped along the way. Early on, Dr. John A. Greene, a psychologist who specializes in counseling firefighters, guided me into their subculture, made introductions, vouched for my character, and explained the nuances of a fireman's head. Mike Mullane from the International Association of Fire Fighters and Frank Raffa and Ed Ryan from IAFF Local 1009 opened my first doors into the Worcester Fire Department. Their assistance was invaluable and appreciated.

  My agent, David Black, has provided wise counsel and unwavering support, which makes him as fine a friend and ally as any man deserves. My editor, Rick Horgan, taught me how to craft a mountain of facts into a long and proper narrative. It would be difficult to overstate either of their contributions.

  During months of writing, a number of people accomodated me in one way or another. John Gearan of the Worcester Telegram &Gazette and Charles P. Pierce, a Worcester native and gifted writer, both tried to explain their city to me. Luke Zaleski signed on for the daunting task of checking each of the facts that follow. Suzi Samowski and her staff at Bukowski Tavern never once complained when I hogged the corner table and asked for a fresher pot of coffee. Ted Miller and Bernadette Carr were irreplaceable confidants. Brekke Fletcher, Liz Wallace, and Ingrid Eberly indulged my rougher passages and offered their sage advice. And Louise Jarvis blessed me with her insight, her companionship, and her tolerant love.

  None of these words would have been written, however, without the cooperation of scores of people in Worcester. Denise Brotherton, Mary Jackson, Michelle Lucey, Jim and Joan Lyons, Linda McGuirk, and Kathy Spencer were all exceedingly generous with their time and their memories. So, too, were dozens of firemen, too many to mention by name but many of whom appear in the following pages. I am indebted to all of them, and especially to District Chief Michael O. McNamee. Two years ago, his men told me that they thought Mike was a hero. He would never use that word to describe himself, but it is true. I hope he believes it, and that it brings him some comfort.

  1 The fire started sometime between 4:30 and 6 p.m. on December 3, 1999, when a candle tipped onto a pile of clothing in a makeshift bedroom on the second floor.

  2 At 6:15, two minutes after the first alarm was struck for a fire at Worcester Cold Storage, men from Ladder 1 and Rescue 1 forced open a door on the loading dock.

  3 At about 6:18, after climbing the stairs on the B wall and breaking through a bulkhead on the roof, Paul Brotherton and Jerry Lucey vented the building by smashing out a glass skylight covering an elevator shaft. The hole in the roof, fifteen-feet by fifteen-feet, allowed smoke and hot air to escape.

  4 At 6:20, Stephen “Yogi” Connole and John Casello found the fire on the second floor. While waiting for hoses to be brought up and charged, Yogi wrestled to keep the door closed. With fresh air flowing from the B side of the building and hot air blowing up through the C-side elevator shaft, a strong draft pulled the door toward the fire.

  For the next twenty-five minutes, firemen flanked the fire, attacking it with hoses threaded up both the B-side stairs and C-stairs. The flames were aggressive, feeding on cool air sucked in from below. At 6:40, a third alarm was struck, dispatching another twelve men to assist the forty-two already battling the fire.

  A minute later, at approximately 6:41, the building filled with black smoke, reducing visibility to zero in less than four seconds. District Chief Mike McNamee, choking on smoke in the B stairs, ordered every man down to the first floor for a head count.

  5 At 6:46, Jerry Lucey, who was on the fifth floor with Paul Brotherton when conditions deteriorated, keyed his radio. “Rescue 600 to command,” he said. “We need help on the floor below the top floor of the building. We're lost.”

  Search teams were immediately assembled at the bottom of the B stairs. McNamee ordered men to use safety lines as they crawled into the boiling black on the floors above, feeling for Brotherton and Lucey. Twenty-two minutes after Lucey's first transmission, Lieutenant Tom Spencer radioed from the fifth floor that he and his men were lost. Eight minutes later, he sent a final broadcast. “Ladder 2 to Command,” he said. “We're done…”

  6 After searching for more than an hour, Mike McNamee realized the six men were missing and that more might die if he didn't call off the rescue attempt. He stood at the bottom of B stairs, physically blocking his men from pushing past him. “Listen to me,” he yelled. “We've already lost six. We're not going to lose anymore.” Two minutes before eight o'clock, the building was ordered evacuated.

  1

  THE SMOKE BANKED DOWN LIKE BOLTS OF BLACK VELVET, HEAVY sheets curling and rolling and folding together. A man could lose perspective in such a cloud, the vapor so dense and oily that it carried a physical weight, like tar, hot and sticky and misted into the air. Through the plastic of his face mask, Lt. Mike McNamee could see a dirty orange glow in the haze, brighter when the smoke puffed one updraft, then dimmer when the fog closed again. If he trusted his eyes, which he didn't, the flames might have been forty feet away, or sixty, or maybe only twenty. So he trusted his skin, believed in the warmth pushing through his turnout coat. He was down on all fours, crawling across a wood floor, staying low, ducking under the worst of the heat. Down there, in the coolest inches, he figured the temperature was only 125 degrees, maybe 150. He guessed the fire, burning at the back end of a warehouse storeroom eighty feet deep and half as wide, was about forty-five feet away.

