MORE LIFELONG LESSONS
BY TOM BRENNAN
Last month I reminisced about short but vivid and valuable lessons I have carried with me throughout my career. I hope you took the time to try and remember those lessons and experiences that have helped you. They are great to bring up at critiques and drill sessions. Here are some more.
Under the window. “Get out, truck! We`ve got a structure fire on Sackman between Third and Fourth. The dispatch says he got a few calls on this!” I am driving for real for the first time. Oh, we`ve had a few runs to take off the edge, but this sounds like a good one.
We get out of the house okay, onto Fourth Avenue. Freddie is the tillerman, a great partner–we always work well together. We see people ahead waving and pointing. I tell myself, Slow down! Think! Look–this may be your last chance. Size-up is routine. We are in four-storyland–brownstones all over. We make the turn into the block. The engine is already in, and the officer points to the top floor.
A middle-age woman is screaming; skin is leafing off her forearms. She mumbles, “…child,” as I round the truck. Freddie drops the tormentor, and she gives us the answers we need: “…daughter…top floor…eight years old.”
At the pedestal. Raise, rotate, extend. No extra and costly moves. Perfect shot–right at the top third of the window of the fourth-floor apartment. I lower. Wow! Everything–the storm windows, the inside double-hung glass and frame–fails completely, the venetian blinds drop from the hanger, and the drapes are torn from the wall. All on the first shot.
I retract the top fly to the sill position as Freddie has passed from the bed ladder to the first fly section racing to the blackening “doorway” I have just made out of a residential window.
Leaping in behind him, I hear Freddie say, “I`m left.”
“I`m right,” I answer automatically. It`s hot. It`s at my “too hot” stage.
Freddie calls, “It`s blowing.”
As we race and scramble back through the front room to the aerial tip, we are without the girl we came for. Freddie trips, falls, and slides. His hands are thrust under the mound of debris that used to be a beautiful window assembly.
“I`ve got her,” Freddie cries. The rest of the story is told during medal day ceremonies as Freddie gets his reward.
The lesson has never left me from 28 years ago through today: Always look under the debris of the window. That is where our civilian friends wait. It could have been so simple.
Know your aerial. We were third-alarm truck. The alarms came in too rapidly. The Brooklyn sky was ablaze in color above our destination. A residence hotel, 12 stories, 16-foot ceilings, 150 feet by 300 feet, irregularly shaped is fully involved on the top three floors. We meet the rescue on the ninth floor below the fire.
“A woman is trapped on the 11th floor front. She went back for her cat. We can`t make it down the hall,” rescue reports. Four good friends, each nod. We have to try.
The stairs are enclosed, as is the hallway. The apartments are roaring as we inch past. The elevator doors are spewing flame out of the service holes. The noise is deafening. We are on the floor above the fire`s origin, and it is fully involved.
“That`s it. We`ll not make this one,” my partner says. We start back and just make it as the apartment doors let go.
Outside, a heroic effort from the tip of the 146-foot aerial proves futile, and the victim falls to her death.
Later, we learn of another enclosed staircase located more toward the front of the building, a great deal closer to the victim with a lot less hallway to creep through. In these large, fire-protected buildings, I never again failed to take the time to rapidly study the layout from the floor(s) below the fire. It did not take much time; and when you knew where you were going and where your refuge areas would be, your objective was always easier, more attainable, and the operation was more calm–you were usually ahead of the “racers” who didn`t take the time to think.
How far will your aerial reach? Many of you will answer in feet–the number that was delivered with the truck. Some of you like to answer in stories of buildings (better). However, neither answer is accurate. The answer depends on the building construction and how close you can get to the building.
In Harlem, I once asked my chauffeur, “What floor of this project can you reach with your 100-foot aerial?”
“The 10th floor,” he replied with some annoyance at how basic the question was.
“If you have to, you can run down the fence to get to the building and hit the 11th floor sill,” I said.
As fate always had it during my career, we encountered that exact scenario two days later. He was able to “pick” the victim from the window as we were beginning our interior search.
The lesson here is to know your aerial device. Know it in relation to your district and your ability to imaginatively move within the structure complexes. n
TOM BRENNAN is chief of the Waterbury (CT) Fire Department and a technical editor of Fire Engineering. He spent more than 20 years in some of the world`s busiest ladder companies in the City of New York (NY) Fire Department. He is co-editor of The Fire Chief`s Handbook, Fifth Edition (Fire Engineering Books, 1995).
