How City Hall Nearly Burned Down the Bronx

Firefighting is more than fancy hat and run trucks – there ’s both a science and an fine art to it . Joe Flood ’s The Fires depict how New York ’s Bravest take out a blaze from the top down .

Just after eight - thirty in the cockcrow on August 2 , 1978 , a little fire break out on the mezzanine storey of a interfering Waldbaum ’s supermarket in the Sheepshead Bay vicinity of southern Brooklyn . “ I determine flames do from a large wooden beam the right way next to the men ’s room wall , ” said plumber Arthur Stanley , who was part of a construction crew adding an extension to the first balcony . “ I told somebody to tell the memory managing director and then I hooked up this garden hosepipe I keep in my dick outfit , and endeavor to put it out . ” computer storage coach delayed call the fire section and evacuate customers from the market , but when the flames spread out to a storage elbow room they relented , and employees had to convert reluctant client to provide their carts and exit the shop . At 8:39 , the call come in to the fire department , and within three second the first fervour locomotive engine was on the scene . The units at the scene quickly radio for backup , and after an eight - second wait , dispatchers abide by , squall a “ 2d alarm ” just after nine o’clock , and a third and a fourth alarm soon after that .

Across the street from the fire , Louise O’Connor stood with her three child - five - class - sometime Billy Jr. and his little sisters , Lisa Ann and Jean Marie . A few minute earlier , Louise had arrived at Brooklyn Ladder Company 156 to nibble up her married man , Billy O’Connor , after the nine a.m. shift change , but visualise that the sign of the zodiac ’s garage was unfastened and empty . One of her husband ’s protagonist from the menage saw her waiting outside and told her Billy was out at a fire . It was take , he ’d enjoin , nothing to occupy about , and turn over her management . When she reached the supermarket , the blaze was far from out . Waves of heat radiated from the building , and heavyset clots of swart smoke seep into the sky . A dozen or so engines and ladder trucks idled in the parking lot , and the arm of a with child column ravel was telescope out over the ceiling of the construction . stand up across the street from the blast , Louise was distract the Kyd to keep them calm — steer out thing to look at , explaining what was perish on — when she tell apart a conversant frame stride out the front door of the Waldbaum ’s .

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“ We ’re standing in front of the construction , and I ’m watching and I ’m watching , ” sound out Louise , “ and now we see Billy come out of the building , and the kids are calling him but he does n’t hear . Then he give out up the run and onto the roof and I venture he must have heard the kids or perchance he just — I do n’t have a go at it , he turned around and they were yelling and beckon and he waved and he stepped on the cap . ”

Just as Billy walk out of sight , a sudden twinkling shone through the windows of the market and the cap hemorrhaged thick streams of honey oil - black smoke . A security precaution standing next to Louise told her it was nothing the stoker could n’t treat , but she had a bad feeling . A reinvigorated wave of hotness cockle from the building and Louise - muttering , “ God , Christ the ardour , ” to herself over and over - take the kids across the street to a pay telephone set to call Billy ’s father , a chieftain in a nearby Brooklyn firehouse .

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endure on the roof or level above a blaze is the most dangerous place a firefighter can put himself . Before the terrorist attacks of September 11 , 2001 , the deadliest mean solar day in the history of the Fire Department of New York came when the first floor of a brownstone flat construction break into a burning basement below , kill twelve firemen . Most of the deadliest blazes for American firefighter — twenty - one killed in a Chicago stockyard in 1910 ; fourteen in a Philadelphia manufacturing plant that same year ; thirteen killed in a Massachusetts dramatic art in 1941 — were all collapses . But get above the fervidness is precisely what the “ truckies ” of a ladder party like Billy O’Connor ’s do for a living . locomotive companies put weewee on a firing . Along with delivery , a ladder crew ’s job is to vent the heat and smoke from the hell . Without discharge , fire crews start the risk of a backdraft , when an oxygen - starved fire gets a sudden salvo of line — say from another fireman , axing his way through the door — and the blast explode outwards . More often , the heat and smoke from a blaze radiate back into the room to cause a rollover , when carbon monoxide and unburned hydrocarbons smolder in dance blue flames that roll along the roof like northern light in the winter sky . In the engine of a car , the exploding gasoline is n’t hot enough to burn off these gases , so a catalytic convertor is used to change their chemical substance structure to fire at lower temperature . In a rollover , there is no chemical catalyst , just heat blast the molecules apart . Without venting , a rollover can apace turn into flashover , when everything in the elbow room is heat to the point of firing and suddenly burst into flame .

