UNDERSTANDING THE RIOTS / PART 3 : WITNESS TO RAGE : MOMENTS OF TERROR : ‘The biggest ball of fire I’ve ever seen in my life came right at us.’

It was about 4 in the morning and J.J. Newberry’s was raging. It was completely engulfed in flames.

We were by ourselves in the back of the structure. We used our rotary saw to cut into a welded steel door in the back. We felt like we were really doing some good in there, helping knock down the fire, because a lot of the storage is in the back. But then the high tension wires were just above us and we had to abandon that position. There were very, very large transformers on a series of four or five telephone poles.

So, we abandoned that position and put a 24-foot ladder up the adjacent building. Then we put a 12-foot ladder up to J.J. Newberry’s. We took pipe poles up there, pounded on the roof until we found a safe position on the part that hadn’t fallen in yet, and started lobbing water in there.

We started to see a lot of smoke coming out of the ventilators. It got to the point where it was getting dangerous, so we said, “Well, we’re going to get down off of this roof. We can’t do any more good.” So, just at that point one of our firefighters got on the ladder, and I had my back turned and another firefighter had his back turned, when this transformer blew and the biggest ball of fire I’ve ever seen in my life came right at us.

That’s when we just jumped off that roof and onto the one next door. We jumped 12 feet down . . . just jumped down the roof. I was so frightened I thought we were going to be burned up. We knew we just had to jump.

We knew, those transformers had gone. I saw the lines come down and I saw a tremendous amount of heat. I’ve seen transformers arc before. I had never seen one blow up before. It atomized the cooling oil it has inside and spewed it all over. It engulfed our engine and it engulfed the entire roof.

I was so frightened for myself that I just leaped and I was hoping that everybody else leaped. But being the captain, when I hit the other roof I instantly wanted to make sure that everybody was safe.

Chuck Coleman, my engineer, was standing on the wagon. He’d jumped off the back of the rig for safety to get behind the apparatus. He looked up and he saw our limp hose line and he thought we were dead. He climbed up the ladder and said it was the best feeling he’d ever had when he saw us.

Since oil in those transformers contains PCBs, which could possibly be cancer-causing, we started loading our hose to take a different position, because if we don’t have hose to lay from a hydrant, we’re nothing.

So, as soon as we were loading our hose, a cameraman from some place came up and took a picture of us loading hose while this fire is raging out of control.

I was thinking to myself, “Oh man, this will show up in the paper, and it will look like we’re leaving a fire when we’re trying to do the very best. I’m trying to keep my guys from getting exposed to any more PCBs than they’re already exposed to.”

There’s nothing quite like when you go to a life-threatening situation, and you have young guys that turn to you and ask: “What do we do, Cap?”

So, you come up with a game plan and the game plan turns out to be successful. I don’t think there’s anything more rewarding.

I was also very very proud of our neighbors, the people who live around the station. Knowing that we couldn’t get out there to get any food, the neighbors brought us sandwiches One man even had barbecued some ribs for us. People brought apples, women had baked bread. So, we were well fed.

It was just outstanding and everybody was concerned on Friday, because they heard that Scott Miller, our apparatus operator had been shot. I was just overwhelmed, I was so proud to be a fire fighter, I was so proud of the neighbors.