Dry Run for a Dreaded Day

Like soldiers, they train and they wait. Days of waiting. Months of waiting. Years and even decades of training and waiting and waiting.

Unlike the green grunt who itches to end the long wait and get on with his fighting, however, the men of the Los Angeles City Fire Department’s crash fire team at Los Angeles International Airport hold no romantic illusions about their jobs. A handful have seen what happens when a loaded airliner breaks and burns, and the others, during their long careers, have seen approximations of such grand tragedy.

“If something goes wrong here, you’re going to see a lot of death,” said Firefighter Alex Icaza. “You’re ready, but you don’t want it. Not at all.”

In a brick firehouse between the runways of the world’s fifth-busiest airport, where the heavy, soundproof windows seem almost to bend against the roar of a taxiing 747, one of the Fire Department’s most elite units hunkers down 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

They don’t do heart attacks. They don’t do kitchen fires. They are here, with a few exceptions, to limit the inevitable losses that come when humans challenge gravity.

They wait and they train. And they don’t mind.

It is well before sunup on this recent morning, the low clouds glowing with the eerie blue and fuchsia of the runway lights. Visible in silhouette is a large black plane sitting in a man-made pond.

Battalion Chief Mike Reagan, clad in his ancient yellow turnouts, is drilling the troops of the B shift, one of three 12-member teams who staff Station 80, or just 80s as it’s known, for 24 hours on a rotating basis. He gives the order and a silver-suited man with what appears--from 125 feet away--to be a handful of fire touches the pond and backs quickly away.

The 1,500 gallons of jet fuel ignite slowly in this pooled state, but within 20 seconds the plane--a plate-metal mock-up of a DC-10--is engulfed in a screaming, searing blaze that sends giant balls of orange-black smoke into the dimly lit clouds.

The first gargantuan Oshkosh crash truck--which can shoot a stream of foam the length of a 747--speeds into view. It screeches to a halt and immediately fires a swath of foam along one side of the fuselage, laying down an escape route for imaginary passengers.

*

A few seconds later, the foam blast from a second truck pushes the boiling inferno still farther away. A matter of seconds more and the fire is gone; the only sound is the twisting and creaking of the superheated plane.

Reagan nods. Not bad. They refill the pond and do it again.

The Federal Aviation Administration requires crash teams to arrive at the midpoint of the farthest runway (the two north and two south runways at Los Angeles International Airport are a mile apart) in three minutes. The crews here do it in 2 minutes, 20 seconds. The FAA requires them to carry 6,000 gallons of foam agent; they carry 12,000.

Nearly 54 million passengers move through the airport each year on 732,000 flights, or more than 2,000 takeoffs and landings per day. If the worst-case scenario--two fully loaded, fully fueled 747s colliding at high speed on the ground--came to pass, perhaps 1,000 lives would be instantly in peril. An extra 40 seconds and 6,000 gallons of foam could mean a great deal.

“Most of the guys here are over 45,” says Stephen Nowinski, a 12-year veteran of the Fire Department. “But this is the fastest station in town.”

This is a choice job, and it takes seniority and thousands of routine, gruesome and heartbreaking calls in other city fire stations to get here.

Torching fake airplanes and putting them out may be the most dramatic part of the training at 80s, but that happens just a dozen or so times a year--when the wind is right and the budget is fat enough to buy and burn up to 7,500 gallons of jet fuel at $1 a gallon. Most of the time the study is considerably more bookish.

“You see here,” says Capt. Dean Lawrence, pointing to a detailed aircraft schematic tacked on a station house wall, “some of these new aircraft have fuel tanks in the tail.”

The firefighters study the location of every fuel tank, emergency hatch and hydraulic line on every model of every plane--55 of them--that flies into the airport.

They know that the emergency wing slides deploy toward the nose on McDonnell Douglas aircraft, toward the tail on Boeing planes. They learn that Jet-A fuel burns at 1,500 degrees and takes about 90 seconds to work its fiery way through the hull of a plane.

They train endlessly to get there faster, to aim the massive streams of fire retardant foam more precisely, to pull a trapped pilot out a window--which, depending on the aircraft, could swing in or out--more quickly.

And they wait for “the Call.”

They have other chores as well. Firefighters typically respond to several routine needs a day, the majority of which are for fuel spills, 25 or 50 gallons dumping out the overflow valve of a wing tank. They stand by for VIP visits, such as Vice President Al Gore’s recent arrival on Air Force 2. They run out on engine fires and failures and bomb threats.

Even when the control tower calls, it is usually to ask the crew to stand by because a troubled plane is on its way in. Alert 22 means a plane has minor problems, and a crash is possible. (That happens, firefighters say, as many as seven or eight times a month.) But with 99 out of 100 such standbys, or more, all the activity is for naught.

Alert 33 means big trouble--lost hydraulics, smoke in the cabin or stuck landing gear like that in the nose of the United 747 from Sydney, Australia, in 1990. Extraordinary piloting kept the plane’s nose in the air until after it landed. Still, 24 of the 323 passengers were injured coming down emergency slides.

And every once in a long, long while, the call might come in a voice filled with horror.

Nowinski had been at 80s just two weeks when he heard such a voice.

It was on a clear February evening in 1991 when a USAir 737 landed on top of a SkyWest twin-engine commuter plane.

The crew was there in seconds, laying down thousands of gallons of the sticky white foam.

“It was burning and we could see people running from the plane,” Nowinski recalled in a quiet voice. “One of the things I still can’t get out of my mind is the people coming out covered in foam, like out of a horror movie.”

Steve Bloch ran a hose line into the tail end of the smoke-filled USAir cabin. In the dense darkness, he could see the dead, still strapped in their seats.

“We do one hell of a lot of training and wait for something, and it almost never happens,” he said. “Which is just fine with me.”