She Held Her Own During Test of Fire

There was something different about the rookie firefighter who started up the stairwell toward the First Interstate Bank fire Wednesday night, laden with 100 pounds of hose, protective garb and breathing gear.

Nobody noticed.

Least of all her.

“She has a function and she did it. She performed with the team,” said Capt. John Buck of his newest firefighter, April Jones. “She was right there on the nozzle. . . . She didn’t back away from the heat or the intensity or anything. She did well.”

Jones, one of 23 women firefighters among the city’s 2,768, apparently answered any remaining doubt about women’s physical ability to handle the special rigors of battling fires in high-rise buildings.

“She did her job,” echoed firefighter Christopher J. Hare, the seven-year veteran paired with Jones under the department’s “buddy” system.

Never a Doubt

Hare said he never once doubted that his partner could cope with the fire as well as any of his other co-workers from Station 26.

“If she couldn’t do the job,” he said matter-of-factly, “she wouldn’t have made it through probation.”

Jones, 23, a former Transworld Airlines ticket agent who joined the Los Angeles Fire Department 18 months ago because she wanted an “exciting” job, was getting ready to go to bed Wednesday night when the first call sounded over the public address system at Station 26 at 2009 S. Western Ave.

She jumped into her turnout clothes, opened the station doors, and jumped on the engine for the ride to Station 10 at Pico and Olive, mentally reviewing her training.

First assigned to backup there, her crew barely reached Station 10 when they were assigned to move to the fire.

The 5-foot, 11-inch, 156-pound woman--who lifts weights and cycles, runs and swims for triathlons--thought nothing of the 100 pounds of gear she lifted as she started up the stairs toward the staging area.

“That is like brushing your teeth,” she said. “Carrying all that is second nature.”

“I was really excited. My mind was going 90 miles per hour. I can’t tell you exactly what I was thinking,” she said. “It is gratifying going to a fire having all these civilians depending on you to put it out. They say on TV we are heroes and sometimes you feel that way.”

Jones and her crew were quickly assigned to the 14th floor.

“I was so excited about this fire,” she said, belittling any concern about her strength, “that I hiked the 14 floors and couldn’t believe I was there.

“Once you get into the fire,” she said, “it is just another building. All I thought was what I was trained to do.”

That was to hold the nozzle on the flames. Jones did that, watching the water turn to steam, sweating and feeling “like chicken soup” standing in the hot water on the floor.

“If I would have panicked and dropped the nozzle, the fire would have come back and got everybody,” she said. “Everybody counts on everybody. We are like a family.”

With Buck and Hare and the others, Jones hosed the 14th floor for the 25 minutes her bottle of air lasted, remembering her slow-breathing training to make the air last. She then retreated to the staging floor for a few minutes rest, before getting sent to the 12th floor and, after a second rest period and change of oxygen tanks, for a third and final onslaught at the 16th floor, where the fire was knocked down.

“I knew we had (the fire stopped) because I could see carpet,” she said, “and it was beige.”

The Station 26 crew was sent home about 4 a.m. Jones fell into an exhausted sleep, rolled out again at 5:30 a.m. for a medical emergency. A second sleep was interrupted at 6:30 a.m. by a phone call from her anxious mother to determine if she was all right.

At 8 a.m., Jones bought a newspaper to send to her grandmother in Las Vegas, drove home to Valencia and slept the entire day.