Battalion Chief Richard Meerbott
Battalion Chief Meerbott is an unassuming man with a distinguished career. He never meant to stay in Pawtucket. Originally, he was waiting for a slot to open in the police academy down in West Palm Beach, Florida. But his plans changed one night when he was having a beer in a bar across the street from Station 3. Forty years later, his career was over. He was widely considered to be one of the most aggressive fireman on the job. He never stopped training either. In fact, two weeks before he retired he completed yet another school. He is credited with many of the changes our department underwent as far as modern training. He also led a team to New York the day of that catastrophe. Fifty years after leaving Florida, he still has a slight southern drawl. This interview was conducted in his living room in November 2017, nine years after his retirement. This is what he said ... TT- Why don't we start at the beginning. The way back days. DM- Back then I had no intention of becoming a firefighter. TT- Really? DM- Well, I'm not even from here. I'm from Florida. I already had a job as a cop. In West Palm Beach. I had it set up. I had the promise of a job. I was in the service, and went to school up here. I had to wait six months for a slot to open up in their academy. TT- What branch of the service were you in? DM- I was in the Army. TT- Did you go to Vietnam? DM- No. It was during Vietnam, but the job I had did not allow me to go to combat. I didn't really work for the army, I worked for the National Security Agency. That's how I got up here in the first place. The school for the N.S.A. is at Fort Devens (Devens, Ma.). I went to Basic Training with the guys from here, the 115th, that used to be in Pawtucket. They put me in Basic Training with them. Then I went to school up here for eight months. But I had no idea about becoming a firemen. TT- Are you able to talk about what you did with the N.S.A.? DM- Now I can. It took ten years before I could. TT- What were you doing with them? DM-I was an intercept operator. TT- So communications? DM- Communications, yeah, I spent two years in Turkey. TT- Really? That must've been interesting as hell. DM- Yeah. It was okay. Some of it was interesting, some of it was sort of okay. But I was waiting for a job down in West Palm Beach. There was a bar right across from the 3's, it was called Donato's, I was having a beer. I saw the truck going out of the station and thought, "That looks cool." Walked across the street and asked Joe Burns (who would later become Chief Of Department), how I could get on the job and he told me to go downtown and put an application in. And from the time the application went in to the time I was working was three weeks. TT- That's incredible. DM- That never happens. TT- What year are we talking about? DM- 1968. TT- 1968. You were already out of the army. DM- Yeah. TT- So back then it wasn't like it is now, with all of the physical tests, and academic tests ... DM- Well, they did. But not that particular school. Or the one before it. They needed guys so desperately, they came up with this on the job training thing. My first fire was my first day on the job. I had never touched a fire truck, much less knew anything about fighting fires until that day. No training at all. TT- That's crazy. DM- Nothing. And we had a fairly good mill fire. TT- (laughs). Holy shit. DM- Over behind Lorraine Mills. TT- That's day one. DM- The first ten minutes. TT- Did you have gear? DM- No, I took someone's. They said, "Just grab the guy's helmet and boots and throw it on." I jumped on Ladder 1. TT- Is this the tin helmet days? DM- Yup. Tin helmets. TT- And rubber gloves. DM- We called them melt-aways, because if you touched something hot they melted on your hand. TT- And the hip waders? Up to the mid-thigh? DM- Oh yeah. TT- And the long coat. You guys used to look like mafioso. DM- Canvas covered coats. TT- So day one, mill fire. DM- Yes. And it was going pretty good. They used to make rubber-covered products in this place. It was all that black, hydrocarbon smoke. TT- Ugh. DM- And I'm saying, "Boy, do I really want to do this?" And the lieutenant said, "Go up and ventilate windows." And I didn't know what he was talking about. TT- (laughs). DM- So I grabbed one of the guys, and he said, "Just come with me." So I followed him up the stairs. And then I got hooked. I loved it from that time on. I was on the job seven months before I even went to school. I think there was five of us. TT- So back in those days, what was the cycle like for you guys. Now, it's two days, two nights. DM- It was three days, three nights, three off. And that went on until sometime in the 70's. I don't remember exactly when that changed. TT- Now I had heard that you guys had air-packs back in the 1960's but never used them. DM- Not only weren't they used, you were picked on if you used them. TT- Right? DM- And we didn't have a lot them anyhow. TT- So you'd be made fun of for not being tough enough. DM- Well, you know, there was a question. If that guy needs to use an air-pack ... There was no mandatory Scott back then. If you felt like wearing it you wore it. I think the lieutenant’s bottle lasted twenty minutes. And the privates had a half hour. TT- Nowadays, it's not an option, I can't even imagine. So we're talking the "sponge" days. Chickee used to mention the sponge. DM- I never used the sponge. Chickee said he did, um, we never used the sponge, we just went in. Took a beating most of the time. And that's what you did. TT- It was a different day back then because houses were still made out of natural things. DM- I think it did make a difference. We had a lot of fires, Mineral Spring Avenue was being torn down, Pleasant Street was being torn down. We were busy. We were constantly busy. Because I think I went to thirty or forty fires before I even went to school. Of course I came in number one. TT- Now back in the day people were smoking cigarettes in bed, there were cigarettes everywhere. Couches being lit up, mattresses, that's one hazard that's been remediated a little bit. DM- But there are other hazards now. The worst are the chemicals they're making everything out of now. So you're really...I don't know how long we could have made it now without air-packs. TT- Yeah, well, I just did an interview with a Providence firefighter, Donna MacDonald, who got a rare sternum cancer from being splashed with a solvent at a fire. (She's one of five people in the world with this form of cancer.) And she had to have her sternum taken out. She said the cancer rates were one in three now for firemen. That's the average. DM- It's getting scarier. We used to have a lot of minor fires, but there was always asbestos. All the old piping in the cellars would be covered in asbestos. They caught fire all the time. We just, with our hands, no Scotts or anything, ripped them down and threw them on the ground. There was no protection. TT- I guess every generation faces a new hazard. DM- Yes. TT- So you went to Ladder 1.When you got on were you a transfer guy? A bid spot guy? How did it work back then? DM- First of all there was no bids. Your Battalion Chief put you where he wanted. I went on Ladder 1, ended up on Engine 2, which was Engine 7 back then, because Ray Massee's father went into the service. I took his spot. And once he came back, they shipped me out to Station 8, which is now the 6's. And I stayed up there for about a year and finally put my resignation in from the Pawtucket Fire Department and joined Providence. TT- Come on. What year was that? DM- 69? 70? That was an old peoples station. And I was very aggressive. TT- Yeah, you were probably going crazy out there. DM- I was. So I went to Providence, put in my application, got accepted, and the chief came down to Station 8 and asked why I was resigning. I told him, I can't be up here. The guy next to me is twenty years older than me. I'm not learning anything, I'm not doing anything. Next day, he came back and said, "Okay, go downtown." TT- So back in the day you had no choice where you went? DM- Not really. It wasn't a bid thing, you were just kind of assigned places. TT- That sucks. DM- It did. But I stayed downtown the rest of my career. Thirty-five years or whatever. TT- Were you back on the ladder? DM- Engine 7, which is now Engine 2. I stayed there for eleven years before I made lieutenant. In those days, there was no such thing as a Rescue Lieutenant. TT- So we're talking 1980? DM- '79. All of the people on the rescue were acting lieutenants until 1979. When I made lieutenant, I went on the rescue. Not as a rescue lieutenant, but as a line lieutenant. You could bid off once a spot somewhere else opened up. I kept my rank, too. You can't do that now. If you hand in your pins as a rescue lieutenant you go back to being a private on the line. I was a line lieutenant on the rescue. In fact I think I was in the first group of actual lieutenants that worked on the rescue. They were all acting. Chief Doire was a line lieutenant on the rescue before he bid off, so there was a few of us. TT- Now back in the day, the rescue was basic life support stuff. Stopping bleeding, oxygen, not like it is today. DM- I was one of the first group of guys that were even EMTs. There were no EMTs before that. The guys on the rescue before that were Red Cross trained. They weren't EMTs. There were a bunch of us that were EMT-I's (Intermediate, which is above EMT- Basic but below paramedic), because we went to the EMT-I class as well. TT- So you were trained by the state? DM- I went to college. At CCRI, for Fire Science, and that was one of the courses. After I got my EMT, the EMT-I's were trained at Memorial Hospital, so I think the city paid for that. I think there were seventeen of us. TT- Were you guys doing IV's? DM- No. TT- So what was going on in the back of the truck? DM- Not much of anything. You packaged them, put them in the back of the truck. Before that, we didn't even transport people. Costigan Ambulance transported them. I think I was a lieutenant for six months before we started actually transporting people. TT- It's incredible what it's turned into now. I just did a cycle last week as acting lieutenant on the rescue, I got transferred over in charge. First run I had was a code. The protocol book is this thick (six inches deep.) It's just crazy. DM- I don't think we even had a protocol book. (laughs) As things progressed, the rescues got more busy. The EMT-I was a big thing. And then of course the Cardiac. (All firemen in R.I. have to be Cardiac level EMTs, meaning they can push drugs and do interventions that EMT-basics can not.) And by that time I had already bid off. I was on Engine 2. TT- So how long were on the rescue itself? DM- Three years. TT- So by '82 you were back on the line. DM- Yes. As a lieutenant. TT- Back in those days, a few names come up. Especially guys that mentioned you. You had protegés, like Brulé and Chickee and Lemay, they used to say--Brulé had a great story about how his lieutenant wasn't a go-getter, and if he saw you at a fire he would jump on with you and go in. DM- Sometimes I was too aggressive. Where, after I became Battalion Chief, then you said, "Hmm. I'm not sure I'd like to be in charge of me." (laughs). I'd also do a lot of things on my own. TT- Freelancing. DM- Freelancing. I was very aggressive. And Chickee would follow me in, so I got him to be aggressive, and the guys who worked with me--if they weren't aggressive, they weren't working with me. That's pure and simple. TT- Because they knew what they were getting into. DM- They also knew I was gonna take care of them. You can be aggressive but make sure your guys are okay. TT- When we talk about this, there are some guys that are here for the job, they do the job. Then there are other guys, especially on the fireground, they really enjoy it. And then there's a level above that, like your level, where it's--they're almost above the command structure. They're doing what they see needs to be done, whether or not their boss is with them or not. That's kind of the essence of free-lancing. You're not with your boss, you're not paying attention to all of the rules they give you to keep you safe, you're doing what you see in front of you that needs to be done. And everybody knows it needs to be done, but they don't necessarily think you should be doing it because it's usually very dangerous. DM- I'm not saying it was the best idea, because it wasn't. I used to scare the shit out of my Battalion Chief (laughs). I'd do things that ... TT- Kind of hairball, right? DM- Yeah. When I first started there was no such thing as accountability. I learned you could go into the building by yourself (another big no-no) because you had nobody with you. That lasted into the 70's. TT- Were you on Engine 2 the full shot? DM- I was on Engine 2 until I got promoted to Battalion Chief. They didn't have any captains back then. TT- What year were the captains? DM- I was already a B.C., so it had to be in the 90's, like '93. TT- So when did you make B.C.? DM- That was all the same thing. At the same time they made the captains rank. So it was '93 I think. What they used to do was have like an acting captain. That's what I was as the senior lieutenant until they actually made the captain's rank. I had responsibilities for the station as a captain would without the actual rank. TT- From '93 you stayed until 2008? DM- Yes. TT- So we're talking about a thirty-nine year career? DM- Forty. TT-That's pretty amazing. Now in that time, injury wise, did you have any problems? DM- There were some. Nothing I couldn't deal with. Like most firefighters I had a back injury. I think I was out six weeks. Smoke inhalation, bruises. The same things. The back injury kept me out the longest. I got to the point where I just came back. The doctor said no and I said I don't give a shit. TT- Because you were probably going crazy at home. DM- Nuts. I'd rather suffer the pain at work. TT- That's the thing people don't get either. Guys with high motors, putting them at home, it's almost even worse. Because now you're hurt and you're at home and you're not doing your job, and the only thing you're thinking about is going back to work and you can't. DM- It just drives you nuts. TT- Nuts. DM- We went out everyday. We trained all the time. On Engine 2 with my guys, we were always doing something. Sitting at home doing nothing drove me nuts. TT- Once you made Battalion Chief, you were on like twenty-three years, and I'm guessing you saw some pretty horrific things. Especially in the late '70's. There was a lot fires. Dick Lemay dropped off three garbage bags of newspapers that I chronologically ordered at Station 4. Guys were helping me, the whole dorm was filled with newspapers. Before you know it, dudes were sitting in chairs reading newspapers. And we just went through and read and it seemed like every other day there was a triple-decker burning. DM- It was pretty busy. If you look at the records, we were busy, but this was before the rescue exploded. We didn't do all the runs you guys do now, but there were more fire runs. TT- Were you at the fire in '79, where the two guys died trying to get people out? It was by the G and C Tap? DM- Yeah, that was my fire. TT- Oh Jesus. That sounded like a horror show. A total nightmare. DM- If you think about it afterwards, yeah. When you were there you're doing your job. You're just gonna try and get the job done. The week before that we had a high rise fire. The fire you're talking about happened on a Friday, so the Friday before we rescued 65 people. Nobody got seriously hurt. But they should've. Everything worked out just right. TT- Sixty-five rescues? Were they above the fire floor? DM- They were above and on the floor. What happened was a woman lit her apartment on fire somehow and ran out the door. Left the door open. Well, at the time it was all rugs, so all the rugs caught fire. So we had most of that hallway on fire, so they couldn't get out. And everything above that, we were either able to throw ladders up or make sure they were safely in place. We pulled some out, some stayed, but altogether we pulled sixty-five people out without an injury. I think the most injured person was the lady who started the fire. And then a week later you lose two guys in a freaking triple-decker. Actually it was a deuce and a half that, technically, was illegally cut up. After the fire was out, the state fire marshal said it was an accident but I didn't sign off on the report. And when we went back, we proved it was an arson fire. And the people didn't have a shot. The guys (two civilians) that went in didn't know what they were doing and it flashed over. They got caught on the third floor. TT- That was it. DM- That was it. I know the guy that got twenty-five years in jail for that. TT- No way! What was he lighting it up for? Insurance? DM- Girlfriend. It was drugs. It was a crack house, they went to get the drugs, she didn't give it to him or something. TT- Wow. So that's why he lit it up. DM- So he lit it up. TT- Where did he light it? In the basement? DM- He lit it on the second floor. In the bedrooms, he poured gasoline everywhere. And it just went Whoompf! I was there in two minutes from the alarm and it was already coming out of all the windows. TT- You guys were right around the corner. Jesus Christ. DM- Right around the corner and it was already coming out of all the windows. It was going good. TT- Lemay said he saw fire blowing out of six windows when he pulled up. How did you get your arson training? DM- I'd gone to the schools. They had seminars too. TT- So you wouldn't sign off on the fire marshal's report. DM- No, because I knew it was wrong. Absolutely wrong. It was political at the time, fire marshal. I used to like him, he was a nice enough guy on Ladder 7 in Providence, but his conclusions were screwed up. I went to bed and when they woke me up at like two o'clock with the preliminary findings that night, I said, "That didn't happen." They said, "Well, it started over there and went to there--" I said, "That didn't happen. I'm coming back down there." We went back down there, and I went through it with our own fire marshal, and the state fire marshal, and showed him. TT- So the guy from Providence was the state marshal? An active duty guy? DM- Yes. TT- Is that the book with all of your certificates? DM- Yes. Even when I was Battalion Chief I still took classes. Confined Space Rescue, Hazmat Tech, Rope Rescue, I did it all with my guys. I figured, if they were gonna do it I was gonna do it with them. TT- You never spent time in the office upstairs? In Fire Prevention? DM- No. I couldn't have dealt with that. TT- When you would pull up and size up the scene, I mean there are certain guys that are intuitive about this stuff. Your name comes up a lot as far as being good at judging certain situations, and knowing who to trust. On the fireground, the Battalion Chief's outside, he's watching different colors of smoke etc, explain what you're looking at. DM- You're watching a lot of things. Smoke is the one you can tell what kind of fire you have by the color. How bad it is, sometimes even by the smell of it. It's instinctive. Sometimes someone would say, "How did you know that was gonna happen?" And I'd say, "I really don't know, I just sort of knew." I was there. You watch the smoke, you smell it, feel the heat, you can pretty much tell what's going on." T- Kraweic used to say that he would watch and wait for it to turn a certain color, either good or bad. He also said he would ask the guys he could trust, who were coming out of the building, "Hey, what's it looking like in there? Do we have a shot at putting this out?" That was his biggest fear, making the wrong call as far as moving guys in and out if the building. He would talk about the color of the smoke. DM- If it got lighter it was pretty much knocked down. Black smoke is never good. Or even the smell sometimes. You can smell whether it's plastic burning, it might be horrible black smoke but you could smell a certain thing and be like, "That'll be knocked down in a second." TT- When you're the B.C. in charge, it's different than being a lieutenant in charge of two guys. When you're the man, you're in charge of thirty guys and the safety of 80,000 civilians. As far as these things spinning out of control, there are plenty of examples. Star Gas was one, were you on that day? DM- I was off-duty but I got there even before the last engine did. I was right here looking out the window. I had the scanner on and I knew seventy or eighty percent of the guys were at a golf tournament that day. So I jumped in the car. I was a lieutenant then. I wasn't a B.C. I think I got there before Engine 5 did. TT- Reports from that day, it's a miracle nobody died, as far as these canisters and tanks being launched into the neighborhood. DM- It wasn't the canisters that was bad. I didn't think--it was me, Ray Mathew, Chickee, Joe Gildea--I didn't think we were coming home. Because they had just backed in a rail car with 65,000 gallons of LNG (Liquified Natural Gas). Actually, I think it was LPG, Liquid Petroleum, and the valve had already gone off. The relief valve. That means you have ten minutes, if you're lucky, and when I got there nobody had any water on it. I grabbed Engine 3 and got the guys to put water on it, because it was gonna blow up. TT- Brulé said he was on a master-stream in front of that thing and he was convinced he was gonna die. DM- Greg and Joe Gildea were on one side, and I was with Ray Mathews. We had 2½ inch lines wetting this thing down. And after the pressure relief valve went, we knew it was gonna go. Period. I don't why it didn't. It was just one of those things. Gildea afterwards, said, "You were a lot closer than I was." And I said, "Yeah, Joe, you were barely fifty yards behind me. We all would've bought it." I don't think I was ever more concerned than Star Gas. Really, we thought it was gonna go. TT- Now if 65,000 gallons of LPG ignites, we're talking about ... DM- Well, it's 800 to 1 when it expands. TT- We're talking massive devastation. DM- It would've taken the school out and many blocks. (the school was loaded with kids that afternoon.) So we just decided we were gonna stay. TT- And the four-foot canisters are being launched like rockets into the neighborhood, like I heard