“Wake Up, Oren, We’ve Got Problems.”
FIRE REPORTS
Here’s a different way to face a fire: Instead of pulling on your gear at the station and stepping onto the fire apparatus for a quick ride (time enough, nevertheless, to think) to the scene, you’re a sleeping motel guest. You wake up at 3:30 in the morning, smell smoke in your first-floor room. As your eyes become focused, you see smoke puffing around the door. Your building is on fire. . .
What do you do in such a situation? I know what we teach people to do. But now I’m asking about us — fire service types who know all about fire safety. What do we do when we find ourselves in a sudden fire situation without protective gear and without much time to think?
Two chief officers on the Oklahoma City Fire Department had the opportunity to practice what we all preach last June 14 when the Ramada Inn in Ft. Worth, Texas, caught fire. The fire claimed five lives, injured 34 persons and caused $7 50,000 damage.
Oklahoma City Fire Equipment Officer Oren T. Dowdy had traveled to Ft. Worth to attend a preconstruction conference for a mobile air supply truck. Chief Training Officer Jerry R. Smith was rooming with Dowdy and in Ft. Worth to review the city’s fire department’s training facilities and procedures.
The men arrived at their motel at around 7:30 p.m. on the 13th. The Ramada Inn consisted of five separate buildings. Smith and Dowdy were assigned to Room 120 in the south wing, a 300-foot-long, two-story structure with no fire walls or fire-stops or fire doors, just a straight shot capable of supporting a great deal of combustion.
As Dowdy and Smith entered the hallway of the south wing, Dowdy noted and commented on a large stack of materials at one end of the hallway. “I thought they were mattresses at first but later, when we went to dinner and passed close to the materials, we could see that they were actually rolls of carpet” To be exact, there were six rolls of jumbo carpet and 11 rolls of padding, all readily combustible.
Dowdy was asleep by around 11:30 p.m. on Monday evening. Smith was in the motel’s coffee shop until almost 1:00 a.m. When he walked down the hallway past the rolls of carpet shortly after 1:00, all was quiet. No sign of fire or any commotion.
A little over two hours later, at 3:28, Smith shook Dowdy awake, saying: “Wake up, Oren. We’ve got problems.”
Problems, indeed. Smith saw smoke “rolling under and puffing in all around the door of the room. The smoke was already a foot or two down from the ceiling.” He hurried to the door and felt it: “It was hot, so I kept it closed.” The two got dressed quickly. When asked about taking the time to do this in a critical situation, Smith said, “We re trained for years to jump into our clothes as a first response to a fire call. It was just a reflex action, but! wouldn’t recommend it for the public. Seconds may make the difference.”
With the calmness one would expect from a training officer, Smith sized up the situation this way: “The door was the only exit out of the room, but it was obvious that we could not escape that way. The only other possibility was to break out the unopenable room window.”
Dowdy remembers, somewhat humorously now, that “Jerry picked up one of the chairs in the room, I held back the curtains, and Jerry let the chair fly. It traveled through the window, over an automobile parked outside the room, and sailed into the parking lot.” By this time, both men were aware of a rising crescendo of general noise, and especially of automobile horns trying to arouse the sleeping guests. And as Smith points out, “the breaking glass seemed to start a chain reaction. We could hear occupants breaking glass in every direction.”
Once the window was out and the ragged edges chipped off, the men used towels and bedding to put over the window frame. Just when they were preparing to escape out the window, they were faced with a complication familiar to fire fighters. The man in the upstairs room was just then breaking out his window, and the falling glass forced Smith and Dowdy to remain in their room for a few moments longer.
Once the glass stopped falling, the men quickly exited Room 120. Outside, their first act was to assist the man in the upstairs room. In fact, they went back into their room and between them wrestled the mattresses to the outside and urged the man on the second floor to jump down onto them, which he did, safely.
Dowdy looks back in shock at how bad conditions were in their room when they awakened. “The smoke was so toxic that my lungs were burning and my eyes watering in no more than a minute after I was awake. We really had very little time to react. Oddly, though, I did not experience any noticeable temperature change in the room. This somewhat disguised the extreme danger of the situation, especially for those people not acquainted with the behavior and effect of carbon monoxide and toxic gases.”
Both men could see a perceptible increase in the amount of smoke in the room once they had broken the window. Dowdy estimates that “if we had not broken the window, we could have survived for probably only two or three minutes more in the room. After that time, we would have been poisoned or asphyxiated.”
