First Alarm

The alarm rang four times.  I hadn’t been asleep that long as I tumbled out of bed, sensing more than seeing the men moving about me.  I was still half asleep as I slid down the pole.  I hit the ground and stepped into my boots.  The door to the station house was already wide opened.  The dogs were sitting on the front seat of the pumper barking.  The sirens were blasting.  It had been awfully cold when I got to work around eight P.M.  It was well below freezing now.  I pulled on my jacket and gloves, slammed on my helmet, and clambered up onto the seat of the tiller at the back of the hook and ladder.  Rory O’Malley started the engine almost before he was fully seated and we were moving into the night.  Not two minutes had elapsed from the sound of the first alarm until all twelve men of our company and the rear of the sixty-foot long hook-and-ladder had cleared the station house doors.  I was oriented and awake.

Wesley Williams, the city’s first Negro commanding officers, led the way in the Chief’s sedan.  It was his job to read the alarm and know the fire’s location.  The company’s job was to follow the Chief to the fire, to take orders on site.  My job was to help get the ladders there, to keep the rear of the hook and ladder in line with the engine that pulled it, to make the tight curves, and miss the cars parked in the narrow city streets.

The fire we found was in a five-story walk up on 183^rd.   Residents of the building were already standing in the street shivering in their nightclothes.  Flames could be seen behind the windows of a front facing apartment on the fourth floor.  Firemen from another company were running up the stairs leading into the front hallway.  Ladders were being extended along the street side of the building.  Someone had to get into the building and into the apartment and someone had to get onto the roof.  A fireman I worked with named Kretowicz was moving up the first ladder toward the window with the flames in it.  He liked fighting fires.  He loved the Chief.  He’d hung an axe in a hook on his belt and had tossed a blanket over his shoulder.  I could see he had no gloves on.  A pumper from another engine company was pushing a hard stream of water at the building façade.  Spray and mist were bouncing off the bricks, hitting the rungs of the ladder and freezing.  I saw Kretowicz’ foot slip, saw him fighting for a grip, saw his boots slipping as he fell to the street like a diver trying to right himself before entering the water.  He never made it.  There was something dreadfully wrong in an instant.  A fireman was never supposed to be lost or injured.  Some standard operating procedure had not been complied with, some foreseeable risk had not been appreciated.  Appreciated.  Fuck appreciated.  Dead.  Now there’s something to think about.

It would be Chief Williams job to talk to Kretowicz’s widow or mother, Chief Williams who would fill out the reams of paper and forms, Chief Williams who would take the administrative heat.  That Chief Williams was the city’s only Negro officer, and that he had just lost his first man at a fire, was not going to make his life one iota easier.