as far away as Broadway. DM- Yeah, they did. It was interesting (laughs). TT- Engine 4 melted. How long were you guys there that day? DM- It came in like two o'clock, and I think it was like six or seven that night? Once we got it under control and things knocked down, and the tanker wasn't gonna go, we-- TT- What exactly was burning when you pulled up? What was on fire? DM- When I got there, you couldn't see because of the smoke. The building was burning, and it was infringing on the tanker. Everything was burning. TT- Did they determine how it started? DM- Somebody was filling something wrong, from what I understand. TT- So like a seal got blown? DM- Whatever it was. Not sure what. TT- Were other companies brought in from out of town? DM- I honestly couldn't tell you but I'd assume they were. I was busy and really concerned I was gonna melt (laughs). TT- Another one was Greenhalgh Mill, 2004. DM- That was mine too. TT- I heard guys at Station 4 just looked out the door and said send everybody. Were you downtown that day? DM- I was not downtown, I was on the Industrial Highway. I pulled in just as Engine 4 did. And I looked at it and said, "Oh, this is going." And Engine 4 had already put in for a third alarm, and I said this is gonna be a General Alarm, because it was already at the point--we found out later it was illegally packed with chemicals. Although we could never prove it because everything was burnt. TT- The story I had heard was that there might've been a scrap team in there stripping pipes? DM- I think that's what they were doing. I think they were taking the copper piping down with blowtorches and it got away from them. There were chemicals that weren't supposed to be in there. Because technically it was a knitting mill. They had some kind of nitrates in there. I can't prove it, it came from other people, but everything was against us that day. TT- Sixty mile an hour winds ... DM- Fortunately, I had taken my whole shift over there the week before. We did an inspection from the outside to prepare. Just had a feeling (laughs). TT- Some of these places you do have a feeling. Right? You walk in and go, "If anybody comes in here in the middle of the night they're gonna die. They're not getting out of here." We did a walk-through over across Newport Ave, on Carter, there's a mill complex over in there, and it was all cut up, different doors slid one way, others this way, there was no power to half the building and it's like a block long. Total death trap. We were like, 'If anyone comes in here they ain't coming out." It was terrifying even in the middle of the day. Anyway there are certain buildings you look at and say-- DM- "My guys aren't going into it." TT- Exactly. Now when you're in charge of a scene like that, that's turning into an inferno and taking out a neighborhood ... Like at one point I heard there was talk of this thing blowing all the way to Attleboro. DM- It was because of the wind. The embers were blowing all over the place. And then we had a firestorm and the wind gusts must've been 80 mph. Just before it collapsed. I mean it really went. TT- I read a weather report from that day, and it actually created its own weather system above the city. DM- It does. That kind of fire does. And when the building went down, I was with Bobby Thurber and them. We were on Kenyon Ave near Engine 2, and we all laid on the ground because it looked like a wave, a wave of pure flame. It went right over us. TT- That's what he said. DM- It looked like you were at the beach, except it wasn't water, it was fire. And it went right over our heads. We were lucky no one was standing up. TT- That is crazy. Thurber was saying you guys turned the master streams straight into the sky just so you wouldn't burn. DM- Oh yeah. It was hot. I wasn't in the command post, I was at the scene. TT- Where was the Command Post? DM- They set it up on Cottage Street. Chief Doire, I think he was acting Assistant Chief because Renzi was Acting Chief. As soon as I got there I called and said for Chief Doire to take command because I had to stay on Kenyon. I had to be there. Because I've always been that way. I had to be there. Some of the Battalion Chiefs didn't want to be there, but I had to be there to feel it, to see it, and then make my decisions. TT- Were you ordering evacuations of the neighborhood? Did the police do that? DM- I had a good shift. My Rescue Lieutenant was Tomlinson, I'm not sure if Dick Lemay was there that day. But once they saw what was happening, they automatically started to evacuate people. All I asked was that someone make sure the school was empty. And that the kids were taken away. I was pretty sure we were gonna lose the school. TT- Now this was at 2:45 in the afternoon right? DM- Yes. TT- And kids were still in school. DM- The kids were just getting out. TT- I heard there was three hundred firemen from all over the place. DM- There was. TT- Sixty Engines, twenty-seven ladders, twenty-three rescues ... DM- It's always better to have people there than not. TT- Now at the point you're on the fireground just basically taking care of that immediate area? DM- I was taking care of my six engines and two ladders. I didn't even know what was going on other than that. We were gonna stop it from taking out Kenyon Avenue, and whatever else was happening wasn't my business. TT- So defensively, you just set up to try and hold it back from running over everything. Kind of like trying to stop the ocean with your hand. DM- Yes. TT- Thurber told a funny story about taking a beating, taking a beating, and then pausing to have a smoke. He said he thought you guys were getting a handle on it until he turned around and saw everything was on fire. (laughs) DM- That was from all the chemicals in there. When we did our preplan the week before we never entered the building. We checked the hydrant placements and where we would be setting up just in case. On the west side of the building it was all vacant, so of course the wind was blowing the opposite way toward where everything was. That's where we lost all of those houses. The only thing we didn't plan on was a 60 mph winds. That wasn't part of our planning. (laughs). TT- Right? There's no way to train for that (laughs). Someone that taught my academy said something that always stuck with me. If you come to work on a nice sunny day and it's windy, don't think it's just a nice sunny day (laughs). DM- That's true. TT- Were you working the day of the Hargreaves disaster? (FF John Hargreaves died in a fire in 1993). DM- I was on vacation. TT- There are certain milestones through the years, where you kind of ask guys if they were there or not. DM- No Hargreaves, that was my shift. I was in Florida. I got home that day, that afternoon, and somebody mentioned something happened but I didn't know. I knew that building. There had been fires there before. TT- From what I heard about that building, it was a law office that was basically turned into a fortress. Double roofs, like an actual roof build over a roof-- DM- Windows that were shatterproof and bulletproof. TT- What were they protecting in there? DM- No idea. TT- And I wonder who they were working for that required that kind of security? DM- Forty years on the job, and we had a fatality. Forty years and I've never seen a building torn down the day after. TT- Wow. DM- Totally torn down. And I always questioned that. TT- I wonder who made the call on that? DM- I have no idea. TT- So they literally showed up with the wreckers-- DM- The next day. TT- Picked it up and hauled it away. DM- More or less, yeah. TT- No kidding. DM- Without a real thorough fire inspection or anything like that. TT- Nothing? There was no investigation? DM- Not much. TT- That's incredible. And that's '93. We're not talking about the 70's or 80's. DM- It went down and taken away pretty quick. And there was not a lot said about it. TT- Do you think it was because of the gravity of the injury, where they just wanted this thing taken out? They didn't know he was gonna die (Hargreaves died at Mass General a three weeks after the fire). DM- I don't know. I can't really tell you that. TT- That does seem kind of suspicious. No investigation after a line of duty of death? DM- If there was a story, and this is just between you and I, but one of the lawyers went past the (police barricades), down the stairway on the side, and John (Hargreaves) was still in the building (everyone else had been evacuated but Hargreaves had no radio). They were still trying to ventilate and he (the lawyer) opened the door. It flashed over because of him but they couldn't prove it. TT- Really? Wow. Jesus. DM- But they did catch the lawyer there. TT- I wonder what was in that building. When you hear about how hard it was to get in there, you almost needed a battering ram, a tank to get into this place. DM- I think as a private I had a fire in that building and as a lieutenant I had another. It took forever to ventilate and break the windows to get in. TT- They didn't want anybody getting into that place. DM- Nope. Whatever was going on ... TT- Were the people that ran the place the same afterwards or did it change hands? DM- They're the same. TT- It would be interesting to talk to them-- DM- They're not gonna tell ya (laughs). TT- Right? I was in construction for fifteen years and never heard of a building construction like that outside of a bank. DM- No, they tore it down really quick. And it was so protected, nobody seems to know why. There were never any real answers. TT- Everything just kind of got brushed away. And that's the last line of duty death due to fire that we've had. Are there any fires in your mind that stick out? I know the big ones, but I don't know the ones along the way. What about grabs? You must've had, especially in the 70s and 80s with all that fire ... DM- Well, there was but a lot of times you don't want to think about them. (visibly unamused). TT- You just kind of put it away. DM- There's a couple. We grabbed a kid, he died, he came home from La Salette, and he went upstairs to the third floor, an illegal third floor bedroom, and it caught fire and we couldn't get to him. I was the Battalion Chief. It just so happened, Dick Lemay found him, pushed through back to the second floor, and he was coming down the stairs with him giving him CPR when he tripped, and I was there, I caught him. I can remember taking him to the rescue doing CPR and burning my lips. TT- Oh God. DM- Having his skin ... in fact I had to go the ER to get his skin pulled off my lips. And that sticks in my mind. There's always the good grabs. We had the Bagley Street fire, I was on the rescue that day. I think there was twenty-one people we pulled out of there. One of the cops, it was really going, and I said to him, "You really shouldn't be in here." He didn't belong there. There was a lot of smoke. I was starting to run out of air and he said, "Well, there's people in here." The next thing I know he's gone. TT- The cop? DM- Yeah. On the ground. I had to carry him down the ladder. TT- (Laughs) Oh Jesus! DM- And Mike Souciar (?) and I pulled a kid out of the second floor. They said everybody was out. Mike Souciar and I were upstairs. We're getting ready to start overhauling when we heard the moaning. We went in and found him beneath the bed. We pulled him out and he lived. In fact his sister came by and wanted to see us and we weren't there. But they're still in the city. You should talk to them. That was the week after Mayor Lynch decided that we didn't need all the ladders. TT- Oh this is the Ladder 3 story. DM- Ladder 3. TT- It's amazing how these decisions come back to haunt everybody. DM- The week after. When I was on the scene and asked for a second ladder Fire Alarm refused me a second ladder. TT- Why? DM- Because the mayor didn't want proof that we needed the second and third ladder companies. TT- Oh my God. DM- I think eventually they sent the second ladder only because the fire broke through the roof, but at first they were told not to send a second ladder. TT- That is crazy. DM- It wasn't Fire Alarm's decision, they were told by the administration not to send that second ladder. TT- That is absolutely crazy. DM- I think it was twenty-one people. One guy set it. He lit all the entrances on fire, all the exits. TT- What was his motive? DM- I don't know if they ever caught him. TT- It's amazing how these things start over love or drugs or money. Just burning people out, it's crazy. Now as far as the job itself, especially when you talk to different guys about how they were able to compartmentalize and not take it home, not turn into an alcoholic, not abuse the wife, were you just able to wall if off-- DM- You can't. That's impossible. TT- What did you do to process it? DM- Drank. (laughs). I didn't become an alcoholic but I became a divorcee because of it. Cause we used to go see something that wasn't so good, like someone's brains on the ground, and you drink afterwards. You know, to a point where ... TT- It affects the marriage. DM- Yeah. TT- And you come home. You've been at work for two days on top of it. And it's hard to forget that these people out in the real world have no clue what the hell you're doing. DM- And you've also got guys like me, as you know, that really loved the job. And unfortunately that came first. It did. TT- And by the time you look around everything else is gone. DM- Gone. TT- All your personal relationships... DM- That was number one. The job. TT- So for the most part you were able to deal with it by whatever you did. DM- For the most part. I'm dealing with it now. TT- That's what Lemay said too. DM- I can't, we went, I was down at 9/11 (approximately 19 Pawtucket firemen went to Ground Zero the night of the attacks). I can't watch those videos. It bothers me. It really does. TT- Now 9/11 itself, you had organized-- DM- Bob organized it. I think he was the Training Officer back then. TT- So you, Dave Reed, Thurber- DM- Joe Cordiero. TT- So you're pretty much talking about the heart of the department. DM- There was a lot of us that were the go-getters. TT- These were the guys that did everything. They did every aspect of the job. And when Thurber talked about it, he said you were in Jersey-- DM- For a little while. And then we just said, "Screw this. We're going." We were supposed to wait and we were like, "Well, we're not waiting anymore." TT- So you packed into the vans. DM- Packed into the vans and went to the George Washington Bridge. We told the cop that we were all needed down at the scene because we were all trained in the IRIS (thermal imaging cameras). And FEMA needed IRIS trained guys. So they said okay and let us through (laughs). We weren't supposed to, but we just couldn't sit there any longer. TT- Now from what you remember about that day, I guess you left Jersey in the middle of the night? DM- Yes. TT- And the whole place was unstable. Things were still collapsing, on fire. You guys were basically a mop up crew. Like putting out fires... DM- We didn't do a whole lot of handling of hoses. We were able to get to Ground Zero and start searching. But after a while word came down that it was no longer a rescue. There was no rescues anymore. That's why we left the next day. Our chief said, "you're not staying there to recover people, you're there to rescue people." Once it was confirmed that there was nobody left to rescue, we weren't really needed there. TT- Now when you were looking at was happening in front of your eyes, you must've--It's gotta be a disbelief factor, where you just can't believe what you're seeing. DM- Yes. TT- That pile, the enormity of what's happened...there's no way to describe it, am I right? DM- You couldn't take it in. You couldn't take it in until after you got back home. It didn't compute then. At the scene, we were just trying to do our job, hoping to find someone alive. And once we found out we weren't going to, you process it then. TT- Thurber also said the New York guys might've gotten a little touchy having all these out of town guys running around. Did you get that impression? DM- From some of them, yes. Yes I did. I think they thought they could do it themselves--because of the way they're trained and the way their mentality, but they couldn't. And I think eventually they needed the help. There was a little bit of something there. You could see it. TT- Nobody wants another city coming into their town, but you're right. This was an unprecedented event. DM- Well, this wasn't like a hotel fire or something. Everything was gone. Like I said, you didn't process it that day. TT- You guys stayed for the day-- DM- Day and night and then we came back. Once it was confirmed there were no rescues, there was no point to us being there as a recovery team because we had our own city to protect. TT- Can you think of any other big events in your career? DM- New Coal and Lumber. Across the river on Taft Street? TT- What was that? A big lumber company? DM- Oh yeah. (laughs) We knew the guy who set it. He used to live right here. And he had set a small fire next to another mill. I knew it was him. I went by him and said, "Is that the best you can do you asshole?" An hour later this thing was roaring. TT- Did he have a motive? DM- He just liked setting fires. The whole family was nuts. His brother lived two houses down from here. They used to live somewhere around Pleasant Street. Chickee would remember their names. But there was a whole mess of them. They just liked setting fires. TT- A family of arsonists (laughs) DM- Yup. TT- Was there ever an arsonist who lit a string of fires? Like terrorizing people? I can remember 2010 we had a guy running around lighting shit up every other night for a while in the same area. DM- Mineral Spring Avenue. We use to go there a lot. They used to call it Plywood Alley because of all the boarded up buildings. Whether or not it was one person or a group, we never knew. Fire Prevention (the office of inspectors and Fire Marshal) wasn't much in those days. It was sort of casual. When I got on the job we didn't have any jaws, or spreaders or airbags, we had a K-12 and a crowbar. That's how you used to cut people out of cars. TT- The old school. DM- There was a bunch of us. Myself, Chief Thurber, Chief Boisclair, and one of the training officers. We went up to New Hampshire and looked at their Jaws and learned how to use them. Then we came back to our city and said, "Hey, we need these." TT- What year was this? DM- I wasn't a lieutenant yet, I was a private, so in the '70's? TT- Were they hydraulic then? DM- Yes. Same principle. They're a lot smaller and easier to use now. We went up there and they showed us how to use them. We came back and convinced the Training Officer that we needed them. TT- How old were you when you got on Pawtucket in '69? DM- Twenty-five. TT- And how old were you when you left? Sixty-five? DM- Yes. TT- So you maxed out. DM- Yes. TT- You had to go. Would you have stayed? DM- Yes. (laughs) I say that, but I don't know. Probably yeah. I don't how much longer, because I had a problem with my back, old injury, in fact I had surgery two months before I retired. TT- That was the attitude back then. Lemay said the same thing. He was like, "If they hadn't forced me out ... but I'm glad they did. I wasn't happy when I left but I needed to go. Enough was enough." DM- Well, you get tired. I know a lot of guys go, "Oh the Battalion Chief's job's easy." Because you don't do as much physical work. But once they move up they find out it's not really an easy job, because you got a lot more responsibility. TT- It's not even commensurate with what the job entails. DM- I think they make a little better pay nowadays. But Dick Lemay made a buck less than me as a Rescue Captain. TT- Right? I think they make like thirty bucks more. DM- Well, I made a buck more and was in charge of him (laughs). TT- In charge of the whole city. It's not a joke. DM- My whole thing was, my guys were gonna go home. They were gonna go home safe. Period. TT- So as a chief you didn't appreciate the freelancing as much (laughs). DM- No, no, no. (laughs). TT- So you had to keep an eye on Chickee... DM- Well, you had to keep an eye on everybody, but I was able to...I had a great shift. And I learned as I grew as a Battalion Chief who could do what. I had guys that weren't gonna go into fires. They weren't. I bet you still have them today. They're not gonna go into fires. But I knew what they could do, so I used them for what they could do. Whether it would be setting up lights or dressing hydrants, I used them for what they could do. Some guys would say, "Well, how come he gets to stay out there?" Because if you put him in there he's just gonna sit by the door and not do a damn thing. If I have them outside, at least he's doing the job. I expected guys to do the job I expected them to do. The guys that weren't as aggressive were gonna handle everything going on outside. TT- They were gonna do something. DM- They were gonna do something. I knew the guys who were aggressive. Knew the guys that were in between, and you worked it out. TT- It's almost like you're a football coach or a baseball manager. You know it's the ninth inning and I need that guy. Or it's the middle of the fifth and blah blah blah. DM- I was thinking more like someone who takes care of a kindergarten. (laughs) TT- That too. From what I've heard, you were very... as far as a fireground tactician, we have McLaughlin now. He's able to move pieces around strategically instead of guys just running in and turning it into a disaster. You were the forerunner to that, as far as pulling up, sizing up what's going on, how to use your resources... DM- That's important. That's what you did. TT- That's the job. DM- I took offense if one of my guys got hurt. It bothered me. It offended me that I might've done something wrong or let them do something that got them hurt. But thankfully I never had anyone who got seriously injured. Bumps and bruises but I didn't like it. TT- You took it personally because that's your job. DM- Yes. TT- So you completed forty years. Thirty is considered long now, but forty, that's a long time. DM- It was a good forty years. There was some ups and downs, some sadness. Like I remember when Dick Lemay lost his son, he came back to work. And the very first day, I was a lieutenant on Engine 2, he had worked for me before he went on the