With many, actually most, of the 87room windows now broken, a draft was created that pulled heat and fire throughout the long structure. Within a very few minutes of the chiefs’ being outside, flames were coming from the building’s west exit and rolling 10 feet or more above the building. Smoke was beginning to puff out of the eaves. “If fact, the smoke was so heavy outside, remembers Smith, “it was difficult to breathe or see; the smoke was creating heavy obscurity.”
It was evident that the building’s occupants did not know what to do once they were outside the building. As Smith points out, “Within two or three minutes, smoke conditions in the parking lot were about as bad as they had been in the room. So, getting outside of a burning structure does not necessarily mean escape and rescue.”
Dowdy adds that the first triage area established was in the lobby of another motel building, “but before long it had to be moved due to the smoke conditions. As a matter of fact, the triage officer at one point had to crawl away to set up a new area.”
While five persons did die in the Ramada Inn fire, 90 persons escaped. Given the advanced state of the fire when discovered by sleeping guests, the toll could easily have been higher, especially considering these other contributory factors: there was no alarm system in the motel, nor sprinklers, nor any other sort of fire alarm or protection equipment. In the opinion of some of the motel guests, there was a delayed alarm of the fire, perhaps for as long as 45 minutes. In any event, when the motel staff discovered the fire or gave up trying to extinguish it themselves, they drove in cars around the building honking horns. Rather a quaint notification system. After Smith and Dowdy were outside, they saw one motel employee breaking out room windows with a tire iron and attempting to help provide escape.
-official photographs, fort Worth Fire Dept
In terms of what we normally teach people to do in case of fire, Smith made these observations:
- “Normally we teach people that they can stay in their rooms safely and wait for rescue, and many times they can. But not in this fire. Of course, a motel or hotel fire is almost always going to begin in one of the rooms, not in the hallway. But not in this fire. The hallway was fully charged very early on. Not one of the survivors escaped out of a room door.
- “We teach people to feel a door before opening it when a fire is suspected. In this case the long hallway distant from the fire was highly charged with smoke, yet the heat would not have been detectable through the distant doors.”
- Since we do not teach the public about breaking windows, they don’t do it in a safe manner. We saw people breaking out a small hole in the window/’ Smith recalled, “and trying to rush through before they widened it and cleared it of jagged eciges. Extra injuries were received in this way.”
- It has become common to read that people don’t really panic in fire situations, Smith said, “but we saw people who were panicked even when safety was within reach.”
Smith and Dowdy speculate that the persons who perished in the fire opened their room doors. Smith believes that “if our room was typical, opening the door would probably have meant the end. I’m certain that whoever actually opened the door would have been overcome, at least to the point that breaking out the doublepaned room window might have been impossible.”
Dowdy says he never really felt frightened during the incident, “except later, out in the parking lot, I started getting angry at what could have happened. I felt nervous later, too, looking back at a fully involved structure.”
Smith was frustrated at not being able to do more in the way of rescue. “Without protective clothing and other equipment,” he said, “knowing what needs to be done is not terribly important. The smoke, the heat, the broken glass . . . without the clothing and equipment we have as fire fighters, we are almost helpless.”
Dowdy emphasizes how fortunate he feels for himself and every other survivor. “Everything was wrong; the worst possible combination of circumstances existed. The time of day found everyone sleeping; the rolls of carpet gave off heavy toxic smoke; being in the hallway and not confined to a room, the fire spread quickly, cutting off the primary escape route for all of us. I feel we were lucky to have lost only five persons.” Dowdy adds that eventually the entire length of the 300-foot hallway was charred, and most of the room doors were completely burned off.
Oren Dowdy and jerry Smith can look back on that morning as only a very close call, fortunately. How do they expect this experience to affect them in the future? “I’ve known the importance of prefire planning for many years,” notes Smith, “but actually being caught in a fire forces you to do some thinking.” Smith adds that “when I travel now, I intend to investigate and inspect all fire protection equipment present in my hotel or motel. I will insist on knowing that the smoke alarms work, that the exit lights are on, and that the fire doors are operable.
Official photograph Fort Worth Fire Dept
Dowdy agrees. In fact, he has already purchased a travel smoke alarm to be his constant road companiion. “No one else will travel with me anymore. You see, this was the third motel fire I’ve been involved in!”
