For Army of Firefighters, It Was Monumental Nightmare Come True

Even for veteran firefighters like Capt. Joe Chavez, the complexity of Wednesday night’s blaze was “mind-boggling,” a 2,000-degree firestorm that left his team “feeling like potatoes wrapped in foil.”

Outside, 1,500 fascinated spectators watched a chaotic drama of glass windows exploding, chair-sized embers plummeting through the sky and the flashlights of firefighters flickering eerily through the smoke.

But inside, carefully drilled teams of firefighters threw themselves into a highly organized task--repeated in training hundreds of times--like worker ants performing and re-performing a specific chore.

Wearing thick protective clothing, air tanks and breathing devices that added 100 pounds, and hauling hoses weighing 50 pounds, the crews trudged up 15 stories of water-swamped stairways that Chavez said “looked like a salmon ladder.” Each floor took a full minute to climb--15 minutes to a place where the fire roared like a tornado.

Chavez’s two five-member companies from Fire Station 26 were among 60 similarly outfitted teams that repeatedly assaulted the smoke-filled inferno with hoses spewing water at the rate of 100 gallons a minute.

“It’s kind of sadistic, but we train and train and train, and we look forward to a fire like this, just like a reporter looks forward to a nice juicy story,” Chavez said.

Filled with adrenaline and fighting thick smoke, many firefighters sucked down 30-minute supplies of air in just 15 minutes. Heart rates probably exceeded 200 beats per minute.

“We went through five air bottles up there,” said Larry Horner of Fire Station 11, one of the first to arrive on the scene.

Once inside, Chavez said, “You don’t walk through walls of fire like in the movies. You can see very little around you but the intense glow up ahead.

“You put your water on it, and you get instant steam. You go mostly by feel, and you watch your step because you can walk out a window and fall for stories.”

Never are the firefighters sure that they are on safe footing.

Division Chief Robert Ramirez, who led a group of firefighters up to the blaze, said that at one point, “the stairwell filled with dark smoke and the heat became intense, and I thought, ‘We are on top of four floors of fire.’ ”

” . . . It was definitely an E-ticket ride,” he said.

Using high-rise firefighting techniques refined since the Occidental Tower fire in 1976, dozens of small teams of firefighters swarmed first the 12th, then the 13th, 14th, 15th and finally 16th floors, following the blaze as it drove upward. They took orders from the officers in charge, such as Capt. Clarence Merriman, who fanned the men out to the hottest spots.

“We are like little ducks with a leader, each knowing what we do next, and all operating on the buddy system in case something happens,” Chavez said.

But in the intense heat, many of the firefighters told of being able to advance their hose lines only in tiny increments toward the blaze.

Surrounded by superheated air and draped from head to toe in fire-retardant clothes, body temperatures rose to fever-like levels. Without a break, a feverish grogginess can set in.

“The heat . . . it was so hot that it just sapped your energy,” said Capt. Tim Larson of Fire Station 11.

Melted wires and tangles of ducts and pipes were like fortifications, snagging the heavily equipped men and women. More than once, members of Chavez’s team “came to a complete stop, going nowhere until they yanked and pulled and finally cut themselves free.”

Despite these perils, only three firefighters were treated for minor injuries at the scene.

Under such conditions, a team could operate a hose for about half an hour before a break had to be taken. Then, they wearily retreated two floors below to a staging area to get new air tanks and peel off their heavy coats. Another team quickly replaced them above, and everyone hoped that during the short “lag time” the blaze did not regain its ground.

In the strangely calm staging area, heaving bodies soaked in sweat got a chance to cool down--”rehab” as firefighters say. Then, in 15 minutes to half an hour, they were back on a hose again.

Wednesday night’s blaze kept firefighters on the bone-wearying rotation for nearly four hours.

“This fire makes the library fire look like a trash fire,” said Lane Kemper, of Fire Station 11, referring to the 1986 Central Library blaze.

‘Bad Sign’

“It’s a bad sign when you use two two-inch hoses and they don’t do anything and finally you have to leave,” said Neal Jones of Fire Station 15, who battled intense flames on the 15th floor.

Chavez said there were moments when he thought they had lost the skyscraper.

“I was trying to figure out: Is my environment collapsing around me?” Chavez said. “If this had happened in another place without the resources we have, you would have been left with a 10-story building.”

Later, back at Fire Station 26, Chavez and the eight other men and one woman who fought together gathered in the kitchen to relive the battle.

“Tomorrow (Friday) we’ll do a formal critique, try to see how our own company could have performed better--though I’m really pleased,” Chavez said. “But today, their eyes were big as saucers, and they were awe-struck. ‘We were really in that place?’ . . . That’s what every one of us was thinking.”