27

Back into the Fray

A FIRE CAN START AT any time of the day, but it felt to me that statistically more blazes started when firefighters were on the toilet, in the shower, or sitting down to eat. Civilians are vulnerable to the same statistical realities. This particular blaze was started by us firefighters sitting down for dinner.

The alarm came in for a fire in an apartment located over street-level stores. It was on Queen Street East in a block of buildings built in the late 1880s. We arrived to find black smoke puffing out of a window on the third floor.

Gary Christianson was the guy we called “Grasshopper,” after David Carradine’s character in the seventies tv show Kung Fu, because he knew karate and could kick your ass. He and I ran up the stairs to do an immediate search while the hose team set up the fire-attack line. This building was very old, so it didn’t have built-in standpipes in the hallway. Hose would have to be dragged from street level up the stairs to the apartment. It would take a minute or more — no time to waste.

At the top of the stairs, on the third floor, we found a man in his underwear, bleeding from the head. He had been in the shower. (Statistically this was a double whammy of probability: firefighters eating plus a civilian in the shower. Wow, sort of like seeing Halley’s Comet during an eclipse!) Realizing that his apartment was on fire, the man had tried to rush out through the thick smoke, run into a doorframe, and knocked himself senseless. The guy’s eyes were still rolling around in his head; he couldn’t string together a sentence to tell us if anyone else was inside.

We crawled into the smoke. A person wouldn’t be able to survive long in that stuff. We were totally blinded by the smoke. Gary and I got separated because I was caught behind some sort of furniture I couldn’t get around.

Fire was now building up in the corner and starting to climb up the wall and across the ceiling. We could see the outlines of the windows through the smoke. There was relatively little heat and I could see that the top of one of the windows was already broken, which was why smoke had been showing when we arrived. We needed to get rid of some of it if we were going to be able to find anyone in the darkness.

I smashed one of the tall, narrow windows with a tool to clear the smoke. Almost immediately, visibility improved. What I hadn’t noticed in the darkness was how high the room was. This was a century-old apartment with twelve-foot ceilings; no wonder I couldn’t feel the heat down at floor level. At the ceiling the temperature was hot enough to break the top of the window: upwards of 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

It was only then that I realized my error. Instead of cooling off the room and clearing the smoke, which would normally have been the case under those conditions, I hadn’t accounted for the height of the room concentrating all that heat. Whumph! The fire, fed by the air I’d just let into the room, was now in a rollover situation. This phenomenon is created when the smoke at the top of a room has sufficient heat and — courtesy of my window-smashing — enough oxygen to actually set the smoke on fire.

A huge carpet of fire began rolling across the ceiling. Gary and I looked at each other, his eyes as big as saucers. We both realized we were in deep shit. We had to bail out. Now. There was no time to wait for ladders to be set up for our escape. I looked outside to see where I could jump. We were on the third floor, so we’d survive, but electrical wires were blocking our path to the ground. We’d get hung up on the power lines and get electrocuted. We were stuck.

By then the other windows had blown out and the carpet of fire was racing across the room towards us. We couldn’t get back to the door, so we did the only thing possible: we straddled the windowsill, with one leg outside and one leg inside, and turtled. Flames rolled over our backs, burning our skin under our coats.

Ironically, the tall windows that had originally misled me as to the heat situation ultimately saved our lives. The fire had enough room to roll out over our heads without enveloping the entire opening we were sheltered in, saving us from being cooked like a couple of boot-wearing pork roasts.

It was over as quickly as it had started. After the fire had got its initial gulp of air, it escalated and blew out the windows, ultimately cooling the room enough for the flames to abate. The Big Guy had been looking out for us. Thank God (literally).

PEOPLE PHONE 911 FOR ALL kinds of stuff: car accidents, fires, public service calls. Like when the apartment upstairs floods because the guy started filling his tub for a bath and then decided to go grocery shopping, and it overflows and the water leaks through your ceiling. Sometimes they call because they smell gas or some other strange odour is permeating the area.

I love cellphone Samaritans. “Oh, yeah, 911? I passed a street a while ago and I thought I smelled gas or something. … No, I can’t stop, I’ve got a meeting. … No, don’t know exactly where, but back there a few blocks.” Thanks, bud, for your concern.

It was another busy day at work when we got a call for a strong smell coming from a unit on the fifteenth floor of an apartment building. We got suited up in breathing apparatus and the whole deal and walked up to the front of the building. You could smell it from street level.

“I’m going to need some coffee,” the captain said to me. I agreed and we went back to the truck.

The recruit we were dragging along on the truck gave us a What the — ? kind of look. “Hey, Cap, shouldn’t we investigate? You can smell it here at street level,” he said.

“There’s no rush,’’ the captain told the kid.

On the fifteenth floor the elevator door opened and the crew immediately started to gag. We put on our breathing apparatus. We found the apartment. A note was taped to the door asking the tenant to do something about the terrible smell.

I bent down to look through the mail slot, turned to my captain, and nodded. It was kind of funny to see the confusion manifested on the recruit’s face. Watch and learn, kid.

I took a sledgehammer and knocked in the door. It swung open, pushing against a large pile of flyers and mail. There on the floor lay the decomposing body of a woman.

The captain said, “Okay, let’s have that coffee.” I took a pot out of the cupboard and placed it on top of the stove. By now the recruit was wondering, What the hell is happening here?

I turned the burner on high and produced a packet of coffee from inside my coat, ripped it open, and poured the contents into the pot. It immediately started to smoke. I took off the facepiece of my breathing apparatus. The smell was gone.

The rest of the crew took off their masks. The captain keyed the mike on his portable radio: “Control, we have a person who expired some time ago. Request police and ambulance.”

The recruit stared at the lonely soul. She died alone. Her body had been decomposing for so long that it was now desiccated, shrunk to only a few inches high — prune-ified. It was lying in a pool of congealed blood.

There was nothing we could do for this person, so we backed out of the apartment and closed the door, leaving things for the police to take over. We stood in the hallway and explained to the arriving officer what we’d found. He was a vet. He’d known as soon as he got off the elevator what had happened.

The tenant from the next apartment approached. “Are you here about the smell?”

We told her yes.

“Good, because whatever she spilled in there has been leaking into my apartment. I’ve been cleaning it up for days.” I was beginning to feel the mental burden of the sheer volume of dead people I had to deal with.