Behind Smoke of ‘Backdraft’ Is the True Grit of Firefighters

Almost two years ago, fire engineer Dan Mackay crawled through tons of dust and debris in search of life among the dead bodies buried under a collapsed freeway viaduct in Oakland.

His dramatic rescue of dock supervisor Buck Helm in the wake of the Bay Area’s earthquake in October, 1989, brought nationwide fame to Mackay, a longtime Orange County Fire Department veteran and a member of the 8-year-old state Heavy Rescue Fire team.

But he is still not comfortable with that status.

“I have a hard time with that,” Mackay said Friday as he sat in the kitchen of the quiet Seal Beach fire station. “There were a thousand other guys who would have done the same thing.

“I’m not a hero, I’m a fireman.”

That self-assessment is common among firefighters, a special breed of public servant who get paid to storm into burning buildings, face out-of-control wildfires, dig through unstable rubble or deliver babies at a moment’s call.

As the adventure firefighting film “Backdraft” hit the theaters around the country this weekend, Orange County firefighters shied away from the hero image portrayed in the movie, but acknowledged that their jobs are among the riskiest.

“You can go for days and the only thing that’ll make you sweat is when you exercise,” Mackay said. “Then, other days you are out there getting down and dirty.”

Indeed, gone are the days when firefighters sat around the station house, “playing checkers and petting the dog,” waiting for a fire alarm, Mackay said. Life in today’s fire stations is regimented, consumed by intensive training, drills and physical fitness routines.

Getting down and dirty comes in many forms for firefighters, who spend as little as 10% of their on-duty time dousing flames, fire officials said.

Instead, today’s firefighters are as much experts in construction, medicine, engineering and mechanics as they are at putting out fires, Capt. Steve Shomber of the Orange County Fire Department said.

Rather than sprinting off to a nightly fire, as suggested by the movie “Backdraft,” which portrays Chicago firefighters, most real-life firefighters spend most of their time responding to traffic accidents, inspecting buildings for fire code violations or treating victims suffering from ailments that range from heart attacks to bullet wounds.

The stories they tell are rife with the stuff that make Hollywood’s efforts to describe their lives pale by comparison.

For instance, Santa Ana Fire Capt. Donald Mahany recalled the time he beat police to a downtown Santa Ana house, where a man reportedly had been shot. Along with the bleeding and dying victim, fire paramedics found a handgun on the table, a large quantity of drugs and thousands of dollars in cash.

Firefighters had no way of knowing if the gunman was still in the house. “It was an eerie feeling,” Mahany said.

But it is not always death and destruction that firefighters face. Sometimes saving a life, or delivering one, is the order of the day.

Mahany said he recently delivered his 16th baby during a paramedic call.

“I’ve gone from a fire, my hands were still dirty, and I put on rubber gloves and delivered a baby,” he said.

Mahany’s station is one of the most hectic in Orange County, being centered in downtown Santa Ana. “A good night’s sleep is almost unheard of around here,” he said.

Still, Mahany does not regret being a firefighter, though it means living half his life away from his wife and son, who was playing a baseball game while his dad was running the station on Thursday.

“Sometimes you gotta walk on the wild side,” Mahany said with a smile. The wild side for him is leading a hose team into a conflagration. The adrenaline rush is indescribable.

“You can’t even see the floor you’re crawling on,” Mahany said. The sound of the burning building is deafening and visibility is zero. The heat can reach 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

“When you’re in there, you come to a fork in the road,” Mahany said. “Will you act heroically or will you back out?”

It is not a decision that is easily made, firefighters said. And it is the “calculated risk” of staying in the middle of the blaze, knowing that a roof can cave in or the fire can cut off escape routes, that sets a professional firefighter apart from others, they said.

“It is not a job that everyone is suited for,” Mahany said. “When everybody is running out of the building, you’re running in.”

Would-be firefighters drop out during initial training when they discover they suffer from claustrophobia in the thick smoke or they panic when they see flames rolling over their heads.

The training can be almost as brutal as the real thing.

Last week, during a weekly fire-training session at the Huntington Beach Joint Powers Training Center, rookie Firefighter Roger Korsiak was ordered into a narrow stairwell filled with smoke and told to lead a team up four flights to rescue five “victims.”

Although there was no fire, the billowing smoke made the stairwell virtually invisible. The firefighters had to wear breathing apparatus to survive the climb.

“This suits my lifestyle,” Korsiak said after the drill. “There is a lot of camaraderie and it’s an active lifestyle. It’s not like sitting at a desk all day.”

But the excitement is not without its inevitable downside. According to fire officials and the state fire marshal’s office, injuries are all too common among firefighters.

Capt. Dan Young of the Orange County Fire Department said that one in four U.S. firefighters is injured each year. In Orange County, the statistics are a little better: One of every five firefighters is hurt in the line of duty.

Ironically, fires do not cause the majority of deaths among full-time firefighters. Heart attacks are the greatest killers, Young said.

“The stress is really great,” he said.

Because of the stress and intermittent danger, firefighters said they develop a special bond with each other. As depicted in “Backdraft,” firefighting is often a career that is passed down from generation to generation.

Although Mahany wanted to become a dentist, he eventually followed in his father’s footsteps and became a firefighter.

“It was all around me,” he said.

The same is true of Orange County Fire Capt. Craig Casey, a 15-year veteran of fire service whose San Juan Capistrano fire company specializes in fighting brush-fires.

Casey’s father was once a captain with the Inglewood Fire Department; his uncle was fire chief of the Fountain Valley Fire Department; and his brother-in-law is with the California Department of Forestry.

“It’s a very family-oriented business,” he said.

Like other firefighters, Casey has worked himself into a specialty, fighting the state’s worst brush-fires. He said nothing compares to the adrenaline rush one feels when helplessly watching a wildfire whipped into a frenzy by the Santa Ana winds.

Firefighters said that the movie, “Backdraft,” has many inconsistencies. But there are truths to be gleaned out of the action feature.

County Fire Capt. Young acknowledged one concept depicted in the film: that many firefighters see a fire as a living creature, set to devour all that it comes across, including the firefighter.

“You sometimes think that it’s out to get you,” Young said.

A Dangerous Job: Orange County Firefighter Deaths and Injuries

Two Orange County firefighters died in the line of duty and more than a thousand were injured from 1980 to 1989, the most recent year that statistics were available from the State Fire Marshal’s Office. 1980: 142 1981: 81 1982: 121 1983: 68 1984: 95 1985: 159 1986: 96 1987: 65 1988: 110 1989: 54 Nationwide Firefighter Deaths

110 firefighters died in the line of duty in 1989.

Circumstance Firefighting: 50% Responding to/returning from a call: 26% Other on duty: 9% Training: 9% Non-fire emergency: 6% Cause Stress-related: 52.7% Struck by or contact with object; exposure: 25.5% Trapped in fire: 20% Falls: 1.8% Source: National Fire Protection Assn.