  “Lieutenant, you wanna open it up?”

  The nozzle man, a lump in the dark barely an arm's reach away, shouted the words. Every man in a firefight had to shout, throw his voi
ce through the mask on his face and the droning thunder of the flames. The sound was muffled, almost slurred to an unpracticed ear.

  “Not yet,” Mike hollered back. “Let's keep moving. Get up close where we can hit it directly.”

  There were three of them, creeping across the warehouse floor and dragging a hose two and a half inches in diameter loaded with almost four hundred pounds of water. The nozzle man in front and another firefighter in the rear flanked Mike, the ranking officer that night in 1981 on Engine 4 out of the Worcester Fire Department's Park Avenue station. Mike was young for a lieutenant, just a few months past his thirty-first birthday. With his shallow chin and thin-framed spectacles, he sometimes looked like an English professor, which is what he had wanted to be before he dropped out of college. He had a reputation as being mildly bookish anyway, a man who studied fire, the alchemy of oxygen and heat and fuel, and the choreographed chaos of fire suppression: how and when to attack and vent and retreat. But he also had the sturdy build of a fireman, a solid frame conditioned by years humping up smoky tenement stairs and clambering over flaming roofs with seventy pounds of gear on his back. In almost nine years since he'd joined the fire department in his hometown in the middle of Massachusetts, Mike had helped put out more than a thousand blazes, which wasn't an unusual number for a man working that job in that place in those years.

  Worcester in the 1970s and early 1980s was a withered industrial city, a factory town abandoned by factory owners and factory workers. Below downtown, just beyond the interstate overpass, old warehouses stood hollow, their insides gutted except for the trash and scraps that could feed a renegade spark. The hills above the Blackstone Valley were lined with sagging wood-framed triple-deckers, tinder-dry and stacked dense as cordwood. The Main South neighborhood was a sprawling slum of deteriorating tenements and abandoned storefronts. And for most of the decade all of it was on fire, the whole city burning lot by lot and night by night. Frayed wires spit sparks onto carpets and curtains, corroded black pipes leaked gas into antiquated kitchens, drunks passed out with Marlboros between their arthritic fingers. Pyromaniacs, half-crazed or halfwitted or both, set light to trash cans and gas station bathrooms and flophouse porches and dry stands of grass. What didn't burn by accident or for sport burned for cash. Arson was epidemic, landlords and investors charring the last scraps of profit from decrepit properties, a depressing number of which were worth more as heavily insured ruins than as cheaply rented apartments or vacant commercial space. Some shifts, it seemed all of Worcester might burn to the ground. In the worst years, an engine crew would routinely fight three fires in a single night, and five wasn't uncommon.

  After a decade on the frontlines, a flaming warehouse wasn't a particularly formidable foe. Potentially dangerous, sure. But predictable, not exceptionally different from a hundred other skirmishes Mike had been through. He knew the best attack was in close. A two-and-a-half-inch line sprayed out roughly 250 gallons every minute, enough to wash the life out of most medium-size fires. But if the stream missed the flames, if it fell short and hit nothing but superheated air, all that liquid would atomize, instantly mushroom into steam, blow back and down in a scalding vapor. So he ordered his men, nearly blinded by the smoke and hobbled by the weight of their gear and the hose, to keep inching forward. Another fifteen feet, twenty at the most.

  Mike was judging the distance to the flames not just by the heat but also by his fresh memory of the building. This was the second time that night Engine 4, along with three other engines, two ladder trucks, and the rescue squad—the normal complement sent to a working fire—had been dispatched to Jacques Street, a short block of squat brick warehouses and machine shops along the tracks of the Providence and Worcester Railroad. The first alarm for 82 Jacques Street came in just after dinner, when the men in the Park Avenue station were wiping the last drops of gravy from their mustaches and splashing their plates into a sink of sudsy water. Three tones sounded, abrupt and abrasive, electrified burps. Then the dispatcher's deadpan voice from the speaker bolted to the wall: “Engine 2, Engine 4, Engine 5, Engine 10, Ladder 4, Scope 3, Rescue 1, Car 4. Striking Box 1575 for a reported structure fire at 82 Jacques Street.”

  A dozen men working the third tour out of Park Avenue, four each on Aerial Scope 3 and Engines 4 and 10, were moving before the dispatcher started repeating the assignments, hustling into their turnout gear. Most of them pulled on long boots that rose to the middle of their thighs, just above where the bottom edge of their coats would fall. A few, including Mike, stepped through the legs of newfangled fire-resistant pants and into shorter boots. In less than twelve seconds, every man was on his designated truck. The officers took the seats on the passenger sides of the cabs, where they could yank the air-horn cords and toggle the sirens on and off. On the ride south along Park Avenue, each man except the driver slipped his arms through a fire-resistant coat hung on the back of his seat, the sleeves already laced through the straps of an air tank. When Mike's boots hit the pavement outside the warehouse three minutes after the first tone, all of his men were ready to square off against an inferno.