rescue. And we had a run over on Roosevelt Avenue and I got in there before him. Walked into the bedroom and it was a crib death. Just like his kid. Twins. One twin was alive and the other was dead. TT- Oh my God DM- It always stuck in my mind. And when Dick pulled up I would not let him in. TT- Thank God. DM- I said, "You're not going in there." He goes, "I'm the rescue, I have to-" "It's all set, Dick, you're not coming in this building." "Well, why not?" "Because I don't want you here." "Well, I'm the rescue lieutenant, and the rescue lieutenant has priority when it comes to rescue work--" "This is not a rescue anymore. There's not anything you can do, and I don't want you here." TT- Good for you. DM- And I sent him away. TT- I'm sure he didn't like it but ... looking out for him like that was huge. DM- I remember how traumatic it was for me, those two little kids, you know? One was alive, one was dead, and especially since I had twin boys myself. TT- Really. How long were you married the first time? DM- I was with Jackie nineteen years. TT- And you have four kids? DM- Five. TT- Did any of them become firemen? DM- No. They took the test, but they didn't seem really interested. TT- It wasn't in the blood. DM- It wasn't. I don't know why. My granddaughter, she wants to be one. She took Seekonk's test and flunked it by millimeter. She was pulling up the hose that third time and the rope was all sweaty. They didn't give her gloves and it slipped out of her hand. And they flunked her. She's small, like 4' 11", 110 pounds, but she's tough. TT- She must be if she was dragging that 250 pound dummy around (at the physical test run by the state.) DM- She already has her EMT, so I'm sure something will come along. The boys, one went in the navy, the other in the air force, and the third became a cop. The other one's a cook. They never showed a lot of interest. TT- Like you said, it's in you or it's not. DM- I didn't know it was in me. I didn't want to be a firefighter. When I was in the service a couple of guys were putting in for fire departments in New Jersey, but I thought they were nuts. "What do you want to be a firefighter for? They don't make any money." (laughs) TT- Right? And then you get there and you're like, "Wow. This is what they do?" I had no idea what the fire department even did until I ran into a friend of mine who was a lieutenant on Warwick. I was in construction, a framer, for years. And finally I was like, "I’m getting ready to kill myself." and he said, "Why don't you become a fireman? You already use all the tools. You're a roofer." And I was like, "What do you guys do all day? That's gotta be some boring shit." He goes, "Come for a ride-a-long." The next night I was on the Hazards with him at Station 8 and I was blown away. "This is what you guys do everyday?" "Yup." I signed up for EMT (at CCRI) the next day. DM- Most people don't. They think we don't do anything. Until they need you. TT- Right? They have no idea. No clue. DM- "You guys sit around the station watching TV." Yeah, sometimes I have sat around and watched TV, but not that often." TT- "And other times I'm peeling someone's dead skin off of me." There are slow days, and then there are days you can never forget. DM- I think Dick ... he wasn't a Rescue Lieutenant very long, he might've just left me. And we had an accident. Five kids. And they were all torn up. I pulled in on the engine and saw him doing CPR on a guy and told him, "I got four other guys laying here, stop with the CPR." He goes, "I got to do CPR--" "Dick, every time you push on his chest his brains are coming out of his ears. Didn't you see that?" He goes, "Oh." "He's gone, Dick. There are other people that need you." We pulled a guy out of a car one time, me and Chickee. And he was talking to us. We had to use the Jaws. We slid him out of the car. And as we slid him out, his legs fell off and he bled to death just like that (snaps his fingers.) But he was talking when we first got there. I guess the pressure kept him alive for a few minutes. Those things stay with you. TT- When you were young on the job, who were the older guys you were following? I hear names. Buchanon, Timmy Hayes... DM- Buchanon got on after I did. Timmy Hayes, wasn't really on my shift. I guess my lieutenant, Lt. Lundgren, we were friends until he crossed the picket line. Dan Cronin, a lieutenant, he was a good lieutenant. One of the guys you kept your eyes on. My lieutenant, he gave me a lot of leeway right away. TT- Do you have any regrets? When you look back at the 40 years? Anything you'd change? DM- Yeah. I probably wouldn't want to be Battalion Chief. If they had Captains then, I probably would've stayed a captain. People thought being a BC was easy but it wasn't. There was a lot of things. I got a reputation of being able to take care of a lot of things. Dumb things that guys did. I would get called at night, off duty, to go somewhere if someone was in trouble. There was a couple of guys I definitely put myself on the line for, I could've lost my job maybe, but I took of them. TT- You always looked out for your guys. DM- Yes. TT- Now these books you have here, are they all scrap books? DM- Those are just a few of them. There's a lot more. TT- What else do you want to talk about? DM- There's too much. I think if anything, they only started counseling after the Dexter Street fire where the two guys died. That was the first time we got to talk to anybody. Before that you just lived with it. You just lived with it. I remember we when we had the wall collapse over at the Stop and Shop. Chickee's wife's boyfriend at the time was cut in half. Me and Chickee pulled him out. Just half his body. Those are the things you remember. TT- Just let me thumb those real quick (the scrapbooks.) Lemay had a ton too. Like from the 70's straight through. DM- We had a fire right next to Station 1. I don't know how it got going but it was ripping. We went in, and on the first floor they said someone was trapped. We couldn't find him, but we crawled in. Couldn't find him, and as we crawled back out we found the body. And the roof was collapsing. We picked him up, started dragging him out and I remember his arms breaking because we had to get him out before the roof collapsed. It always stuck with me. Jesus, we had to break the guys arms to get his body out. That's the stuff the public never thinks about. TT- We had a code once, guy weighed over 400 pounds in this tiny bathroom. There was no other way to get him out and do CPR other than just yanking him out. And we broke both his shoulders. He was dead anyway, but it didn't make me feel any better. DM- We had a floater one time whose head came off as we dragged him to shore. He was wedged beneath the pylons, and the only way we could get him was to tie a rope around him. The Medical Examiner was already there, and he goes, "Where's his head?" "It must've come off when we pulled him out." We never found it. TT- One thing these scrapbooks show us is how dead real reporting really is. I mean i'm so used to meaningless blurbs, it's refreshing to see real reporting. DM- True. TT- This has been invaluable. I hope one day we can get everyone's scrapbooks digitized. Make a real history of the job. I want to thank you for taking the time. It's been a real honor. DM- Thanks for coming over. Good to meet you.
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July 22, 2009
“Jesus Christ!” Psycho Sal braced against the dashboard. “What did I tell you about the fucking brakes?” “I’m sorry, Sal.” Glenn St. Pierre was relieved he hadn’t just crashed into the car in front of them. It was only his second day on A-Shift as chauffeur of Rescue 1. His boss, Lt. Salvatore Giametti, was easy to read since he pretty much existed on the edge of a perpetual meltdown. St. Pierre knew all of the stories, how Sal, formerly known as "Straightline Sal" because of his attention to detail, had his rescue career blown apart after a string of horrendous runs he could not process. There was the single mom stabbed forty-nine times, the ten-year-old girl that hung herself in her closet, two dead babies, and a carful of teenagers turned into ground beef when their car hit a bridge abutment at 70 MPH. This was over a two month period in 2005, and after that he was never the same. But St. Pierre was determined to stay positive. He said, “It’s kind of incredible how poorly these things are maintained.” “Welcome to the rescue division.” Psycho Sal lit a cigarette. “Hope you enjoy getting your nuts punched in all day long.” “How old is this truck?” “2006.” “What? It’s only three years old?” “I thought you were supposed to be some kind of genius? Guess your big brain can’t wrap itself around the fact that these trucks run day and night.” “Guess that’s true.” “Besides, the Receiver shit-canned most of the mechanics.” “Fire Alarm to Rescue 1.” Psycho Sal grabbed the mic. “Rescue 1, go.” “Start responding to 516 Cantwell Street for a possible overdose.” “Roger.” Psycho Sal turned to his new partner and said, “Ten gets you twenty we play Jesus and raise the dead.” “No bet. Sounds like you’ve been there before.” “And we’ll be going back again. Place’s a total shooting gallery.” Fire Alarm hit the Alert Tone and announced, “Attention Rescue 1 and Engine 1, Still Alarm. 516 Cantwell Street, apartment 2, for a possible overdose …” St. Pierre fired up the lights and sirens while fumbling with his phone. He had no idea where Cantwell Street was. “Are you kidding me?” Sal puffed on the cigarette. “Put that phone down before you kill us both. Take a right.” “I’m sorry—” “You better learn your goddamn streets, newbie. This ain’t Fire Alarm.” St. Pierre tried not to be discouraged. Despite hitting every IV and three flawless runs so far today, he felt all of it had been erased in the last five minutes. He tried not to cough through the fog Sal’s chain-smoking produced. “Take a left.” Sal leaned forward, scanning the block. “Just passed 421. It’s gonna be on your side.” St. Pierre’s pulse was pounding. He tried avoiding parked cars on either side of the road while hunting for the address. “I think that’s—” “Watch out!” A police car responding to the same call blew the stop sign. After St. Pierre slammed on the brakes and sent Sal into the windshield, his cigarette exploded into a burst of sparks. “He’s not even using his siren!” St. Pierre struggled to maintain his composure. “That was close.” Sal had his door open before they even stopped. He went straight to the cop’s window and said, “That was some great driving, superhero, you almost killed us!” “Don’t be so dramatic—” “Didn’t you hear our siren?” St. Pierre went for the First-In bag, which was a backpack stuffed with an oxygen tank and every conceivable breathing attachment—nasal cannulas, non-rebreather masks, bag-valve masks, nebulizers and steroid ampules for treating asthmatics or anyone with COPD. There was also a glucometer for diabetics, oral glucose, stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, pulse and SpO2 gauge, epinephrine for allergic reactions, narcan to reverse opiate overdoses, and various sized needles to administer both. 516 Cantwell was a bombed out triple-decker in the worst part of District 1. Home to the city’s open air drug market for cocaine, heroin, and crack, there were whole blocks of foreclosed triple and quadruple-decker homes. Built a century before to house thousands of workers that had once flooded the mills, these massive houses were now vacant hellholes filled with the worst things people could do to themselves and one another. Zombie junkies and tooth-grinding meth-heads scavenged for cash doing whatever needed to be done. Female addicts transformed into bedraggled prostitutes that stepped out of shadowy doorways. Nicknamed the “Kitchen,” this ghetto straddled the border of both the “Knock Out Kings” and the “Fifth Street Vatos.” They shared a fortified DMZ along Claiborne Avenue where atrocities, traded in an endless cycle of provocation and retribution, were just a part of doing business. As Psycho Sal and the cop argued, St. Pierre shouldered the First-In bag and a book-sized AED, which was a portable cardiac defibrillator. He took the stairs two at a time. There was no front door, and the dark hallway was strewn with garbage and used diapers ripened in the July heat. “Fire Department!” St. Pierre banged on the door to number 2. The stench was overpowering. “Hello! Open the door!” “Hello?” He tried the handle. “Fire Department!” He slowly pushed open the door. A white man and woman sat at a filthy table in a long destroyed kitchen. Their arms were bruised pathways tattooed by the needle. The woman was barely awake and had a long drool oozing from the corner of her mouth. The man, a lesion-filled mess, cackled loudly at her expense. He had leaky brown eyes surrounded by the hollow sockets created by emaciation and addiction. He was thin and wearing dirty boxers and a stained T-shirt. He said, “I woke up first and thought she was sitting there dead!” He laughed again. “Guess I was wrong.” “Sir.” St. Pierre did not know where to begin. “Have you both been using drugs today?” The man laughed even harder. “Naw, she’s alright. She’s a tough old goat. But I won’t let her shoot no more today.” “Ma’am.” St. Pierre approached her. “Can you tell me what day it is?” She turned her head as the long drool let go and splashed across her deflated breast. “Tuesday?” “Long as you’re here …” the man jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “It’s been awful quiet. I think there’s something wrong with the baby.” “What baby?” St. Pierre was confused. “There’s a baby here?” “Yeah. She’s in that room right there. She’s been sick.” Convinced the man was just high, St. Pierre kicked aside beer cans and trash. He pushed open the bedroom door. He saw the empty crib and stepped closer. “There’s no baby in here.” “You’re a funny guy. No baby …” The guy laughed. As St. Pierre left the room, something in the bathroom across the hall caught his eye. He took another step and then dropped the backpack and AED, screaming, “Sal!” “Who’s Sal?” St. Pierre dove at the tub and pulled out a toddler. “Sal! Oh Jesus.” He desperately searched for a pulse. “Come on, kid. Sal!” “What’s going on?” The junkie appeared in the doorway. “Oh no. Oh shit! Linda was gonna take a bath—” “Get out of the way!” St. Pierre was doing CPR on the still warm child. He ran out the door and straight for the truck. “Sal!” Sal and the cop stopped threatening each other long enough to register the panic on St. Pierre’s face. Sal blinked. “Was that a baby?” Inside the truck, St. Pierre laid the kid on the stretcher, doing CPR while hooking up the defibrillator pads. He turned on the monitor as Sal hopped in and said, “What the fuck is going on?” “I don’t know, man! There were two junkies just sitting at the table and the kid, the kid was in the tub—” “Gimme that.” Sal hooked up the pads in case the monitor called for an electric shock. “Stop CPR.” They both watched the screen and, sadly, saw the rhythm was P.E.A. A soothing voice said, “No shock advised. Continue CPR.” “Fuck me, man.” Sal ripped open the IV drawer. “Keep going with the CPR.” “We should be able to get her back if she just drowned, right?” “Do you know how long she was down for?” “No. That junkie—” Sal turned to the cop. “Go in and get that fucking guy.” The cop was all cop and tore off for the house. Sal, reminiscent of the gifted medic he used to be, found a tiny vein and sunk the IV while CPR continued, no small feat. St. Pierre, pumping away, was in awe. “Where’s the epi?” Sal spun for the med-drawer, drew up the appropriate pediatric dose of epinephrine, and had it going into the IV line thirty seconds later. Next, he cranked back the kid’s head, intubated him in one shot, and hooked up a bag valve mask, pumping pure oxygen into the tiny chest. “Where the fuck is the engine?” “Didn’t you have your radio on? They called responding from County Street. They were on a Box Alarm.” “Of course they were.” Sal drew up another dose of epinephrine and toggled his mic. “Rescue 1 to Engine 1.” “Engine 1, go.” “Approximate fifteen-month-old, Code 99. Expedite.” “Roger that.” “I don’t think so …” Sal pumped the bag-valve mask every ten seconds. “That’s not how this is gonna go down.” Engine 1 tore around the corner. Three men jumped down and ran for the rescue. Lt. Stokes got there first. “Whaddaya got, lou?” “Looks like a drowning. I need one man back here with us to run the code and one to drive. Like right fucking now.” Lt. Stokes said, “Bugsy, you drive. Finn, do what you do.” Kevin Finnegan was no ordinary twenty-year guy. The first five of years of his career had been spent on Rescue 1 working for Capt. LeClaire, and the next five he partnered up with Lt. Killmoor to learn the other side of the city. Since he was taught by both department pioneers in EMS, Finnegan was widely regarded as one of the best rescue guys on the job. But 135 Eddings Street finished that. A mother shot her three kids in the head and then herself. Finnegan had two small kids of his own and knew he was drowning in the ghosts. He said, “What do you need, lou?” “Can you get another epi ready?” Sal pumped the bag-valve mask. “Talk to me, Finn, what’re you thinking, bro?” “Nothing, man. You got the line, the tube, the epi, the CPR … I can’t think of anything else except some good pavement medicine.” “Bugsy!” Sal screamed. “Let’s roll, dude!” “Roger that!” Sal toggled his mic. “Rescue 1 to Fire Alarm.” “Fire Alarm’s on, Rescue 1.” “Advise St. E’s we’re coming in with an approximate fifteen-month-old found face down and unresponsive in a bathtub. Unknown on time. She’s currently P.E.A. We have a twenty-four gauge IV in the left AC, two rounds of epi are on board, and we’re about to drop a third. Kid’s intubated, CPR’s in progress, we’re six minutes out.” “Roger.” Rescue 1 was barely parked before its back doors shot open. St. Pierre hopped out and grabbed the stretcher while Finnegan continued CPR and Sal pumped the mask. Ideally, they knew Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence would have been better suited to handle this situation, but state protocol called for all pulseless people to be transported to the closet Emergency Room. The ER doctor on call at St. Elizabeth’s wore an expression that seemed to reflect this, that he was about to become the wrong man in the wrong place at the right time. “Doc, we got an approximately fifteen-month-old female found face down in a bathtub.” They wheeled her into Critical Care Room 1 where an army awaited. Sal continued his report, “She’s been P.E.A. the whole time. Don’t know how long she’s been down. Four rounds of epi on board. No vomiting of water or stomach distension, twenty-four in the left AC.” The nurses motioned that they were ready for the transfer, so they moved the child from the stretcher to the bed. As they did so, the mask moved. The doctor approached. “Halt CPR.” “What?” Finnegan was pounding out a steady rhythm. “Look at this.” The doctor pulled away the mask and pointed at her blue lips. Then he motioned toward her mottled skin. “Lividity has not yet set in but it’s close.” “She was still warm! Blue lips could mean she’s hypoxic!” “Sal …” St. Pierre tried to step in. The anxious room did not know what to do. “You ain’t calling it.” Sal made it sound like a threat. “You haven’t even done anything!” “I’m sorry, lieutenant. Our protocols are pretty explicit.” “You’re a piece of shit.” Sal seemed to think of it. “It’s a little girl, man.” “Lieutenant—” “You ain’t even gonna try?” Finnegan said, “I’m continuing with CPR. Fuck this guy.” The doctor said, “The water probably kept her warm. You don’t even know how long she was down for.” “I know …” Sal deflated. “A little fucking girl, man.” He shrugged. “I’m all filled up. This one’s on you, med-school.” Then he left the room. Lieutenant Greg Brulé July 16, 2017 Physically, at six-foot three-inches and two-hundred sixty-pounds, he was the largest man on the job. He could've been a devastating bully. Instead, he was widely considered to be the nicest guy in the whole department. He'd been in one fight his whole life and, after literally throwing his opponent through a door, profusely apologized while helping him to his feet. Renowned for smashing in dead-bolted exterior doors with only his size-fifteen boots, new guys loved him because he was always down to teach. He was one of the remaining connections to the old-schoolers, the guys who'd been through the fiery 1970s. His enthusiasm for the job hasn't wavered an inch. Indeed, as he relived his career, he spent ninety minutes in an animated state of excitement. This interview took place in his kitchen five years after his retirement in 2011. It's only an excerpt of a much longer conversation. TT-- What I remember, is after Chief Cute retired, and he showed up downtown for lunch, he said the same thing. He was there for like ten minutes and said, "I feel completely out of place here. Everything has just washed over me." What is that like when you go back after (retirement)? GB- I never understood it until--Timmy Hayes was one of the greatest firefighters I saw work a fire, I had high--still do--high respect for Timmy Hayes. He was always a walker. Always walked the boulevard. He lived off of Weeden, up near the Lincoln border, so he would walk from his house all the way to Blackstone Boulevard, do the boulevard, and walk back home. TT- Wow. GB- No shit. Everyday. Relentless. Always saw him walking by the station. He was on the job doing it too, but after he retired, I still saw him. I said, "Timmy, c'mon in. Have a coffee. Let's chat." He did a couple of times, you know? Probably to be cordial. But he started avoiding the station. He started going down freaking Power Road, because I saw him a couple times taking Power Road all the way down. And I ran into him, and I said, "Tim, what's up, man? I don't see you anymore." He goes, "Nothing against you, and nothing against the guys, but it is so totally different. So, so different." You're on the outside looking in, you seem--remember that old saying, "Take your piss and screw" that everybody uses? You know what? You don't have to say it because it's different. So I went downtown, probably like a year ago, and I was looking for some people. I was actually looking for John Dolan, to get a smoke inspection for