BY TOM BRENNAN
This award goes to the “school” that trained our arsonists to booby trap the fire escapes on the buildings they were planning to ignite.
I was thinking back to the 1960s through most of the 1970s when anarchy reigned in urban America’s streets and buildings. These were the times about which those who were never really “there” like to tell the members of today’s job, “You will never have the experience, kid!”
What nonsense! But I will save that for another time.
What occurred then does not occur so frequently on today’s fireground, but we still should talk about it to eliminate some of the surprise factors of this job. These actions happened in our streets daily, and we were so familiar with them that our reaction to them was routine. I give my “Mutt of the Year” awards to the people who performed these actions.
MUTT AWARD #1
The first award goes to the dirtbags who would cause tenement stairs to erupt in the faces of unsuspecting residents of multiple dwellings in areas that housed Spanish-speaking Americans. Revenge was a major motive for person-on-person crime in the ghetto days of yore, and this was the worst. These bums would access the rooftop of usually a four- or five-story structure and, after opening a scuttle or bulkhead door, pour gallons and gallons of gasoline into the stair shaft, which worked its way to the first-floor hall.
Then came ignition. Gathering out in the street and in front of the dwelling, they would toss a couple of Molotov cocktails into the first-floor lobby and to the base of the stairs reaching to the now open-to-the-roof stair chimney.
There are two reasons for giving this award first. One is that it caused so much havoc in all areas of the building that residents were injured and killed as they panicked from the noise of the flames in the hall and on the stairs and the sight of flames at their apartment door and then moved to unavailable exits from upper floors (and jumped). They also succumbed to exposure to fire products from unnatural and rapid horizontal extension to any floor occupancy from which a door was opened at the sound of the commotion.
I remember one night we lost six family members of a drug lord’s target and seven or eight other people located in other apartments throughout the structure.
The second reason for giving this award first-and the most important aspect of this story-is that stairs on fire from a “torch” are not difficult to gain control of if you get there early enough and there is not much extension to the apartments throughout the building AND you know it is a “stair fire.” The arsonist actually does you a favor by opening the roof over the stairs before setting the fire. Ventilation has produced big flames but little headway into the fuel on which it is traveling-the stairs.
What should you do in such a situation? Get water. Inform your people that you have what looks like an arsonist’s stair fire. Flake out the hose, and march up the stairs as fast as the fire lets you, cutting a safe path in front of you to the people trapped behind the flames in their apartments behind doors that are beginning to open. Fire on the stairs is easy once you get a hold of your pucker factor. Fire in the stairs is another matter.
MUTT AWARD #2
This award goes to the “school” that trained our arsonists to booby trap the fire escapes on the buildings they were planning to ignite. In those days, the miscreants saw our act often enough to understand all of our behavior patterns, and this was no exception. Drop ladders to fire escape assemblies are dangerous enough if they stay in their track as they crash to the pavement to the awaiting firefighter. Take these ladders off their flimsy track and hook them higher than normal over the sidewalk so that the checking firefighter cannot see to the welded assemblies, and you are orchestrating serious and painful injuries for the firefighter the ladder comes toward and drops on, causing delays in establishing a secondary escape route for the occupants of the apartments those balconies serve.
Another dangerous section in operations on the fire escape is at the top of the assembly-at the gooseneck ladder. Today, poor maintenance on the assembly and the building has loosened the connections of this ladder to the roof. In my day, they were pried loose by our candidates for this award. The point here is to be wary of the problem of this poor connection.
Should you need to use this ladder to escape flames or get to your objective, climb the inside of the ladder and stay between the ladder and the building. Neat trick, if I say so myself.
TOM BRENNAN has more than 35 years of fire service experience. His career spans more than 20 years with the Fire Department of New York as well as four years as chief of the Waterbury (CT) Fire Department. He was the editor of Fire Engineering for eight years and currently is a technical editor. He is co-editor of The Fire Chief’s Handbook, Fifth Edition (Fire Engineering Books, 1995). He was the recipient of the 1998 Fire Engineering Lifetime Achievement Award. Brennan is featured in the video Brennan and Bruno Unplugged (Fire Engineering/FDIC, 1999).
