For O.C. Rescuers, Death of Nimitz Survivor Comes as Frustrating Blow

Orange County firefighter Charles Nicola first met Buck Helm at the end of a flashlight, in a crawl space the height of a bathtub.

Nicola hoped the next visit with the tough longshoreman, rescued after four days under the quake-smashed Nimitz Freeway, would be less confining--maybe over a cup of coffee or a beer.

Nicola, a battalion chief, and four other county firefighters who assisted with Helm’s dramatic rescue, wanted to go to Northern California to deliver a present to Helm: a piece of the concrete freeway column that crushed his Chevrolet Sprint.

But Helm, 58, who already suffered from diabetes and high blood pressure before the earthquake, died of respiratory failure in an Oakland hospital Saturday night.

“Selfishly, I am very sad he is gone,” Nicola said Sunday. “I wanted very much to meet him and just talk. He symbolized many things, but for me he made all those long hours worthwhile.”

In Nicola’s line of work, the rewards are few. In 1985, Nicola and Steve Shomber, a county fire captain, were dispatched to Mexico City to search for victims of that country’s huge earthquakes. They found no victims alive. Last month, after two days of retrieving bodies in Oakland from the flattened freeway viaduct after the Oct. 17 quake, Nicola thought that rescuers would again come up empty.

Then Helm was found in a concrete tomb, his car sandwiched under the collapsed upper deck, and Nicola was among the first to reach him.

In 22 years as a firefighter and disaster specialist, Nicola said few people have touched him as Helm did.

Nicola has kept track of just a handful of the survivors he has helped to rescue, most of them children.

“But Buck was different,” he said. “Hundreds of people were crawling on and around that freeway, hoping to find survivors. Spirits were low. . . . When Buck was found it was so uplifting.

“His death has taken the wind out of our sails.”

Shomber agreed, saying, “I definitely have an empty feeling.”

He was in his office in Orange early Sunday catching up on paper work when he heard about Helm’s death.

“It’s like all of our efforts were for naught,” said Shomber, who was on the crumpled freeway the drizzly day that Helm was found. “It’s almost like losing a child.”

County firefighter Dan Mackay was at the controls of the hydraulic jaws used to cut open a car door to free Helm. Working in a darkened crawl space less than three feet high, Mackay, along with Nicola and five others, spent an hour pulling Helm from the car and lifting him to daylight.

As rescues go, Mackay said, it was a rather “easy extrication”--especially considering the pancaked condition of other vehicles trapped between the double decks of the Nimitz.

He was philosophical about Helm’s death: “It was a shocker, that’s all I can really say. . . . Maybe it’s better . . . he didn’t suffer any longer.”

Helm’s condition had been improving recently, doctors said. In fact, his death Saturday night came less than a day after doctors announced that they planned to take Helm off his respirator. And Helm’s family had been convinced that his strong will would see the burly dockworker from Weaverville through the ordeal.

Nicola found some comfort in the final month that Helm had lived.

“While I am sad, I am also happy that Buck had some time with his family before he died,” Nicola said.

“I don’t know whether it was quality time, but at least they had a chance to talk and hopefully say things that in a disaster, when death is sudden, never get shared.”