my daughter's house. Man, I just looked around that kitchen and Alarm Room and I didn't know a freaking soul. It was like holy shit. I went upstairs, I said you know what, I'll go see Barbara (secretary Barbara Pacheco has been the gatekeeper to every chief since the 1970s), and Chief--Benny Langevin was up the there at the time--I went up there and nobody was around, kind of creepy. Even dropping in (at Station 1), A.J. and Patrick (his old crew), they haven't changed. They're still the same. But I still don't drop in as much as I used to because you do--you feel like you're--not invading their privacy, but almost like ... (Retired) Chief Burns always comes in on a Friday. Always. But that was just the feeling I got, almost like I didn't belong there anymore. It's a weird feeling. TT- That has to be kind of strange after spending all that time there. GB- All that time. TT- Even if you're out of the loop for a couple of weeks--vacation or injured--it's been like sealed over and you have to wedge yourself back in and (catch up on everything you missed.) GB- The biggest changes are the faces. You don't realize it because you're still around them, but there's so much attrition on the job, it's a revolving door it seems. How many schools they put through in the last six years since I've been gone, how many guys they've put on six years. TT- I've got eight years and I think 50 guys beneath me. GB- Isn't that incredible? TT- Crazy. And when I got on, it was all top heavy, lot of senior guys. GB- I understand the dynamic of the job--you're not gonna maybe feel it for a while. But when you first get on the job you feel like--you don't want to touch anything, you don't want to say the wrong thing, what do I need to do here--back when I got on in '82, it was paramilitary. There were still guys from World War II on the job. TT- Wow. GB- On the job at Station 6. They call it the Sleepy 6s because you didn't really move too much, and you went up there and it was such an unbelievable difference. They were into cleaning brass, and the brass--Wednesday's brass day so we had to clean all the brass! So I was the dumb kid saying, "What're we doing this for?" You know what I mean? (Laughs) What the hell are we doing this for? It's winter time. The truck would go out on one run, come back-- "Oh we got to get the hose and spray underneath, get all the salt off." What? We didn't even go that far! So I was that young kid, generation gap thing, they're paramilitary. That flag's gotta be out there by dawn and down at dusk. And that's cool. You better have a pot of coffee going all the time because they were into their Joe. I saw the differences--now, fast forward thirty years. I'm sure those guys felt the same way. They wanted to get away from havoc and seek refuge at the 6s. They all kind of hung together, the old dudes would be up there playing their bridge and stuff I never seen before, Crib, but I see it now, where when I was ready to go--you know when the writing's on the wall because one of the main thing's that generation gap thing. Guys on their devices all the time. I'm saying, "Hey, dude, come to the (kitchen) table. Change of shifts. Let's get to the table, you know? Let's get an hour in with the (previous) shift, see what they did last night, what they used last night, what's on the truck, what's going on?" Everybody would be scattered. I'd walk in, nobody would be around. Man, I miss that coffee with two shifts at the table, all the bullshitting, busting balls, having fun, talking about shit, legitimate shit, like how can we better things? TT- Yeah, talking like tactical stuff. GB- Tactical, safety, stuff we deal with everyday. Yeah. And I was like, "Wow, I just feel, I'm not in anymore. I'm on the outside a little bit," you know? I didn't want to become the lieutenant where I would grab a phone and say, "Gimme that phone." (laughs) "You can pick it up at my locker at four o'clock in the afternoon." But that's the way I felt, you know? TT- The technology got that intrusive, right? Because Lemay was talking about the same thing. "Guys would sit around smoking, smoking and joking, and there's one TV in the whole station." GB- But I understand. Going to the computer, checking out all the different things on the computer, it's cool. But time and place for everything. You got all afternoon, man. But, um, but when I'm going to a run in the 5s district, and the guy in the back--now the motor's going like a bastard, we know it's a confirmed Code Red, we're laying a feeder from freaking Goat Hill. I want to grab a hydrant that's high so we're laying it down the hill, so I'm looking in the book (the official department mapbook that has every hydrant in the city) for that hydrant, we're gonna be there in two and a half minutes, we better find out where the hydrant we're gonna tag is. And I hear the guy in the back yelling and screaming. So, got away from what I was doing, we're screaming down the road, sirens are going, engine's going, and he's screaming with the window between us. I slide the window open. "Yeah, whaddaya got?" Thinking he's got something going on. You know? "Hey, lou, you got a hydrant on Whatever Street." Thinking he's thinking what I'm thinking. He goes, "No, lieutenant, I'm just talking on my phone." TT- Oh God. GB- You dumb SOB. TT- On the way to a fire. GB- Crazy, right? So you know what? I said, "Screw it. I'm not gonna address it now. Address it later, man." But I'll tell you what, he made me become this--like I didn't want to be that guy! I didn't want to be that dude. I said, " I'm just gonna let it slide, let it go away." It didn't, man. I was pissed. So I said, "Listen..." The fire was over. "Show me how--did you take a picture of yourself?" "No Lieutenant, I didn't." I said, "Listen, we're on our way to a fire, it's a confirmed fire.." He says, "I had my axe, I was ready to go..." Axe, no. Hydrant gear, my friend. (Second due engine companies are responsible to hook the first engine up to a hydrant) You dumb SOB. Now this was just a guy that was transferred over, but still, young guy, nice guy, but I had to grab it and say, "You'll get it later." And I thought the conversation... he goes, "Well what do you want me to do, lieutenant?" I said, "I want you to be like..." And on rescue, Dawson was on the rescue at the time. They came on together. I said, "Be a Mike Dawson. That's all I want you to do. Watch what he does during the course of the day. He gets it. I want you to get it. Talk to him, follow him around, you don't have to hang around with the senior dudes, be a new guy like him." So I thought the conversation was fine, between the two of us, I thought that was it. I caught overtime at the 5's, so this was later in the day, he got his phone at four. I fly over to the 5's and hear, "Oh I heard you took his phone! Oh, you're a real ball-buster! Good for you, man." (laughs) Who the ... now he gets on the line and the department grapevine goes wild. I'm saying, "Now I got to go back and talk to this guy." But anyway, what I think I was getting at, the writing was on the wall. There was a generation gap, I understand it, I do. But it's a young man's job. That fire that we had (he and I on West Ave in July. Hot and humid), I was fine, I felt great. But the next couple of days, man, (laughs) I'm saying, "Jesus." I got my back, I got my heart. TT-Why not get out while the getting's good. So, let's go back to '82 when you got on the job. How old were you. GB- I was twenty-one. TT- What were you doing before you got here? GB- That's what got me here. Cathy Fugere (his soon-to-be wife), it was 1977. Her brother got on the job. I was at Tolman High School and we watched a huge mill fire right from the second-floor. Middle Street was going fucking crazy. And I'm saying, "Your brother's in there somewhere?" (laughs) Holy shit! It just opened my eyes. I said, "What an exciting job that must be!" So I had never thought about becoming a fireman, but there was the fact that he was doing it, and a year later, maybe two, there was the Narragansett Racetrack fire. So we went to go see that and that's when I saw the beach wagon, the frigging car come in with all the beer. And I'm saying, "Look at this shit." You know, they're trying to hide it and stuff. (laughs). And I'm saying, "Man, these guys are drinking beers." So now I'm salivating a little bit more. I went to URI for two years on a football scholarship, and that didn't work out for me. I knew I was wasting my time, and everybody else's time, and I wasn't gonna waste my dad's money. That was the main thing, I was getting a full ride. Then Cathy got pregnant. We'd been dating since '77. Juniors and high school sweethearts. So URI was a testing ground for that, make sure it was right. But she got pregnant, so it was like, oh man, I gotta grow up quick. So left that, grabbed a job at Rhode Island Hospital, her father was an electrician there. I was working third shift, cleaning toilets, stuff like that. Ran into Bobby Thurber who was working in the ER. I saw the technicians there--he was a tech there--got friendly with Bob, we started talking, he started talking to me behind the scenes, showing me shit--burn victim, this dude was alive but you'd never know he was alive, melted, smelled like a barbecue, but he was still alive. And Bobby was like, "Look at this, guy." Everything was melted. So, the blood and guts didn't bother me. Later, I learned that they brought some dude in that was a dumpster dweller, who had these bugs all bored into his stomach and shit. Grossest thing I've ever seen in my fricking life. (Bobby Thurber's) pouring peroxide and these bugs--I'm saying, "Bobby, what the hell!" It was fascinating shit though, it wasn't grossing me out. The piss and shit, yeah, maybe a little bit. Puke, you know? But this stuff was fascinating, this is crazy stuff. So I was taking some police tests and he goes, "Fuck the police department. You got to go for the fire department. My father just made B.C. in Pawtucket." So long story short, that's where I met Bobby Thurber, fire service, the whole nine yards. I was already working third shift, and I had to supplement it with a book-mobile job. TT- Book-mobile? GB- Yeah. So I took an application for the book mobile. It was parked on a hill. I popped the clutch, the books fly all over the place. (laughing). It was because of that job, the mayor saw my name on an application, and I didn't know the mayor was on the church board with my mother. TT-Oh no way. GB- He goes, "I saw your son, is it your son, Greg? Who put in an application for the book mobile?" "Yeah, he's working hard, gonna have a baby, he's working two jobs..." "Do you think he'd like to be a fireman?" She goes, "He's already taken Warwick and Cranston's tests." He says, "Tell him not to go to personnel, just come to my office. Take out an application." The rest is history. Right? Everything happens for a reason. The book-mobile got me the job. So all these guys, I got on with six guys, they were all pounding signs, working their balls off for him (the mayor) and I didn't spend a day doing anything and all of a sudden I'm number 4. Bobby Thurber goes, "What the fuck!" (laughs). "Who the fuck do you know!" "I don't know anybody!" So I went on in '82. TT- Was...When Kraweic and I were talking, he was talking about specific guys. Because obviously, since he's the chief, he's in charge of a lot of--I think it's the most pressure filled spot on the whole job, being the B.C., only because anything can go wrong, and you're responsible for thirty guys and 80,000 people. GB- They should be getting double pay, not the fifty bucks ($ difference between B.C. and Captain). TT- Right? So I was asking him, "When you would show up on-scene, what would you do?" And he was like, "I always knew who to turn to." Brulé, Jay McLaughlin was another guy, Timmy Hayes' name came up a bunch, Bobby Ogle. He was like, "I would turn to these guys and ask, "What's it like in there? Do we have a shot? Should we get everybody out?" He was like, "I wasn't afraid to ask, but I knew who to ask. Because some of these guys aren't gonna have that kind of knowledge." GB- I think the fact that he was with us so long, you know what I mean? You get familiar, and you get comfortable with guys. You know they know how you operate. Just like A.J. and Patrick (privates under Brulé on E1), I know what they were capable of and how they were thinking, and they knew what I was thinking, without even saying stuff. So if I turned around, I didn't have to ask for a tool. A.J. had the tool, but he was on the job, you know what I mean? He wasn't handing you the tool and going, "Okay, lieutenant, here you go." No. He was on it. So I think there was a comfort level and--you get really familiar with the guys, the way they operate. I think working with Kraweic for so many years ... If I was Battalion Chief I'd say the same thing because it's only past experiences that I have that I can use, so, I think that's maybe why he mentioned my name and stuff. I mean you know some of the good firemen, you know? Back in the day, Chickee and I used to hook up and I would freelance. We would take off from our bosses and jump on Meerbott (a legendary B.C.), who was a downtown lieutenant, and follow him into the fire, work with that crew, it wasn't the right thing to do, we understood that, but we were learning and we were fucking doing it, seeing shit. As time went on, it changed for me, the accountability thing, after the Hargraves fire when he died on Cottage Street. I was Acting Lieutenant. We were back-up line to Engine 2. Engine 2 went to the basement, went around the back to where the coffeemaker I guess had started it, but they couldn't find the seat of the fire. That was the surprising part. It was so superheated down there--now we didn't realize the Ladder couldn't make a hole. There was two roofs up there. They couldn't break through the two roofs. Sand and gravel on both. But there was like a two-and-a-half foot void between the new roof, and the original roof. Heavy workload. TT- And we're talking about bullet proof windows... GB- That's the thing. The fucking K-12s were bouncing off. They ended up, I think over time they ended up just pushing the ladder right through the fucking thing. That's how they vented it out. But in the meantime, it's cooking down there. So I'm at the base of the stairs, and my two guys, it was Russ Renzi and Bruno Marovelli. It's so hot, we're hitting the ceiling just to cool the area down, and I said, "Let's drop some of these drop ceilings, because it has to be right above us." But we were committed to stay at the bottom. The stairs went up both sides. You couldn't see anything. It was banked down, super hot. So I said, "I'm gonna go try and push in one of these air conditioners. You guys stay here, and I'm gonna go right to the freaking back wall and try and find a door, an AC, anything to vent this thing." It's all made up with these movable sound proof little barriers. Now going through there, you're trying to stay as straight as possible-- TT- So you can get back out. GB- The shit is building up. There's shit piled all over the place--office furniture, chairs, tables, desks, file cabinets--the big ones, you know what I mean? Can't budge them. So I finally made the back wall, now I'm working, I'm a big dude, and I'm sucking that air. I hit the back wall and now I'm hearing airhorns outside. Get the fuck out. (air horns are the universal sign to evacuate the structure.) So I was gonna Mayday, but I didn't Mayday, because I said, "Let me go this way. If I can find a window, pull in a fucking air conditioner, I'll go out that way." But I knew those guys--now this was before everyone had a radio. There was only one radio, the boss had the radio. It got wet when we were hitting it and I'm not hearing any kind of communication on the thing. TT- So you only heard the horns. GB- Right. Now I'm hearing bup-bup-bup-bup (mimics the ominous sound of the vibe-alert on his mask going off signaling he was running out of air.) I'm saying, "Oh man, I'm in a jackpot." It's super heated down there, so now it's a pucker-factor, you know? I had it with me, but I never went for it (the Mayday). TT- Did you have a hose with you? GB- No. TT- Solo. Nice. GB- I'm freelancing. I found a door and got out, but I wasn't accountable. TT- They said they were looking for you because at one point you were missing. Like they had already done an accountability. GB- That's right. I don't know. God blessed me that day because you know what? And I was thinking about it (activating the Mayday) I'm saying my grandfather died the year before, in '92, and I'm saying "Jesus, Gramps died a year before me, I could buy the farm." But I had a moistened sponge an old-timer told me to keep in my pocket, and I didn't reach for it, but after the fire was done, they fucking yelled and screamed. AJ (Al Jack) was the acting BC that day, who was also my boss at the time. I never freelanced again. I learned the importance of staying with your crew. TT- Now I had heard the name John Buchanon. He was a well respected guy, Buchanon, right? GB- Yes. Absolutely. TT- The story I had heard from Lemay was that when he came out, when Buchanon came out and was changing bottles, Al Jack was asking him, "What does it look like in there? What do we got going on? Do we have a shot?" And Buchanon turned to him and flat out told him, "The fucking Devil's in the basement and he's gonna kill somebody down there." That's pretty fucked up. GB- That was the only time I thought I was gonna die on this job. The only time. TT- Wow. It was a Sunday afternoon, beautiful day out, and it was just the weirdest thing. GB- It was originally, the adrenaline pumped through your veins because we were getting multiple calls. Then it went down when Engine 4 said, "Oh, it's just black smoke pouring from the chimney." Kind of like a chimney fire. And then they reported, "No, no, we got heavy smoke and fire in the basement." Engine 4 was, I think minus a guy. So it was Engine 2 that really kind of got in there. So I don't know if Engine 4 was feeding the ladder. I'm not sure how it played out, but Engine 2 were basically the guys that got down into the seat of the fire. But Buchanon must've been with the 4's. Because that was before he became a training officer. TT- Now, let's talk about the freelancing stuff. At these events they're guys that are very safety conscious. Everything is by the book. And then there are guys that are very aggressive, they're not afraid to do anything, and then there's a certain level above them where there's just dudes that're actually enjoying what's going on at the fire. They are having a blast, they're wrecking walls--you see the same guys at the end of every fire doing the work nobody else wants to do. You took a certain amount of pleasure doing the job. It provided a high. It was an adrenaline rush, right? GB- But it was controlled. I think you could attest to it, because at the last fire of my career, you were with me, and I said, "Alright, T, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna hit this door." And I was kind of giving you a little instruction. You don't want to have blinders on. The first thing you want to do is scream, "There's the fucking fire!" But, no, man, find out where your windows are, hit them now while you can see them, make your way around the room, see if there's anybody there, scurry here and there, while you can see. Let the thing go over your head, man, you got time. But by hitting it, now you're not gonna see a thing. So you better remember where that back stairway is. So you're adrenaline says, "We gotta put this thing out!" But no. I was more like, "This is pretty cool, let's let this thing burn. I gotta a hand-line that's gonna knock this thing down in seconds. Let's go check out the room, the hallway." I had a fire where there was a death. It was an infant. And I'm not pointing fingers at all, but... we flew in because the guy said, "My child's up there. He's in the second bedroom." It was Christmastime. There was a Christmas tree. I went into the first room, furthest from the fire, figured I'd check that first and work my way down. I was through the second, done with the second, and that's when my lieutenant couldn't get air. He's calling. Now it looks like shit when you're on the stairway landing with no air, but I had air. No line, but it (the fire) was coming through the kitchen now. But again, it was high. I knew what I was capable of. I've seen it before. I've been there. It was a baby in there. TT- Right? you gotta go. GB- You go. So that third bedroom, he's adamant, "Get the fuck out right now. Right now." I said, "I got one more bedroom. I'm just gonna--" and I ran into something, some kind of object, and I hit it, and what I thought was the layout of the floor plan wasn't. I hit some kind of pack-and-play thing where I thought the room should be and hit a dead end and said, "Maybe he's right. Maybe I'll get lost in here." The voice of reason. And he's my boss too. Respect the rank, if not the person. So I bailed and the kid died. Engine 3 ended up making the grab. That was another thing, the comment my officer made later (about how it was our grab and we didn't make it,) and I'm saying, "Oh man, you're saying that to the wrong fucking dude." He's a respected guy, a well respected guy, and I get along with him, I respect him, but he just didn't know what I was capable of. And I thought right from the get-go he was slowing me down because he's talking to the man whose hysterical about his child being up on the second-floor. I thought he (the father) was very clear about it. I didn't think there were anymore follow up questions needed. So let's go! I was separated from the officer, doing my thing, but my pack was on, he wasn't even on air yet, no mask on-- TT- Taking up precious time doing nothing. Now when you were talking about how this job gets passed on from generation to generation, the one thing that struck me was that I had been through EMT-Basic, Cardiac, Fire I and Fire II, I had all the certifications and whatever, but you don't even know what the hell you're doing when you pull up on something. Because you're brand new and it's a lot to process. That's why the West Avenue (fire) was so crazy. Downtown was being ripped up from construction and no one could get to us, and you