The well-heeled fashion to vent a fire is to break out windowpane and doors , but the most efficient method is to tear fix in the cap or ceiling above the hell . Truckies have a few antic for spotting and preventing collapses . Once they ’re actually above a fire , they attend for sudden puffs of smoke coming up through the vent , and check the roof they ’re stand up on for increased passion or softness . But the most important employment happens before ladder crews even set foot on a ceiling , when they scout the fire from below . Some of their method are by - the - book : check the hardship of the fire , cutting small holes in the ceiling and walls to see how far it has spread , studying the building ’s building for weaknesses . Others are punishing to quantify , the almost subconscious cognitive operation of stack up the countless , petite details gleaned from the blaze at hand — the olfactory perception , shift in air current and pressure sensation — and compare them with the accumulate wisdom of a career spent fighting fire . It all happen so speedily that most firefighter describe it as little more than a catgut feeling , but , like hitting a curveball or making a no - look pass , it ’s a matter of skill and experience , not divine inspiration .

Before Billy climbed onto the roof and roll to Louise and the kids , he and Ladder 156 had been inside the market scout the blazing , belike cutting holes in the ceiling and walls for signs of fervour extension , hold how far the heat and dope had “ rely down ” from the ceiling to estimate how long and how red-hot it had been burning . Radioing back to home base , honcho inside the market said the flak was nothing out of the average , but they did n’t cognize that an nether region was blazing above them , hidden in an illegally constructed section of the bonce . The first trace come when a run crew on top of the building cut a hole in the kernel of the roof , to find not flames but another ceiling . unbeknown to fireman , the Waldbaum ’s was build up with what ’s known as a “ truss roof , ” which has a inclination to sag in the middle and collect large rainwater . To desexualise the problem , the contractor added a tenuous , sloped “ rainwater roof ” on top of the original roof to disport water system to gutters on the side of the building . But direction never told the construction department or the fire department about the rainfall ceiling .

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In New York in the tardy 1970s , keep City Hall in the dark about building redevelopment was received operating process . The metropolis had gone all but bankrupt in 1975 , and the hard currency - strapped buildings department and fire department did n’t have the time or manpower to execute many review or enforce codes . With no one to give up or ticket them , build owner routinely cut corners to save money . In the casing of Waldbaum ’s , the fire department had never even done a serious inspection of the building — chiefs on the scene knew nothing about the truss roof , the rain roof , or the out - of - code attic that hid the master flame from both the firemen inside the storage and those on the ceiling above .

After cutting through the rain roof , truckies had to apply long hooks to punch smaller holes in the original ceiling below . ab initio the openings did n’t show much fire , but just after Billy and Ladder 156 reached the roof , someone issue a kettle of fish above the hidden inferno in the attic . With the sudden rush of atomic number 8 , smoke and flames shot into the melodic line and do the burst of sparks that sent Louise to the pay telephone to call Billy ’s Father-God . With the previously hidden flames now vented , Billy and the crew on the ceiling faced two facts that had initially escaped them : that the roof they stood on was really above the original cap , and that there was a very serious fire burning below a plane section of that lower roof . There was a third fact they were still incognizant of , though : the truss - style building of the original ceiling . One of the grownup advantage of a truss cap is that the trusses ( unremarkably sword or wooden beams ) work together to evenly pass around the weight above them to the side walls of the edifice , removing the need for load - bearing columns below . For decades , column - trend grammatical construction had been the FDNY ’s primary collapse problem - an odd distribution of weight or flaming damage would cripple one or two column and down they ’d come . Collapses were in particular mutual with the plaster cast - iron computer architecture of many factory and warehouse south of Houston Street in Manhattan . By the late 1970s , the cast - iron district was being rechristened as SoHo ( for “ South of Houston [ Street ] ” ) and TriBeCa ( for “ Triangle Below Canal [ Street ] ” ) by the area ’s budding artist universe and the enterprising real estate developers who follow them , but in the fire department , the neighborhood was still known as Hell ’s Hundred Acres . Trusses cut the risk of exposure of collapse by circulate extra system of weights from one corbel to the full roof . But if that distribute weight is too much for the trusses to gestate , they can all collapse in an instant ( which happened with the collapse of the World Trade Center towboat ) .

From THE FIRES : How a Computer Formula , Big Ideas , and the Best of Intentions Burned Down New York City – and Determined the Future of Cities by Joe Flood . Published by arrangement with Riverhead Books , a member of Penguin Group ( USA ) , Inc. Copyright ( 100 ) Joe Flood , 2010 .

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Joe Flood receive the Bronx Recognizes Its Own ( BRIO ) honor from the Bronx Council on the Arts for his study researching and writing about the epidemic of ardour in the Bronx in the seventies . The Fires is his first book .

THE FIRES : How a Computer Formula , Big Ideas , and the good of Intentions burn Down New York City – and Determined the Future of Cities is available fromAmazon.com

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