Firefighter’s Lament : ‘All You Could See Ahead Was Red’

For a few moments Tuesday, Los Angeles Fire Capt. Don Stukey could not find the fire at the Central Library.

But only minutes later, after finding no flames in the basement, Stukey and a 10-man team of firefighters worked their way upstairs and found themselves in the heart of the blaze, engulfed by the searing heat and flames on the library’s second floor.

“It was nothing but darkness in there,” Stukey said Wednesday. “But all you could see ahead was red because the books were so hot. We were getting it from both sides because the heat from below was rising up from the floors below. You get on your hands and knees and the water on the floor was blazing hot.

“The aisles were maybe a foot-and-a-half wide and we couldn’t overcommit people in case we got cut off (by the flames).”

Clouds of steam--created by water thrown on the flames--and heat that reached an estimated 1,000 degrees made the firefighters’ task even more difficult.

The heat was so intense that it took Stukey, 40, of Thousand Oaks, and 10 firefighters nearly two hours to fight their way past a doorway on the second floor.

“Inside, all you saw was red,” Stukey said.

Stukey was one of 300 firefighters who fought the blaze. About 100 firefighters stayed on to knock down hot spots and clean up through the night.

Los Angeles city officials surveying the damage repeatedly praised the courage and professionalism of the firefighters, whose quick work was credited with saving as much as 80% of the library’s contents.

Following a longstanding Fire Department plan for battling a fire in the library, firefighters moved in quickly with plastic tarps to protect many of the volumes and to minimize water damage as the flames licked about.

But just as important, fire and other officials said, was the work of people like Stukey who were among the first firefighters to enter the building shortly after the 11 a.m. alarm was sounded.

Stukey, who was helping in the mop-up efforts Wednesday, said there appeared to be much ado about very little when he first arrived at the scene.

Firefighters searched the library’s basement--where the fire was first thought to be--and found no sign of it, he said.

“But when I got outside, I could see smoke from the top,” he said. “So we went back inside.”

Stukey led a team of firefighters upstairs to the third floor where more smoke was encountered. But no flames were in sight, he said.

Stukey then called for reinforcements as he and others crashed through a window to get outside on the roof below. When they climbed through a second-floor window, they found themselves 50 feet from the heart of the blaze.

“The heat was just awful,” he said. “It was so hot that it was like throwing water on a blast furnace.”

In rotating teams, the firefighters tried to inch past the second-floor doorway and inside a room stacked with books in the library’s eastern wing.

After two hours of spraying water through the doorway, the team from Fire Station 10 finally got past the obstruction and entered the room, Stukey said. But they were immediately forced to the floor by the flames.

The firefighters, equipped with compressed air bottles for breathing, crawled in groups of two and three through narrow aisles to fight the blaze, he said.

“All of those guys in there had guts,” Stukey said. “. . . That was just the toughest structure fire I have ever seen.”