methodically went from the first-floor to the third smashing open doors with your boots everywhere we went searching for people first. And in my mind I was like, "Well, the fire's upstairs. Shouldn't we be going up there?" And you were like, "Nope. We already know where the fire is. We're gonna make sure everyone's out of the house first." There's a list of things to do. It always struck me, it always stuck with me, and then even when you were getting ready to pop the door, and you let me take the nozzle, I never forgot it. You were like, "Hit the ceiling, hit the walls, look around, advance the line, don't let it get over our heads or behind us" and sure enough that's what we did. The ceiling collapsed on our fucking heads, it was a total shitshow, but there were so many lessons given in one short period of time. GB- Life hazard is always the number one priority. When we got there, the guy was being carried down in his wheelchair, which was huge, because that would've occupied a lot of time. Say the neighbors weren't around, and no one knew that guy was up there and needed that kind of care. That guy would've been priority one. But life hazard still doesn't change. You've definitely got to have your priorities. It's all different. One time, this woman was on a roof on Main Street. She was safe on the roof. It was a basement fire. That was the call. Should I go knock that freaking fire down, or should I take a ground ladder … She's safe. She's on a flat roof. She got herself out of the window, she's yelling for help but you know what? There was a little smoke, not much. But the fire's raging in the basement like a bastard. So that was the call. My boss made the call. We stretched a ladder and got her off the roof, Engine 5 went down there and got pummeled. A snotty nose, shitty fucking fire and they got a great stop. We got a company citation because we got some lady off a roof. I thought she was fine. See, the whole thing about ... I was never a big fan of the awards. It's bullshit. TT- It is bullshit. Were you on the job for Star Gas? Wasn't that 1982? GB- '83. Star Gas was a crazy-ass--WPRO dispatched me to work that day (laughs). WPRO says all off-duty police and fire are to report back to work. The wife goes, "You're not going to go to that, are you?" I say, "Oh yes I am. I'm gonna drop you off, I got my gear in the back, I can be there in no time!" (Laughs.) So I walked over there from Station 4 and what a fucking freakshow. I'm seeing a heavy plume of dark dark smoke, burning like ten motherfuckers. And these blasts of (propane) canisters that were four-feet long. Sailing up into the sky. I don't know where the they're going but they gotta land somewhere! (laughs). Those things probably weighed eighty to a hundred pounds each. TT- Isn't it a miracle nobody died that day? GB- You could taste it, it was so thick. And Engine 4's burning. (Engine 4 was parked too close to where the propane tanks were. Once they exploded they melted the truck.) Engine 4 and the whole building's going and there was a big railcar, a big old bastard, and if that thing blew we were screwed. But Google BLEVE. And you'll see a railcar explode. (laughs). There wouldn't have been any pain (laughs). It would've taken out all of Freight Street. But the thing that got me was the fact that the school was right there. A thousand feet away, there's this school right in the middle of this neighborhood. TT- The interviews from people at the scene, because Lemay has these bags of newspapers, and I went through them all. And you're reading these interviews from people that lived in the area, and they were like, "We've been telling the city that this gas company shouldn't be here, literally surrounded by apartments, triple-deckers and schools." GB- It was nuts. Do you still got the pictures? Because I'm in them. I'm sitting on a master stream with a couple other guys, and we're right at the nose of this motherfucker (the railcar), and they say the worst place to be (in a BLEVE situation) is in the front, because if it does rupture it's gonna go like a rocket, it's coming right at ya (laughs). But since then, I've seen video of the BLEVEs and there wouldn't have been any pain (laughs). TT- Do you know what year they built Station 1? GB- 1912. TT- In some of the research I was doing, Engine 1 is in here at 1804. And Engine 2 is 1808. And they weren't "engines" they were giant flower pots with water that got hand pumped. GB- It's right here. (flips through some pages). Now, I went to Phoenix with the wife and we saw this one displayed in Phoenix. "The Haycart" is what it was called. So I go to Phoenix, and I know that it's there somewhere, but it's a huge, two airplane hanger-sized museum, they got hundreds and hundreds of pieces. You pay your toll to get into the place, go through the turnstile, the first piece that you see is that one right there. (points to the Haycart). It's amazing. It's beautiful. It looks exactly as it does right there. The guy re-did it. TT- Jesus, it says Pawtucket right on it. GB- Here's a little info on the back page. TT- There's the Flowerpot! GB- That's the first one. Look at that fucking thing. TT- Was that in Phoenix? GB- No, no. I don't even know if that thing's still around. Just the pic. TT- The history of this job is so crazy. GB- That's what I mean. You look back at some of these--Here. That's the West Avenue station. This is inside the station. Hasn't really changed that much. (shows me more pictures). TT- No, it sure hasn't. They took the pole out but that's about it. Unbelievable. GB- And look at these dudes. (shows me a pic of old school guys in uniform). That's in their Sunday best, that's the dress uniform. TT- (laughs). Those are some serious hats. Wow. Thanks, Lt. GB- Take care, T Interview with Donna MacDonald-- September 28, 2017
Because of the importance of this interview, this is the full conversation. Usually, only excerpts are published in the hopes of one day including the full length versions in a non-fiction account. Donna MacDonald is a tall woman with an athletic build. She was a firefighter in Providence for fifteen years. She is also the first person outside of the Pawtucket Fire Department I've interviewed, so we had no working relationship. After her retirement due to cancer related issues, she came to speak to our department, and her impact was nearly instantaneous. Change in the fire service is never fast or welcomed, and our job is even worse. There are stories of air-packs being introduced in the 1950s and no one wearing them for the next decade. Change takes on a glacial pace. Donna changed all that. This is what she said ... TT- So why don't we go back to the beginning of your career. Tell us when you got on the job. DM- I got on in 2001. TT- And when did you serve until? DM- Until last year, so 2016. TT- Now, you're the first out-of-department person I've interviewed, so usually I know the people I'm speaking with, so this is gonna be--I mean the fire department is the fire department, no matter where you go. I think that you could probably attest to that, like the old saying goes, "Same circus, different monkeys." DM- Yes (laughs). TT- So when you first got on the job, where did you go? Where were you assigned originally? DM- I first went to rescue because I was a cardiac coming on the job, so I went immediately there. I had to do my six months time. So I actually ended up doing about nine months. TT- So like all new firemen, they usually find themselves on the rescue. DM- Yes. I did my nine months and then went to Engine 3, downtown, and I never left. TT- Wow. DM- I loved it there. TT- So nine months and then Engine 3. When you say downtown, are you talking about the Public Safety Complex? DM- Yes. Actually I did bounce around a bit before that but I ended up on Engine 3. TT- How many trucks are at that downtown station? DM- We have an engine, ladder, special hazards, a rescue, and a (Battalion) Chief. TT- So it's a big station. DM- Yes. TT- How many people are on the Providence Fire Department? DM- Five hundred. TT- Wow. Our job's 136-140. And you guys have a quarter of a million people to protect. I mean, Pawtucket's only got 80,000. So at Engine 3, I'm assuming you saw a lot highway stuff. DM- Yeah, I liked that engine company because we saw a lot of different things. It's the busiest engine in New England. We're doing about 5,000 runs a year. We do highway, we do high-rise, elevators, fires, EMS, so everything. Because we're centrally located we hit everything. TT- It sounds like you were satisfied being on the engine because you didn't go anywhere else. DM- No, I loved it there. I mean on overtime I'd do a ladder company. We would also cross-train downtown, so we would spend maybe a month on Ladder 1, learn everything about it, a month on Special Hazards, same thing, learn everything about it. And we're trained for every truck in the city. TT- So basically you're like us. You're trained to cross-man all apparatus. DM- Yes. TT- That's what we do as well. Everybody does everything. Now in your spot on the engine, could you be forced back to the rescue? DM- Yes, we'd get detailed every so often if they were short. TT- Yeah, we're doing that now because we're understaffed. It doesn't change. As a matter of fact, the rescue just gets more and more complicated. They finally switched us to computers. We didn't have computers until three years ago. DM- Same with us. TT- That's been a huge change, especially for the older guys that don't handle computers very well. Like me (laughs). DM- Yes. Having to hold that laptop and figure it all out--forget about it. I didn't want any part of it. TT- So basically, I found out about you through a program. You had come to our department. I had broken my leg, I was out, so I missed it. But I was told about what your presentation. And when I got back I was curious because everybody seemed to be talking about the same thing. Cancer. I think we all know the fire department is not really open to change too quickly. We get set in our ways. In what we think works best. Creatures of habit. I've only been on eight years, but guys still slept up in the dorm with their bunker gear at their feet. Also, the worse your gear looked, the harder you were as a worker. So I'm assuming your gear was just like everybody else's gear--completely trashed. Torched. Beat up. DM- And we didn't get new gear. I went ten years before I got a new set of gear. It had failed, but the city just wasn't buying new gear. So finally--and I was not compliant with NFPA because my top and bottom were not made by the same company. So basically they gave you whatever they had. It didn't fit me right, I wasn't compliant, it was falling apart. It was burnt, had holes in it, and so finally they fit us for gear and now, most of the department has two sets of gear, which is new. TT- Did you guys have gear extractors (giant washing machines specially designed for cleaning toxic gear)? DM- Yes, we have one in every station. TT- When did you get those? DM- I'd say five years ago? TT- Wow. Up until six months ago we only had one for the whole job. We got our first one like two years ago and no one used it at first. They were like, "Whatever." Couple guys downtown used it, but yeah, it started getting worse and worse. People started bringing in studies, especially about the exhaust from the trucks. So anyway, you had ten years on the job before you got new gear. And the exposure to everything as well, we're kind of a hearty bunch. I mean guys, and when I say I guys I of course mean men and women, don't really like wearing the air-packs if they don't need them, and it's usually the first thing we drop after a fire. Right? I'm assuming that's pretty universal. DM- Yes. I'm guilty of taking my mask off during overhaul. You run out of air, you can't see, you don't want to leave the building, all of that. I've taken it off. And it's a slight haze and you're coughing but it's no big deal. But that is actually, what we're finding is that that is the worst time to take it off because that is when it's releasing the most toxins, is during that overhaul phase, that smoldering phase. TT- Now let's talk about the toxins themselves. Ten years ago there weren't smart phones. People might have had a computer in their house but nowadays everyone has a laptop, iPads, phones on top of phones and sixty-inch flat screens. When these things burn they burn bad, and they release a lot of horrible things. Toxins and heavy metals. DM- Yes. And also building materials now, houses are not just wood frame anymore. They are, but they're treated with fire retardant chemicals, all the insulation that's there, all the plastic that furniture's made of now, it's not made of pure wood anymore. There're a lot of laminates, all of that releases chemicals when it's burning. TT- So like the IKEA stuff, anything that's not natural. DM- Yes. TT- The flame retardant that was applied to furniture and especially the kid's clothing, what else was it on? Can you tell me what else it was applied to other than furniture and clothes? DM- In carpeting, in the insulation, in a lot of the building materials, it's sprayed on everything. Now for building materials for like parking garages or something, that's not so bad. It's all contained. But in a couch, it's sprayed on the foam that's inside the cushion. Well, that breaks apart and releases those chemicals into the air, and now firefighters have three times those chemicals in their systems. You're being exposed at home, because every time you sit on the couch it releases, so you're breathing that in, and then when it's burning or smoldering you're absorbing all that through your skin as well. TT- Wow. DM- So right now we've been fighting at the state house, trying to ban these chemicals, a whole class of chemicals. We're the first state to try and ban a whole class of chemicals. Because if you just ban the three chemicals they use, the chemical companies will change one compound, so now it will still be cancer causing but it'll still comply with the law. So if you ban the whole class, now they can't do that. But so far we've testified four times and the bill keeps dying. We were hoping it would go through this year but it didn't. TT- Who's fighting this? Is it the chemical companies themselves that're fighting it? DM- Yeah, they're the opposition. On our side is the Clean Water Act, they're helping, and firefighters are helping as well. We have child advocates helping too because of all the childhood cancers. So there's a group of us. TT- Originally, these chemicals were embraced. The whole idea of fire retardants was almost mandated. DM- Yes. TT- I read somewhere that Boston and Massachusetts have the most amount of flame retardant chemicals and items in their homes. More than any other part of the country. DM- Yes. Well, it's like asbestos back in the day. It was great. It was a fire retardant, an insulator, used in all sorts of stuff, and now we realize how dangerous it is. Well, it's the same thing for these chemicals. Yeah, they were great, they retard the fire, but it's releasing all these chemicals. TT- When it gets to a certain temperature, these retardants even stop doing their job. As far as keeping the flames at bay. And they actually turn more combustible when they hit that flash point. Is that true? DM- Exactly. TT- Wow. DM- When they're smoldering ... the point of them is to, like if you fall asleep on the couch smoking a cigarette, it won't burst into flames. It'll just smolder so you can exit the building. Well, when it's smoldering it's releasing the most toxins, so now you're being overcome by these chemicals. It releases high levels of hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide, so you're gonna be overcome before you can leave the building. And it only lasts to a point. Eventually it's going to burst into flame. TT- Didn't you guys have a line of duty death due to cyanide? DM- An almost death. Yeah, he had to retire, he was on a ventilator for three days, but he ended up recovering. Still has issues with his lungs, but he won't be able to be near smoke at all anymore. TT- So they put him out on a disability pension? DM- Actually I don't know. I don't know for sure. He had enough years to retire regular but I don't know what he went off on, so I can't say that for certain. But they wouldn't promote him to chief because he went off injured. TT- And we have started to see it on our job. We just had a line of duty death--he was declared a line of duty death about three weeks ago, Dave Boisclair, just from the sheer cancer load in his body. He had it in his bones, liver, kidneys, blood, stage four on everything. We also have one active duty guy fighting leukemia, that just happened last month, two recent retirees--one had pancreatic cancer, another has liver cancer. (Also an active lieutenant fighting myeloma.) Talk about some of the cancers. I heard prostate cancer, bowel cancer, myeloma... DM- The top four for firefighters are testicular, prostate, lymphoma and multiple myeloma. But we also see everything. And what we're seeing is a lot of people are having very rare cancers. So something only one in a hundred get, or whatever the rate is, it's just very rare. So it's gotta be all these chemicals we're dealing with that're causing these rare cancers. TT- Now in women, is it the same? Obviously it's not going to be two of those cancers, but it might be breast cancer. I read somewhere that in San Francisco, twelve women out of 117 got breast cancer and one died. That's six times the national average. DM- It's crazy. TT- So as we talk about these chemicals, and the gung-ho attitude, obviously, when you do this job, you don't really...you take time to think about risk, you know, and you worry about things, but at the same time you're not going to run into anything that's on fire if you're worried about living. (laughs) TT- So, at the end of the day, when people are talking about chemicals, firemen aren't thinking about it until stuff like this starts to happen. And out of all the ways to get injured or killed, this seems to be a silent creeper. DM- Yes. TT- Now why don't we talk more about what happened in your case. As far as when did this start, and how did you notice something was going on? DM- I didn't notice anything at the time. Looking back I realized I had symptoms, but at the time I just excused it off. I was extremely tired all the time and I was losing weight, like I lost about twenty pounds, which I really couldn't afford to lose. But I was also on Engine 3, a busy engine, and I was also training for the Combat Challenge (the Firefighter Combat Challenge is not for the feint of heart. There are usually five events done in full turnout gear and wearing Scott air-packs. They're held in twenty-five locations around the world. http://www.firefighterchallenge.com/) We had a team and we traveled. And it was competition season, so I'm training. On every day off we did some heavy duty training, so I'm like, "That's why I'm losing all this weight. That's why I'm tired." So I took a week off. On my four days off I didn't do anything. No training, just rested, and I felt much better. Went back to work my first day and halfway through the day we go on an EMS run and I went to lift the patient, just assist to lift the stretcher, and my sternum fractured. Went to the hospital. They did X-rays, found a fracture, and they sent me to an orthopedist. Well, that's when they decided to do a Cat Scan. Because for my age, I was almost thirty-two at the time, my growth plates are done, and bones just don't break with that little bit of pressure. So, they wanted to see what was going on and that's when they found the tumor. TT- Thirty-two? So how long had you been on the job? DM- Five years. TT- So you got on at twenty-seven. DM- Yes. TT- So they do the Cat Scan, they find the cancer. What did they tell you? DM- Well, it was a shock when I walked in, because I just had a fracture. So they ... I went into the orthopedic office but he says, "We're gonna send you to a different doctor. It's in the same office, just a different doctor." So I didn't think anything of it. I'd only seen this guy one time, so they put my Cat Scan up on the wall and he says, "Well, this circle right here, that's the sarcoma." (Incredulous) And I just went, "You got the wrong patient. I got hurt at work." And he said that's why. The tumor had grown to such a size that just putting that little bit of pressure, it pushed it through, it fractured it. TT- So the tumor fractured the sternum. Was the cancer in the actual sternum itself? DM- Yes, it was right inside the middle of the bone. TT- I'm guessing that's an exceedingly rare cancer. DM- Yes. Very rare. It's called chondrosarcoma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chondrosarcoma.) Usually Osteosarcoma is the bone cancer, so chondrosarcoma is very rare. TT- Jesus. What was the course of action? DM- The only treatment was removal. Usually they don't find it in a sternum. I was the first case in New England that they'd ever seen in the sternum. I belong to a site on Facebook and there's maybe only five of us in the world that we know of that had it in the sternum. TT- No kidding ...