  But there wasn't much of a fire left. When the first flames heated the air to 165 degrees or so, tiny metal plugs melted in the sprinkler heads plumbed through the building, opening the spigots and dropping a heavy shower on the fire. The only thing left for the firemen to do was shut off the main valve to the sprinkler system, soak a few embers, and then track down the owner of the building to tell him to replace his spent sprinkler heads and board up his doors and windows. A quick knockdown. Thirty minutes later, they were back at the station, scrubbing the dinner dishes.

  If the fire had been accidental, then the sprinklers had saved the building and protected the men who came with their hoses and axes and ladders. If it had been arson, then it had been merely a setup fire, a prelude to a bigger, more devastating and dangerous blaze. With the sprinkler system disabled, the flames from a second torching could get a jump on the fire crews. In the unimpeded minutes before the fire department's arrival, two or three isolated ignition points could engulf the entire building.

  The second alarm for 82 Jacques Street came in three hours after the first, shortly before ten o'clock. Dispatch announced the same unit assignments, and all twelve men at Park Avenue, plus eight more from the Webster Square station and ten out of Central Street, quick-stepped back into their gear and onto their trucks. When Mike hit the pavement the second time, black smoke billowed through the roof and blown-out windows. The second floor was fully involved, a tangle of orange and yellow. A second alarm was struck. Headquarters dispatched another dozen men on two more engines and a third ladder company.

  The driver on Engine 4 stayed with the truck, working the controls that regulate the water coming in from the hydrants and pump it out through the hoses. Mike and two of his men grabbed a coil of hose from the bed above the back bumper and lugged it toward a street level door, up a staircase, and into a hallway. From the smoke and the sound, they knew the flames were raging somewhere behind a steel fire door that had rolled shut. Much the way the sprinkler heads had been activated by heat, the fire door had automatically closed when the heat melted a pin that held it open, the idea being to contain the fire to one room.

  Mike and his men pulled their plastic masks over their faces, cranked open their air tanks, and rolled back the door. Then they dropped to their knees, ducking below air that might have been 300 degrees at waist height and twice that at head height. At the ceiling, twelve feet above, the temperature was nearly 1,500 degrees, almost as hot as a crematorium. With the hose charged—filled with water sent up by the engine's pump—the three of them crawled into the black folds of smoke. When the last man cleared the fire door, it rolled closed behind him, propped open only a couple of inches by the trailing hose.

  They were in forty feet, halfway across the storeroom. “Now?” the nozzle man hollered.

  “A little closer,” Mike yelled back again. Another ten feet, he thought to himself. Ten
more seconds, then we'll hit it.

  He shuffled his left knee forward, then his right, keeping one hand on the hose and another on his nozzle man. He moved his left knee again, then stopped short when he saw it: a flicker through the smoke, near the ceiling. Then another, a shimmer that brightened and blossomed into a deep yellow glow, the color of overripe lemons. A bad color signaling a very bad thing, a phenomenon Mike had read and heard about, and even witnessed from a distance. But he'd never been up close, directly in its path, had hoped he never would be. The sound came next, a low rumble through the hiss and snap of the fire, like thunder tumbling across a prairie horizon.

  One of his men, maybe both of his men, shouted something, but the words were swallowed up by the growling near the ceiling. Mike reached for his nozzle man. His hand touched nothing but smoke. He wheeled on one knee, flailing his arm behind him for his other man. Nothing. Above him, the rumble swelled and quickened, a trembling whoosh. The storeroom, a box of thick brick walls closed in by a bulky steel door, had trapped too much heat inside. The gases lingering near the ceiling had reached their ignition temperature, the point at which each tiny particle of smoke and wisp of oxygen turned to fire. Mike, groping at smoke in the dark, realized he was alone in a room about to explode. “Oh, fuck,” he muttered.

  Then he saw it happen. It started on the back wall, above the fire he'd been inching toward, an orange ball expanding, erupting, blowing across the ceiling. It spread to the walls on either side, covered the width of the room, and spun forward, flames biting into the smoke like a thresher into wheat, spears of fire curling and weaving a few feet above Mike's head. It moved as fast as a breaking wave, washing across the length of the storeroom to the wall blocked off by the door, then plunged to the floor, covering all that ground in three seconds, maybe two.

  Mike dropped flat on his back as the flames passed over him, as much by training—always stay low, beneath the heat—as instinct. A man could survive a rollover, but it was one of the most terrible phenomena he would ever witness. The only thing worse would have been a flashover. The physics were similar, gases superheating until they exploded. But where a rollover happened near the ceiling, a flashover happened everywhere at once, every scrap of cloth and stick of furniture and atom of hydrogen instantly exploding into flame. A man on the edge of a room about to flash could take maybe two giant, panicked strides out; a man inside that room was going to die.