(incredulous.) DM- Usually it's in the pelvis, or a long bone, like the humerus or femur. Very rarely do they see it in the sternum. So usually amputation or removal of the bone is the only cure. TT- Are we talking about this column here being taken out? (motions to center of his own chest.) DM- Yes. I have the little tiny xyphoid process left. Everything else is a prosthetic. TT- What about the ribs? DM- They removed pieces of two ribs, because once the tumor broke through, it just started growing. It invaded into some of the rib. And just to get clean margins, they took a few of the ribs. So what they ended up doing was using bone cement and this plastic material called med-pore. The original one was a Gortex plastic which I rejected. I've had three surgeries on my chest. The first one, it was pushing out of me, so they had to remove that one. And then I went with no sternum for about seven years. TT- Whoa. DM- Because there was an infection behind it so they couldn't put a new prosthetic in after I rejected that first one. So they just kind of closed me back up, I had scar tissue there, bone cement holding all the ribs together. I did okay for years. Went back to work full duty, about six months after surgery. I was fine, but with all that carrying of air packs and hoses on my shoulders, it put a lot of pressure on my collarbones, because I didn't have that stability anymore. And a part of my heart was exposed, so my doctor wasn't really thrilled I went back to work. TT- Now, did you have to fight to get back to work? DM- The doctor didn't want it. TT- What did the department tell you? Did you have to fight them? DM- No, I didn't have to fight them. TT- So the first sternum was rejected, that was taken out, and then you had bone cement put in and you went seven years with that. Eventually that failed as well, right? DM- Yes. I ended up getting hurt again. I was carrying someone in a stair chair and they panicked and their knee slid down and landed on my chest, fractured my collarbone. They found another tumor in there. So they removed that tumor, it was benign, so we caught it in time. But my whole chest was failing. My collarbones had a lot of bone spurs in them and they were flexing too much, more than collar bones should, so they had to reconstruct my whole chest again. This was about three years ago. TT- What did they put in this time? DM- This time it's called Med-pore. It's a very porous plastic so your own tissue can grow through it, so it helps with rejection. And they can mold it the way they want to mold it. I guess it's easier for them to work with. And they bolted that in with titanium, so it wasn't going anywhere, the ribs are all bolted in. It's very stable now. TT- And that was three years ago? DM- Yes. TT- So after that happened, what happened at work? Did the doctors say enough is enough? Your body can't take anymore? DM- They just left it up to me. But this time I was having a hard time getting back. Because they had to cut my pectoral muscle. It's connected to your sternum. Every time I had surgery, they had to cut it away, pull it across, and sew it back to together. Every surgery they cut that muscle. The third time it just wouldn't heal. And I was also having a lot of pain in my collar bone, which I still do. I have a lot of spurs in there and a pinched nerve as well. I don't know, I guess I could go back into to surgery to relieve that pressure, but I don't want to go for another surgery. TT- Jesus. DM- I've had four on my chest as it is. But they tried everything. They tried taking tissue, stem cells from my legs to put in there, to kind of give me some more padding, relieve some of the pressure, but it didn't take the pain away. They tried Botox throughout my chest, cortisone shots, so that got me back to full duty, but once it would wear off I'd be in extreme pain again. So they finally said no more after the third cortisone shot. I was back to work for about a year and a half when I finally had to throw in the towel and retire. TT- You retired with how many years on? DM- Fifteen. TT- Did you go out on a disability (pension)? DM- Yes. I went under the Cancer Presumptive Law. TT- That's still something that's in its formative stages now, this cancer law for firemen, that's allowing firemen to be covered... DM- Luckily in Providence ... Originally it was just a state presumptive law. So one of our guys--I had just been diagnosed, so it was like twelve years ago? He needed to retire after having bladder cancer, and they wouldn't allow him to retire under the presumptive law because they said, "We're our own Home Rule Charter, we're separate, we don't fall under the state." We had to fight it separately. I helped fight for that at the time, and we won, and the wording in it is so well-written, it was cut and dry when I went through it. I had to see three oncologists that the city chose, I went to each of these oncologists, they wrote their report, and all of them--actually one of them even said there was no doubt in his mind that it was a job related illness. TT- The story I had heard was that you were actually able to trace it back to a specific fire. Is that true? DM- Yes. I don't know a hundred percent for sure, but I went to a chemical fire. It was a jewelry company, so they had all kinds of chemicals. TT- We're talking fifty-gallon drums. DM- Yes. And it was a workbench on fire. It was heating up the room and allowing these chemicals to escape. So we knocked it down really quick, it was just a small room. I had full gear on, I had my pack on, everything on except the hood. We did not wear hoods back then. But later on in the day, I broke out in like hives, these welts, all across my neck and chest. Big red welts. And the chief actually happened to notice it. "What's all over your neck?" So I washed up, changed my shirt, went on with my day. By the end of the day it was better. The next morning I come in. We go on a box alarm, I put my gear on, and a little later on I broke out in that same rash. So I exposed myself twice. It was my fault for not washing my gear after that fire, so I ended up showering, washing my clothes, washing everything, washing all my gear. It went away and I didn't think anything of it until a year later when I was diagnosed with cancer right in that area. TT- So this is two exposures. That's all it took. Incredible. DM- Yes. TT- Wow. That's terrifying. DM- Because it was some nasty chemical. TT- Who knows what was in that place. (metalizing agents are extremely caustic, toxic, and filled with cancer causing compounds). DM- And when chemicals mix they make new chemicals... TT- Yeah, man, wow. So when all of this was going on--I'm assuming you're married? DM- Yes. TT- What was your husband's thinking on all of this? Did he want you to keep going back to work? DM- (laughs). I think he wanted whatever I wanted, but I think he was worried, definitely. TT- I'm sure. DM- But he knew it was something I had to do for myself, and if I wanted to go back, he would support me either way. TT- On your department, are there any cancer numbers right now? As far as active duty guys, retired guys ...? DM- I don't know the numbers because I don't hear all of them, unless they call me ... TT- They're that bad? DM- Especially with the retired guys, but the active duty guys will call me through the cancer network, but some of them, they just don't want anybody to know. They just suffer through it. TT- So the retiree numbers are through the roof? DM- Probably, yeah. I still do the Honor Guard, so I go to every funeral, and I would say eighty percent through the years, I would say were cancer. Some of them are older, in their eighties, so they actually lived a long time, but they died from cancer. So is that old age? Or from firefighting? We don't know yet. But when you're seeing guys in their fifties dying of it, or even younger, you know it's job-related. TT- That's scary as hell DM- Yes. TT- I had read an article about a Boston Chief, who was on the job thirty-two years, and could claim that he personally knew 200 hundred guys who either got cancer or died from it. That is terrifying. DM- Yes. TT- So outside of the retardants, I mean, in your opinion, where do you think this goes? Are there other things out there to worry about now? DM- It's just all the plastics that are burning. Everything's plastics now. TT- Everything's plastic, everything breaks, so it's just more plastic after that. DM (laughs)- Yes. TT- What's the official name of the group you're in? DM- The Firefighter Cancer Support Network. ( https://firefightercancersupport.org/. ) TT- What do you guys do? DM- We have a mentor program, that's our biggest thing that we do. So any firefighter that's diagnosed throughout the country, because it's a nationwide organization, they just go to our website or give us a call, and we will hook you up with a mentor. Now this mentor is a firefighter from anywhere across the country, that is a cancer survivor. So we try to match people. If you have lymphoma, we try to match you with someone as close to where you live as possible that has lymphoma. TT- So this person will give you their roadmap as to how they got better? DM- Yes. TT- And what they should be doing (for treatment) as well. DM- It's an outlet, too. Gives you someone to vent to. This person already went through what you're starting to go through, so they can say, "Yes, this is normal, what you're going through is normal." And it's not just the physical part of it, but the emotional part of it that a lot of people forget about. You're going through the fear of it all, the anxiety, "Am I going to be able to go back to work? Am I weak if I don't?" All of that stuff. And it's tough when you're a caregiver. We take care of everyone. We solve all of the problems. And now you're on the other side and you're the patient. It's really hard to deal with. You're used to being in control and now you're not. So trying to deal with all of that, this person understands exactly what you're going through. In every aspect. So it's a really good outlet, and sometimes you just need someone to say, "I've been there. What you're feeling is normal." TT- You're not alone. DM- Yeah. TT- Now when you got involved with this group, were you staggered by the numbers you were seeing? And what is your role in that group? What do you do? DM- Right now I'm the Rhode Island State Director and Vice President of the East Coast. I've been there for eight years. So when we first started out, there were a lot of numbers, there was a need for us, that's why we started this. But over the years it has gotten so much worse. TT- Wow. DM- I don't know if it's because now people know about us so they're calling us? Whereas before they just sort of suffered in silence? I don't know. So I don't know if the numbers were there and we just weren't tracking them, or if now we're really on top of it and we're aware. TT- The sea-change, probably the mid 90's as far as all of the technology stuff (iPads, laptops, cell phones, flat screens), and the plastic stuff, I can remember growing up and our house wasn't filled with all of this crap either. So it seems like from the mid-90's on, the group of firemen that were straddling those generations seems to be coming down sick now. DM- Yes. TT- And the young guys coming through now have thirty years of this exposure to look forward to. They don't even have the ten or fifteen years before all of this toxic stuff started being incorporated into every aspect of our daily lives. DM- Yes. TT- Now, when we talk about all of the different cancers, are they all being brought in under the same umbrella no matter what cancer it is? DM- We're trying. Some states go by research. So the research we have out there says, "Ok, these cancers are the top four." Or these are the top ten. So they're using that but it should encompass all cancers because we're getting all sorts of cancers. They're saying, well some are genetic, some are not, but you don't know if chemicals caused this genetic mutation, or if it was because your father, your brother, and everyone else had it. We just don't know. It shouldn't matter. You're still getting it at a younger age. You're being exposed. TT- Now, it sounds easy enough to clean the gear in those machines, and we should tell people you can't just throw this stuff in a regular washing machine. This has got to go in a special Washer/dryer setup to get the chemicals out of it. And then take those chemicals somewhere so those chemicals won't be in the environment. True? DM- Yea, I didn't think of that. Once it goes through the extractor, it's just going the same route as every other washing machine. TT- Now once this stuff--you can clean your hood, you can clean your gear, but what about the helmets? The inside of the helmets? DM- Yes, you definitely want to wipe them down. You can use a disinfectant wipe or some kind of wet cloth and soap and just clean the inside out. TT- I had heard a story that a guy actually got skin cancer in a ring around his head. From the webbing of his helmet. DM- Yes. TT- That's true? DM- Yes. He had lymphoma. He was on the job in Providence. TT- Wow. That's crazy. DM- Yup. You can see the ring, I mean it's perfect, right where his helmet sat. So all of those years--you don't think of cleaning the inside of your helmet (laughs). You think, "Okay, I washed my gear." But that's part of your gear, and you don't really think of it that way. It's not cloth. But the earflaps, you want to wash those, basically anything that touches your skin. If not, you're just exposing yourself constantly. TT- And the insides of the trucks. DM- Yes. TT- Some of our trucks are very old. I should say that they are gradually replacing the fleet. but we have trucks that are thirty years old. God knows what's in those things. DM- Yeah. TT- Cause we have some guys, we actually had one guy that recently retired with only thirteen years. The no sleeping, the bad food. He just didn't feel good anymore. He was in his forties and he said, "You know what? I'm done." And guys were like thinking he was crazy. "Oh, what're you doing? You're not gonna have your health plan, you're not gonna have a retirement." And he's like whatever. Now all these guys are like, "Well, he might be the smartest one out of all of us." (Laughs). Now as far as the actual cleaning of the gear, the thing that blows my mind is that when you come out of a fire, you're literally covered in everything. You come walking out covered in-- DM- Insulation, building materials, TT- Everything. You're soaked. You're immediately being exposed, and while you're sitting on scene, it's just seeping into you. And you think about the guys who never cleaned their gear ever, not one time, after every fire it just adds more and more toxins. Their gear has to be a toxic soup by this point. DM- Yes. And when your body temperature rises you're absorbing all of that into your system. So on scene the best you can do is wash that off as fast as you can. In the middle of winter you're gonna turn into an icicle, so you try to do a dry decon--wash all of that insulation and heavy soot off of you. And we have wipes on scene now, the canteen carries rescue wipes. I got a grant from the Rhode Island Foundation for $14,000. And now I can supply the canteen truck with--it's probably gonna end up being a two year supply of wipes. TT- And for people that don't know, the canteen truck is actually funded by firemen, and it shows up at fires with food and water to help keep the guys going. The canteen guys man the scanners. I think there's two of them? DM- There's two. I think they might have a third as a back-up. TT- And those guys are great. They show up in the middle of the night, in the winter, wherever. DM- And they've been pushing the wipes. I went in there and told them all about the wipes, what they do, why they're important, and now they push them at every fire. Before the guys can get any food or drink, they hand them these wipes. TT- What about boots? I know our gear covers them so nothing can get down there, but are they telling people to clean the inside of their boots too? DM- That is probably a good idea. The soot's gonna get in there. These chemicals are seeping in through the gear, even though you're covered. They say clean your neck, clean your face, whatever's exposed, but it's still seeping through all of the turnout gear. There's actually a test that they did where they sprayed someone with an aerosol spray and then put them under a blacklight after the fact. Now they sprayed him when he had his full gear on, and then he went down to just his shorts afterwards and they showed he was exposed across his entire body. TT- Get out of here. DM- It was most prominent on his neck, wrist, face, but it was still on the entire body. So we know that it's seeping through. So getting that heavy soot off the neck area, the wrist, hands, all of that on scene is good, but as soon as you get back to the station shower right away. Keep your uniforms at work, don't bring them home, clean them there as well. TT- When you think about it, the job is dangerous enough. If you do a career and get out of it without a back injury or heart attack, now you still have to worry about the cancer. DM- Yes. TT- Our job is very slow to change. There are stories of guys, when they initially brought air-packs on in like the 50's and 60's, it took ten years for these guys to even wear them. Change is a glacial pace. But after you came to our job in March or April, and I returned from my broken leg, I came back and saw guys cleaning gear like I'd never seen before. I think we scored a grant and went out and got another gear extractor and dryer. So we have two sets now when we actually need six. And we have guys, guys are going out of their way--my boss' brother (a Cranston firefighter for twenty years) just died from bowel cancer, and my boss has been on the point of this the whole time. And people have been calling him crazy. I remember like five years ago he stood up at a union meeting, yelling at people for not putting on the Plymo vents for the truck exhaust every time they pulled in or out of the station. The diesel fumes. He was like, "We're just poisoning ourselves." This change has to take place until people realize that this is not a joke. We have two extractors now, but I hope before this is over there will be a set at every station. DM- There are grants out there, the FEMA grants are great. I went down there to learn how to write them. So I've been trying to teach people how to write these FEMA grants. TT- The plastics, there's no end to that, the houses are just being filled with plastics, so when I think long range, and look out ten to fifteen years, when all of these other guys start getting sick, and these cities are gonna have to pay for all of these disability pensions, gear extractors, I mean will it get to a point where they're not sending anybody in anymore unless there's someone in there that they know of? Who knows? I guess that gets determined by how many people continue to get sick. DM- I don't see that happening in Providence. I think they'll still fight fires the same way, I think it's just taking the precautions after the fact. TT- Do you think the precautions are gonna work? DM- The best we can. It's just like any other safety issue, you know you could walk in and the roof could collapse. You just gotta be as safe as you can about it, to make sure they're rehabbing guys, taking them out so they're not taking their mask off during overhaul, washing the gear, and going to the cities and saying, "Ok, you want to prevent these disabilities, than supply us with extractors, supply us with a second set of gear, get yearly physicals for all the guys, so we can stay on top of these wellness programs. If you do all of that, it's going to help prevent this." Or even catch it early. TT- And these injuries, this is not cheap--I can only use my example, I had a horrific back injury lifting a 550 pound woman on a 175 pound stretcher. I was out less than a year, but I can't imagine the cost to the city. Paying to replace my spot, paying me, paying the doctors and therapists, I'm guessing $200,000 maybe but I have no idea. That wasn't chemo, that wasn't radiation, that wasn't the rehab ... these cancer costs are going to go through the roof. DM- That's why we're just trying to show them, it's so much cheaper just to get a second set of gear for all the guys. How hard is it to do that? And that's gonna be a huge prevention because you're not wearing dirty gear again. Sometimes you're forced into wearing it because you can't wash your gear in the middle of a shift. You could get another fire two hours later. It happens. So what're you gonna do? "Oh, I have no gear, I can't go in." (laughs). You need that second set so you can switch them out and not be exposed over and over again. TT- Now we're talking about $3,000 per person for new gear. DM- Yes. Maybe going up to five if you're getting hoods, gloves, everything. TT- So $3,000 compared to $300,000 doesn't even seem like a question. Now is there anything else you can think of, as far as what you would tell people? I mean your story is self-explanatory--clean everything. DM- The biggest thing is going to your doctor every year. Get a physical. If the department doesn't have it or supply it, push to get that. TT- Are you talking blood work? DM- Just a basic physical, your EKGs, your blood work, check out any symptom you might have going on, let the doctor know what you do for a living. They don't quite understand it, but we do have a letter, which I have for you. It's from a doctor in Boston. He was a Boston firefighter, now he's a doctor. He wrote a letter saying what we're being exposed to, all the chemicals, the stress we're putting on our bodies, the lack of sleep, he explains all of that, and then has a list of what these doctors should be checking for. A lot of it is a little bit of a wish list because the insurance company's not going to pay for some of this stuff, but at least it's a jumping off point. And the more these doctors are seeing this and why we need these tests, maybe they'll help us fight the insurance companies and say, "I think this guy needs this." Say for women, you can't get a mammogram until you're forty. We're seeing women dying in their twenties and thirties from breast cancer on the job. So if we can get it at least ten years younger, the same with a colonoscopy. For someone to go through colon cancer, I think it costs $400,000. Well a colonoscopy costs $5,000. And yes, that's a hefty bill, but compared to someone going through colon cancer you may find that right away, you could remove it really quick, and that's it. A one day procedure and now you're all set. TT- This almost seems like the CTE thing in football, you know? There's a couple voices shouting out of the darkness that something bad's coming and it seems like we haven't even touched what's gonna really happen. Which, honestly, scares the hell out of everybody. And I'm not someone that scares easy. You take the job, you accept the risks, but even I was like "I have to clean this stuff now. This isn't a joke, this isn't a couple of people or some kind of conspiracy theory about chemicals. This is real. This is about as real as it gets." Now when you give these talks at other departments, do you get these kind of reactions? Are people listening to you? DM- Now they are. When I started years ago I got all sorts of push back from it. We had a flier that said to wash your hands after a fire before you went into the bathroom so you don't contaminate the bathroom. Wash before. So I had a guy say to me, "Oh well, little girl, if that's what you're worried about you're in the wrong field." (Laughs). Well, if you stopped and listened to the reasons why, maybe it would make more sense. I heard a lot of that, a lot of, "That's part of the job." I get it. It's not a safe job. I'm not denying that. It's just we need to change some of the way we do things. Take care of ourselves a little better. Eat right, work out, a lot of guys don't do that. I see how guys eat in the firehouse. TT- (laughs) Right? It can be terrifying. (laughs). DM- Some guys haven't been to the doctor in years. And they don't want to know. Well, if you catch it early enough ... early detection is probably the biggest thing. It's inevitable. One in three firefighters will be diagnosed with cancer. If you-- TT- That's the number? (horrified) One in three? (incredulous). Oh my God. That's pretty bad. DM- Yes. TT- Jesus. And these numbers just keep going up and up right? Like we haven't even hit a plateau yet, we're just climbing. DM- Yes. And like I said, I don't know if it's because more and more are being diagnosed, or if we're just aware of these numbers now, I don't know. But I think it's just going up because of the change in all of these building chemicals. But hopefully they'll start going down if we make these changes. It's never gonna prevent all of it. But like I said, early detection is gonna make it a lot less invasive and deadly. More lifesaving. TT- And your story as well. You did five years before all of this nightmare started happening. Five years. Out of a possible thirty year career, I mean think about all the further exposures if you would have stayed. That's the terrifying part. It could happen to any of us real quick or not. Like what happened to you by getting splashed with a solvent--who knows? I mean we go running into these places, and you're trying to think about safety, but you're not a chemist, you don't know what the roster of chemicals inside are, you're just doing your job. DM- Yes. TT- Looking back, I know you probably don't have any regrets because you were just doing your job, and you loved it, you were a fireman. That was never gonna change. DM- No. No way. I have people ask me all the time, "So knowing what you went through, would you do it all again?" And I say, absolutely. I would make some changes, but I loved the job more than anything. TT- Right? You can't help it. It's the greatest job in the world. DM- It killed me. This whole past year I went through a depression over having to retire. That killed me. I fought for so long to stay on, I just couldn't do it anymore. TT- I hear ya. And the guys that fight to get back from whatever's happened to them, when they come back, and not that they didn't have an appreciation of it, but we have a guy who literally broke his back. He signed a waiver to return to work, that's how much he wanted to return. DM- Yes. TT- This is another part of the story, your example. This isn't about jumping on and off fire trucks, this is the real life stuff, the when you go home stuff, when your family's affected, your husband's affected. You don't hear about that at the academy. I don't remember any cancer talks at all and I've only been on eight years, so it's all relatively new. DM- It is. I've been slowly going around to all of the departments and teaching at the academy, the Rhode Island State Fire Academy. And I'm gonna be training all of their instructors, so every Firefighter Level I class will have a cancer program in there. TT- The only thing I can tell you, is thank you. Because the affect you've had on a 136 guys is already immeasurable, and it only took two months. That's how fast this has started. I'm telling you guys are cleaning everything. DM- That's great. That's great to hear. TT- So whatever you're doing is working. And on behalf of everyone else that's heard your story, I just hope that you keep going forward with this and bringing awareness to people, and especially the public, that don't know about fire departments, so that they understand that this isn't a bunch of people just trying to get covered. That this is part of the job now. This is as bad as getting burned at a fire or hit by a car on the highway, or the 500 pound person you're carrying down the stairs, this is all in that same category. DM- In the beginning, when I first started telling this story, like you said, the physical part, that's easy to talk about. But the other stuff, that's hard to discuss. I wrote a story for Fire/Rescue Magazine. They asked me to do it. So I said, "If I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna lay it all out there." And I was nervous, because it's firefighters. Your peers. You don't know what kind of response you're gonna get. But it was all positive. I just kind of laid everything out, every feeling, every fact, and it was scary but it worked. I had a lot of people contact me and say they went through the same thing, or were going through the same thing. So that's why it's worth doing. TT- It's an eye opening story, I'll tell you that. I'm glad you survived it. DM- (Laughs) So far so good. (Laughs) TT- If you think of anything else, give me a call. And if not, thank you. It's been an honor. The interview ends. I turned the tape off. But as I walked Donna out she told me her particular cancer has a 60% chance of recurring. And it usually comes back after laying dormant, sometimes up to fifteen years later, or even longer. When it does come back it's the same bone cancer, but this time it now appears in the lungs, so you can't even treat it as a lung cancer. It's a bone cancer in your lungs, which makes it fatal. She always has this in the back of her mind. She's also mentoring a Maryland firefighter, a female who has just been diagnosed with the same cancer. She just had her humerus taken out and is now facing the same fight. Here's a list of chemicals 150 countries are trying to ban: http://chm.pops.int/TheConvention/ThePOPs/AllPOPs/tabid/2509/Default.aspx All POPs listed in the Stockholm Convention The chemicals targeted by the Stockholm Convention are listed in the annexes of the convention text: Annex A (Elimination) Parties must take measures to eliminate the production and use of the chemicals listed under Annex A. Specific exemptions for use or production are listed in the Annex and apply only to Parties that register for them. Aldrin Chlordane Chlordecone Decabromodiphenyl ether (commercial mixture, c-decaBDE Dieldrin Endrin Heptachlor Hexabromobiphenyl Hexabromocyclododecane (HBCDD) Hexabromodiphenyl ether and heptabromodiphenyl ether Hexachlorobenzene (HCB) Hexachlorobutadiene Alpha hexachlorocyclohexane Beta hexachlorocyclohexane Lindane Mirex Pentachlorobenzene Pentachlorophenol and its salts and esters Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) Polychlorinated naphthalenes Short-chain chlorinated paraffins (SCCPs) Technical endosulfan and its related isomers Tetrabromodiphenyl ether and pentabromodiphenyl ether Toxaphene In 2014, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (N.I.O.S.H.) published the results of a cross-department study with members from the Chicago, Philadelphia and San Francisco Fire Departments that served from 1950-2009. Of 19,309 firemen, there were 1,333 cancer deaths, and 2,609 cancer incidents: https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/updates/upd-10-17-13.html https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/firefighters/pdfs/Daniels-et-al-(2015).pdf https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/firefighters/pdf/dahm_et_al_2015.pdf Here's what's in your cellphone when it burns: https://www.e-cycle.com/cell-phone-toxins-and-the-harmful-effects-on-the-human-body-when-recycled-improperly/ Lead is found in a wide variety of cell phone components including the circuit boards, batteries and as a stabilizer in PVC products. Lead exposure can cause damage to the reproductive, blood and nervous systems. Mercury is used in the cell phone’s battery, crystal displays and circuit boards. A single cell phone contains up to 2 grams of mercury. Mercury exposure contributes to brain and kidney damage. Arsenic is found in the microchips of many electronic devices including mobile phones. In high doses, arsenic poisoning is lethal. Low levels of exposure cause negative impacts on skin, liver, nervous and respiratory systems. Cadmium is used in the battery of a cell phone. It is associated with deficits in cognition, learning, behavior and neuromotor skills in children. It has also been linked to kidney damage. Chlorine is a component of plastics used in cell phones, specifically polyvinyl chloride (PVC). PVC makes up about 30% of the cell phone. Exposure to improperly disposed chlorine causes tissue damage and the destruction of cell structure. Bromine is a component in a group of fire retardant chemicals known as brominated flame retardants. It is associated with cognitive and developmental deficits. Studies have shown that bromine contributes to the disruption in the thyroid hormone balance, brain damage and cancer. Flatscreen TV's have 19 known carcinogens. But these are even worse: https://circabc.europa.eu/sd/a/69b35967-108e-4e6d-9ffe-5992819f4290/Chemicals%20in%20electronics_GP%20briefing.pdf Berylium, Cadmium, Chromium Hexavalent, Lead, Mercury, Brominated flame retardants, polyvinyl Chloride, phthalates If you called 911 in Pawtucket, and C-Shift was working, chances are you were transported to the hospital by either Dick Lemay or Dave Tomlinson. They manned both rescues on C-Shift for thirty years. Tomlinson is a barrel-chested man with a sense of humor only obtained by witnessing the ups and downs of life on the squad. His catch phrase was "No Stress EMS." I was his last partner before he retired, and, true to his moniker, never once saw him flustered or overwhelmed. After retirement, he took a job dispatching in the Alarm Room, and this is where the interview was conducted. This is just an excerpt.
TT- So you had a shaken baby syndrome? DT- Shaken Baby Syndrome. He said he rolled over on the baby, when in fact, when they got her to the hospital, they ran CAT scans, brain scans, and she actually had Shaken Baby Syndrome. But he met us in the middle of the street all concerned and everything, saying, "My baby, my baby, my baby"--he gave her to me. (it was actually his girlfriend's baby). We did what we had to, got her to the hospital. TT- Awful. So she was dead? DT- She was dead. When he handed her to me, she was dead. One of many... TT- Why don't we go to the beginning. What year did you get on? DT- 1984. I was first assigned to Fire Alarm. TT- How old were you? DT- I was 25. TT- What did you do before you got here? DT- I was a French gourmet chef... TT- Really? DT- I went to the Rhode Island School of Design. And I worked in the restaurant business for 8 years. TT- 8 years and then you got on here. DT- Got on here. I won the lottery. TT- (laughs) Now I know your family was big in the police (department). What made you choose fire? DT- I had too many bad habits (laughing.) I'm kidding. I never wanted to be a police officer, I wanted to be a Gage and Desoto guy. TT- Right? DT- You know, from "Emergency?" That's what I wanted to be. TT- When you first got on, I think that's when Rescue 2 started in service, right? DT- '82 I think. When I got on in '84, I was in Fire Alarm for six months, which in that six month span, my sister was killed in the line of duty as a police officer. And I received the phone call in Fire Alarm that night. TT- Wow. I was gonna get to that-- DT- Oh, I'm sorry. TT- Well, now that we're there, um, when Lemay started talking about it, you could tell he didn't really enjoy, you know, (re-telling) the story, because I had never heard it. And when he told me that you were the one that dispatched him on the run, you know, he just-- DT- I knew it was her. She had given me a ride to work that night. TT- Now your sister was a patrolman on the Pawtucket Police, brand new, right? DT- Six months on the job. Her first six months was spent--because she looked so young--in Cumberland High School as an undercover student. They had a big drug problem in Cumberland High School, and her first night back on the line, she went into work that night and was told she had to be in dispatch. She bitched a little bit about it and there was a new officer at the time, Kenny Provost, he said, "I'll go in dispatch and you go on the road." So they switched. She came up to my house, she gave me a ride to work that night, and when the call came in that it was on Power Road, and I said, "That's my sister's division." So I took the call for an Officer Down, I had to call my father who was the Chief of Police, tell him to get to the hospital right away because my sister was not in good shape. There was a priest on the scene and he said she sat up. What happened was she spun out--they were resurfacing the road--she spun out on a patch of dirt, hit the leg of a backhoe, the backhoe spun her into a telephone pole. She had no other injuries except head trauma. Six days later she died at Mass General. TT- Lemay said the same thing. Said there wasn't a mark on her. DT- Nope, just a little glass on her face. The priest said that she sat up, brushed the glass off her face, and then just went unconscious. TT- How old was she? DT- 22. TT- And you what? DT- 25. TT- And what about other policemen? DT- I had my brother, he did 20 years on the police department and retired a detective sergeant. And my father, who went through the ranks. Got on in 1957 and ended up being the Chief of Police until somewhere around 1993. TT- Right on. Now as far as your career path, after Fire Alarm where did you go? DT- I did two months up at Station 5, and in that two month span, Captain Lemay's baby passed away. So I was always getting transferred to the rescue. And in those days you did a three cycle transfer, than you had to come back (to your own truck) for a cycle in your station, and then you could go back out. So every four weeks I was getting sent out, so eventually I decided to just stay on the rescue, because I was always there. And then there was a low point in like, '85, where we had no rescue lieutenants, and nobody wanted to be on the rescue, so I took a permanent transfer to Rescue 2. And for the rest of my career I was on the rescue, for the next 28 years and 9 months. TT- You were on Rescue 2 C-shift for the whole shot. DT- The whole shot. Yep. TT- Lemay said the same thing. "I was on Rescue 1 C-shift the whole time." DT- It was Dick and I. I was Dick's partner for like three years, I think, as a private, and that's when I took a permanent transfer over to Rescue 2. And I drove Dick Lemay crazy as his partner. (Laughs) Because I'm sure Dick Lemay never told you that we had to a couple of times push the rescue out the door because I left the batteries on in the truck, and we'd go out for a run and the truck would be dead (laughs). And he would run and get the jumper cables, going, "Davey, Davey, Davey." I ran out of gas on the rescue one time because--right in front of Station 3-- because I wasn't paying attention to the gas gauge.. (laughs) You know, these are the fun times, you know, but he kept shaking his head, "Davey, Davey, Davey." (laughs). But we both worked side by side--you know, he was on one rescue and I was on the other, for some twenty-something years, and it worked out perfect. TT- Now in that time, I mean, uh, you saw a lot of people coming and going, cause nobody stays on the rescue. DT- Nobody stays on the rescue. TT- So you, Artie, Lemay--guys who were doing two decades, three decades, I mean that's-- DT- It was a lot of work. It was trying work, because you knew everytime the bell rang it was either you or the other rescue going out. And you would lay in bed praying, "Let it be the other rescue. Please let it be Rescue 1." (laughs) But most of the time you were going. You always got the rookies on the job all the time, and you would try to tell them, "Maybe this isn't the job for you. If it is, hey, stay. If it's not, don't feel bad about moving on, you know?" So I had my share of partners. TT- Let's get into that. There's no worse place than being stuck on a truck with somebody that doesn't want to be there, isn't good at what they're doing, you know, it's a nightmare. DT- It is. TT- Because you're just basically carrying them. DT- Well, yeah. I would just try to tell people, "Listen, I am very competent in my job, I need you to make sure what I need on the truck is on the truck. That's basically your job. Make sure the product's there, the drugs we need, the supplies we need." I said, "I'm not going to come down on you," I was very low stress EMS guy, you know? Guys liked to work for me. I never got excited but if something's not there, I get mad. And I taught. Did a lot of teaching. And the people that were go-getters, then I would let them do the job, you know? I don't have to run the ship myself, you know? You want to intubate, start IVs, you're welcome to it. The more you know, the better off you are. The more secure you are in your job, the less afraid you are of your job. And the big theory was, when in doubt, drive faster for the hospital. (laughs) DT- When in doubt drive faster. (laughs) TT- It's close enough, let's just get there. Um, when you hear about the changes, now that you're off the line, and you hear how things are changing--everything's computers, reports and PTS's, and now we're on scene doing CPR for thirty minutes, it's almost like they're turning the rescue into a clerical position, with all of the -- DT- Yes. In the old days it was like "Treat and Street." If you could fix somebody on the scene and send them on their way, that's fine. Nowadays, every person is money. So they want you to do as much as you can to make your money up. You know, um, I think on-scene time for 30 minutes doing CPR is crazy. You're three minutes from the hospital, in my district you were three minutes, five minutes tops, from the hospital. So to do an on-scene CPR, whatever, for 30 minutes... 12 lead EKGs, now they're the big thing, it's very hard to get a 12 Lead EKG in a truck that's vibrating, you know? And you're trying to tell the patient to sit still, you're on a gurney in the back of a truck, with the truck running, guys coming in and out of the back of the truck...it's hard to get a good reading. And it's a waste of time, because when you get to the hospital the first thing they do is put him on a 12 Lead EKG. A lot of times, the nurses at the hospital just want to know what shape the patient is in--alive, dead, pulse, no pulse, CPR--a lot of times that's all they need to know. They don't need all the intricacies. You can give it to them afterwards. TT- I've noticed it too. These (rescue) guys have to be more concerned with documenting all the stuff that's got to get done instead of patient care. DT- Right, yes. TT- It seems that's what we're losing a little bit. It's almost like you need three guys on the recue now. DT- Well, in the old days, if you were going on a run for--I don't know--say you're delivering a baby, or mass trauma or something--on the way to your run you were thinking about that run, what you're gonna need when you get out of the truck, what supplies you're gonna need--nowadays, as soon as they get in the truck they're starting to type on the computer. Name, address... TT- Crazy. DT- That's crazy, you know? You can do that later. I'm glad I got off before they started that. Because that, to me, is a waste of time. Not a waste of time, because I'm sure they need it for stats and numbers and--that's what the city sold us on, anyways, we never seem to get the benefit of all that stats and numbers, you know? 15 years I fought for a third rescue and they got it two years after I retired. (laughs) The rescues were getting hammered doing like 5000, 5500 runs a year, and you were getting no support from the city. They were taking your money (city's bill residents for 911 Rescue services, but not fire services), the clerical work you were doing was making the city money, but you weren't really receiving the benefits of that money. That got kind of depressing. And not getting total support from the firefighters on the job because they wanted fire equipment, they didn't really care about the rescue. The guys on the rescue were kind of like on an island on their own. It was kind of, it let you down a little bit. But you couldn't let it affect your job. Everyday you came to work. I worked 30 years on the rescue, I never hated my job one time. TT- Right? DT- I might not have wanted to come to work at night, but I never hated it once I got here. TT- The rescue is an island. Those guys are almost, when you see them in the station, they're not sleeping right, they eat when they can, they're dealing with themselves mostly because they are pretty much isolated. DT- They're isolated. It's nice to know that 90% of our guys have been on rescue and can help you out on scene. It's nice to know you have that back up, but you are isolated. TT- You stayed on the EMS side so long because you liked being out there, on the streets... DT- I kind of liked to know I made a little bit of a difference. TT- Waiting around a station would've driven you crazy. DT- It did drive me crazy. I went from working 100 hours a week in a restaurant...I liked the busyness of the rescue. I always liked to know that I was going to something major that happened--whether it's a rollover on the highway--which is what you live for. Rescue guys live for that. Mass trauma, gunshots, whatever, hangings--rescue guys live for that. They don't like the 75 year old woman that can't breathe. You gotta give her an Albuterol treatment, start an IV--that gets boring after a while. We happen to live in the area of the S-curves in Rhode Island. In my career I probably went to a hundred accidents in the S-curves. And some of them were major accidents. TT- We can talk about that too. The fact that they bent the highway to accommodate certain interests... DT- Yes. And it's a dangerous part of highway. They resurfaced it with the wrong Macadam so it's like an ice rink. If there's a mist on that part of the highway, it's like an ice rink. I've seen cars come around the corner and smash into the fire truck that's blocking for the rescue. Total the fire truck. I've seen cars come around the corner with the cops five cars back, and a car coming around the corner almost kills the cop because he slid into the cop car. There's just been accident after accident on that stretch of highway. TT- Chaos. They did that (bent the highway into the S-curves) in the 1950's and they're still paying for it 60 years later. DT- Right. TT- So, I'm assuming anything kid related is awful. DT- Kids aren't supposed to die. Babies aren't supposed to die. I hated baby runs. If there was any run I didn't like, it was baby runs. But you're not allowed to pick and choose. You have to go. Whether you're going to a family that's yelling "Save my baby, save my baby" and you know there's no way to save that baby, but you do your best, you try to remove that baby from that situation for the comfort of the family. And it's sad, because you have to see the family go through hell. And there's nothing you can do. You can try to comfort them but there really isn't anything you can do. TT-How many babies did you deliver? DT- Eight. TT- You and Lemay. He had nine. DT- I had 8. I had--one of my favorite stories is, a Portuguese girl on her knees in the bathroom, with a head sticking out of her vagina, and I'm saying, "Okay, mam, we're gonna turn over now and have this baby," and the girl's mother, who only speaks Portuguese, is going, "Maria! Maria! How you not know you pregnant?" And I'm saying, "Mam, by this head right here, I'm pretty sure she's pregnant. And it's time to deliver this baby." (laughs) Another one, the engine got there before us, and they're walking this girl down, and the only reason this baby didn't hit the ground is because the baby got delivered into her sweatpants. (laughs) A third-floor apartment, an open stair way, in zero degree weather. TT- Wow, that's a mess. DT- That's a mess. I had people telling me, "Oh it's not time for this baby, we're not in the third term yet." And I, you tell people, "You can take all the terms you want, but this baby's gonna be delivered right now, so I wish you would move some of your other children away from the area, you know?" TT- It's gonna get messy. DT- It's gonna get messy. I delivered one on the third floor with Engine 2, with Captain Cordeiro. We get in the house, and the sack was out with the head in it, and we had to cut--there was six or seven kids around, all watching this--we were asking them, "Please move the children out of the kitchen," because when we cut the sack, all the fluid, she broke her water and it went everywhere, and these people, like just wanted all these kids to watch this stuff. This is not stuff you should be watching. Not yet, you know (laughs). TT- It's like a live TV show. DT- It is. A couple on beds, a couple in the back of the rescue. I got an accommodation one time from the Governor's office for somebody related to him. We had a breach baby. And we actually delivered the breach baby in the back of the rescue, which is very dangerous. TT- Oh my God. DT- The lady had no choice. That was very very difficult. We got accommodations for that, me and Norman Pike. TT- Smoking Joe Pike! DT- Smoking Joe, you know. TT- Now as far as--those are good baby stories. The bad baby stories are bad enough. DT- Bad baby stories are bad. You try not to think about them too much, because they're the only ones that bother you. TT- I remember once a lady running out with the kid in her arms and the kid was blue. I remember the whole thing. It was awful. DT- It's awful. We had a fire over on Magill Street, it was an 8 year old kid. The mother was mentally challenged. She left the kid in the house with a space heater. The space heater tipped over, the place was roaring when she came back. She got burnt. Somebody handed the child out to (Battalion Chief) Meerbott, he handed me the baby. I started an IV, and when I went to snap the tourniquet, the tourniquet melted on the kid's arm. That's how hot he was. That's the worse burned child I've seen. I've seen adults where you grab their shoulder and you pull the meat off their shoulder. That was one of my first fires. On West Avenue. And you have to, like my wife called me hard. I'm not hard, it's just if you take everything to heart you're not gonna make it in that field. You're not. TT- Now, you never took it home with you. You never turned into an alcoholic, you never divorced your wife...you were able to-- DT- Sometimes you wonder why. You know? Sometimes you wonder why it doesn't bother you more. But it's just, you're trained. You have to be hard. You have to be able to go back and eat your dinner after you get someone hit by a train. I had multiple train hits. But you have to learn to shake it off or it will eat you up. And you won't last. Like I always said, "Low Stress EMS." You have to push it off. And I was good at that, I guess. But you have to wonder why I was good at that. Why didn't it bother me? TT- Lemay was talking about the cocaine 80's, and just the sheer amount of violence, that it was unbelievable. DT- I don't know if he told you about a run we had, a guy's girlfriend stole a kilo of coke from some dealers. You know where the car wash is on Main Street? TT- Yes. DT- We come out of Sayles Avenue, turn right, and there's a guy laying in the middle of the street, in the fetal position, and we roll him over and blood is just squirting out of his carotid artery. A car from New York came up, saw him walking down the street, shot him in the neck, and it was retaliation for his girlfriend stealing the kilo of coke. We get to the emergency room, the doctor sticks his finger in the hole, in the side of his neck, says, "Oh, there's a fractured vertebrae," and he didn't make it. But that's the violence they had back then. People would just shoot you. Dick Lemay stood on top of a guy that was shooting people with a machine gun. Main Street. And Dick Lemay's standing on top of him. (laughs) Now that's ballsy. I don't know if I would've done that (laughs). That's ballsy for Lemay to be doing that, and I give him all the credit in the world for doing that, but as I said, "I'm glad I wasn't your partner that night." (laughs) TT- Catch you on the next shift, right? (laughs) DT- There was a run going down Weeden Street. There was a guy, smoking crack cocaine, he was going down Weeden Street punching out windows. Just going down the street. So the cops start chasing him, he punches out a window, dives in the house. There's an old lady and old man watching TV. So we pull up on the scene and the kid's hiding in one of the rooms and he's got knives. Every time he jumped out to see the cops he's got knives to his throat saying he's gonna do it. So I come up with this great idea, because there were way too many guns drawn around the house. There was Lincoln, Central Falls, and Pawtucket around the house. Everybody has their guns drawn. So I go, "Hey listen. Let's bring Engine 2 down here, we'll get a 2 1/2 (inch hose) out, and the next time that guy shows his face, just blast him with the 2 1/2. Right? And that's what they did. TT- (laughs) No way. DT- They come down, Moreau, Tanguay. But the lieutenant overslept. He didn't make the run. (laughs) So the guy sticks his head out, Kenny Moreau opens up on the guy, blasts him against the wall, and he held it on him until the guy dropped the knives. Cops went in there, bang, bang, bang, bang, (not gunshots, mimics a fight) and they bring him out to the rescue, where I treated him. But I'm sitting there going, "This poor family. Just sitting watching TV and some guy busts into the house, the fire department comes, puts 500 gallons of water in the house, and says, "See ya later." TT- Enjoy your night. DT- Enjoy your night. The guy wakes up in the back of the truck and asks me for water. "Hey you have any water, I'm thirsty." "Water? You just got 500 gallons worth of water." That same guy later got caught going down chimneys. He got caught in a chimney breaking into a house. TT- Lemay said that by the end of the 80's the cocaine madness kind of died down. DT- It died down but then the heroin picked up. The heroin--that Burger King on Cedar Street was the big heroin pick up spot. So guys would pick up their heroin, shoot up in the parking lot, and then by the time they crossed over the highway to get back on 95 North they'd be fucked up. I had a couple of cars stuck on the highway. Just in the lanes stopped. Unconscious, needle, ten packs of heroin on the frontseat. I had a lady unconscious in the Dunkin Donuts bathroom on Armistice Boulevard. I go in, there's a guy running out the door with a lady's pocketbook. So come to realize, he thought whatever heroin they had left was in the pocketbook, but it wasn't. It was in her pants. So we woke her up, got 10, 12 packs of heroin out of her pocket, go to the hospital, and now I'm trying to get rid of it. I don't want to be responsible for this, couldn't get rid of it. The hospital didn't want it, the police didn't want it. So I'm like, "Am I supposed to keep these ten packs of heroin?" The hospital finally took it. TT- The heroin, compared to now, because Lemay was saying he pushed more Narcan in the last two or three years of his career than he did in the previous twenty years. DT-That's because heroin's so cheap right now. You can buy a bag of heroin for five-ten dollars. It's very cheap and it's very pure. So you don't need to shoot it. You can smoke it, you can snort it, so it's very easy to--what people don't know is how addicting it is. It just totally destroys your life. TT- Destroys everything. By the time you're done with it, it's fucking done with you. DT- Yeah. You're right. TT- One thing I've found most intriguing about the job, because I didn't really know what fire departments did until I got here, but really we're just a mop cleaning up the messes people make. DT- That's it. You're the Zamboni. Obviously, you know there's the crappy calls. "Oh, I've had a headache for three weeks." It's four o'clock in the morning and now they want to go to the hospital. "Oh, I stubbed my toe last night. Take me out of bed so I can go to the bathroom." You know, those are not our runs, but you still have to go in there with the same nice attitude and be nice. As much as you want to come out and just tell them what you feel, you can't. As I was told by one Battalion Chief, "The rescue is our PR. And you do a lot of work for us." But you don't get the credit. TT- When I was your partner, I never saw you upset with anybody. I don't think I ever saw, especially in the middle of the night, you never showed it. DT- It's your job. And I used to tell my partners,, "Listen, if you don't like this, you're only here because you have to be. The first chance you get, you're very welcome to stay, but you can go. And I had a lot of good partners. I had Scooter for eight years. Mike Callahan, who ended up being a captain, he was my partner for four or five years. But they had different ambitions, they wanted to move on and do different things, you know? And I used to say, "Don't stay just because you want to be my partner. Just move on." And you're the one who forced me off the rescue... (meaning me) (Laughs). My last day on the job you got me into an accident. (laughs). TT- That's all rumors. I think we were together for six months before you retired. And after twenty-eight years, how old were you when you left? DT- I was fifty-four I think. TT- What was it like leaving? Were you ready? DT- You always think you're ready. I left more because my wife had an illness, there was no contract, I couldn't afford to take another hit in health care coverage, and it probably would've benefited me to stay longer, because I could've retired at a seventy percent pension instead of a sixty, but at the time I had to make the choice I thought was right for me. Am I sorry that I left? No, because I think it was time. And it's a young man's job. As you know, there's a lot of carrying, a lot of fighting, a lot of arguing, crazy people are tough. There's a lot of crazy people out there. When you have to take down a manic person, because you've talked to him and talked to him and no matter what you say it's not registering. And then eventually you say, "Enough talking. Now we have to take him down." And that's a lot of work. Rescue guys get beat up quite a bit. I never did, never personally, because I always used to tell them, "Someone's gonna get hurt and it's not gonna be me." But being a rescue dude is also a lot of fun. You meet a lot of new people. TT- You're in and out of hospitals all day-- DT- All day, so you start to earn the trust of the doctors. Where the doctors, if you say something, they're gonna believe you. After so many years, if you tell someone I'm coming in and I need trauma, stat, that they're gonna have that room ready for you, they believe you. And because we work so closely with the hospitals, you get to do things that you don't usually do on the rescue. Like I've done open heart massage. Actually, it was a patient I brought into the hospital. Me and Dave Boisclair. He was transferred to the rescue. We used to call him Dr. Death because everything bad happened when he worked with us. If anything bad was gonna happen, Dave was on the rescue. So it was in the middle of winter, over on Bagley Street and Pine Street, there's a little mill back there. And somebody found a man down back there, so we get out, walk over there, it's the middle of winter, we say, "He's frozen." I gave him a little nudge with my foot and all of a sudden his fingers started moving. And we're like, "Oh God." So we get him in the back of the rescue and we start stripping him down and see he's been stabbed seven times. The guy had just gotten paid, (he was) one of the drunks, and they robbed him, stabbed him up, and threw him in the Blackstone River. He made it out and made it to Bagley Street. He coded and we brought him to the hospital, and one of the doctors, an O.R. doctor (surgeon), just happened to be in the Emergency Room, and they cracked his chest open right there. He says, "You ever do open heart massage?" I says, "No." "Well, today's your lucky day." So I stuck my hand in there and--the guy had a hole right through his heart, the doctor was stitching up the heart as I was squeezing it. He's going, "Squeeze, squeeze." And that's something you never forget. That guy lived. TT-As a partner, how was my driving? DT- You scared me every single day. (laughs) March 21, 2009
Interstate 95 ran from Florida to Maine, through fifteen states, and was the second most dangerous highway in America. It had many hazardous sections, but none more deadly than a series of curves cutting directly through Sachem City. Nicknamed the “Blood Alley,” these sudden S-curves had been specifically designed to circumvent two Sachem City institutions—St. John’s Catholic Church, a massive ornate brick structure that could seat a thousand people, and the Viri Autem Civitatis Club, which was Latin for “Men of the City.” Founded in 1851, the Viri Club was a closed society home to Sachem City’s elite, the mill owners and industrialists who all built mansions in the adjacent Crescent Side neighborhood. In keeping with the club’s name, there were no women allowed, either as guests, members, or employees. Within these walls for a hundred and twenty years, businessmen and politicians carried on and made deals that affected local citizens for generations. “The Valley of Death” was one of them. By 1952, in order to complete the 43.3 miles of highway that went through tiny Rhode Island, the design team originally drew up plans for I-95 to cut directly through the Viri Club and, a half mile further north, St. John’s Church. But when club members and the archdiocese got wind of this proposal, influence and favors rained down on the politicians until the highway was magically bent around the Viri Club. It swung sixty degrees, swung back sixty degrees the other way, straightened out briefly, and then another S-curve flung motorists around St. John’s Church. So far, this redesign became a decision paid in blood for the last sixty years. The Viri Club was still there, but its windows had been boarded up after the last member died in 1972. St. John’s, auctioned off to help pay for the Catholic Church’s pedophilia scandal, was bought by a developer that went bankrupt five months later, so the abandoned building was now a haven for drug addicts, the homeless, and those that preyed upon them. But inside the S-curves the massacre continued. Whole families had been killed out there. Tractor-trailers, misjudging velocity and physics, jackknifed or flipped over completely, flattening anything in the next lane. Cars slammed into the Jersey barriers and then shot across four lanes, taking out other cars before crashing again. Some vehicles got launched over the divider into oncoming traffic, and that’s when the real horrific injuries and decapitations appeared. In case it wasn’t dangerous enough, four bridges kept the city connected above the highway, but their three-story concrete abutments created human soup and fireballs when vehicles smashed into them at 70 mph. When accidents like these became catastrophes, the entire highway could be closed for hours. Stuck in this ensuing parking lot, people had asthma attacks, panic attacks, or even went into labor and had to be rescued from their cars. With the highway impassable, this had to be done from the other side of the Jersey barrier with traffic whipping by at 60 mph. In the rain, snow, or ice, the fire department might respond to this stretch of road so many times it looked like a union meeting had spontaneously convened on the highway. Three engine companies covered the 6.1 miles of I-95 through Sachem City. Since people often gave 911 faulty information, protocol called for two engines—one to sweep the northbound lanes, the other southbound. Callers to 911 had good intentions but were sometimes startled eyewitnesses with a bad sense of place or direction. Engine 2, in the center of the city, responded on every run. They were either joined by Engine 5 coming north from the Providence line, or Engine 4 cruising south from the Massachusetts border. On a normal stretch of road, rubberneckers were just annoying, but out here in the S-curves they often caused accidents of their own. People snapped pictures or live-streamed as they passed by with their phones hanging out the window. Some of the older guys told the newbies the highway was even more dangerous than house fires. The drunks, mesmerized by the flashing lights, were drawn in like inebriated moths smashing into fire trucks, tow trucks, and State Police cruisers. Because of this, Sachem City had lost two engines and one rescue in the last five years. The All Call tones went off at 8:45 a.m. Brian Fonseco was only riding on Engine 4 because, as the junior guy on shift, he got held in a line spot the Battalion Chief couldn’t fill. His brand new gear was incredibly clean compared to the veteran’s soot-smeared and battered pieces. Eager to learn, he had been out on the apparatus floor going through every inch of the truck since the 7 a.m. shift change. Mikey Doneen, the other private on Engine 4, was answering his questions. If a newbie showed up at a station and just threw his gear on the truck, grabbed a coffee, or read the newspaper, he was instantly labeled a bag of shit. Likewise, if an older guy approached a newbie and asked if he had any questions about the truck, the newbie that answered no was in for a long shift. Twenty-year guys might turn a blind eye, but the real old school, the guys broken in thirty years ago, considered this a complete lack of respect. Depending on the gravity of the offense, for some newbies it was a reputation killer only reversed by years of hard work. Mikey Doneen, the twenty-nine-year-old rising star with eight years on the job, was watching the six-foot four-inch Fonzie practice donning his gear and SCBA in a timely manner. He said, “Jesus Christ, kid, you’re as big as brick shithouse. Remember to keep your shoulder straps—” The All Call interrupted the lesson. “Attention Engine 2, Engine 4, Rescue 2, Still Alarm. 95 South, in the vicinity of Exit 29 …” Doneen hopped behind the wheel as Lieutenant Walls jumped aboard. Behind them, Rescue 2 already had its lights spinning. Lt. Walls grabbed the mic. “Engine 4, Rescue 2 responding.” “Roger that, Station 4 companies responding at 0846.” By protocol, Engine 4 entered the highway in Massachusetts and swept south from Attleboro. They swung onto 95-South ninety seconds after leaving the station and hit a wall of traffic, either from the morning commute or accident or both. “Fuck me.” Lt. Walls pointed to the right shoulder. “Take this, Mikey. I’ll see if Fire Alarm has a better location. We might have to get over to that other shoulder if it’s in the high speed lane.” “Roger.” Doneen punched it down the breakdown lane while Lt. Walls wailed the siren. Behind them, Rescue 2 rode in their wake. “Engine 4 to Fire Alarm. Do you have a lane for this accident?” “Negative. But just received a call from State Police requesting you to expedite.” “Fuck yeah.” Doneen was pumped. “Grab extra gloves, Fonzie, when the cops say expedite you know it’s gonna be a bloody mess.” Riding back-step, Fonzie jammed rubber gloves into his turnout gear. He looked over their shoulders, straining to see beyond the four lanes of deadstop traffic. “Engine 2 to Engine 4.” “Go ahead.” “Yeah, lou, you got a sedan on its roof. Middle two lanes. Might be another two cars involved. They’re against the Jersey barrier beyond the first car.” “Roger that.” Lt. Walls motioned. “Mikey, get us over in front of the rollover.” He toggled the mic. “Engine 4 to Engine 2, after you swing around, take the two cars against the barrier. The cops are all around the rollover flagging us down.” “Roger.” “Fire Alarm, companies on scene.” “Engine 4, Rescue 2 on scene at 0850.” To provide protection, Doneen parked diagonally to block off both center lanes. Lt. Walls yelled, “Fonzie! Trauma and airway bags!” "You got it, lou.” Fonzie put on his helmet, grabbed the two bags from the side compartment, and tried not to be overwhelmed. They had been taught in moments of extreme stress to revert to the basics—airway, breathing, and circulation. The ABC’s kept people alive. He saw Doneen and Lt. Walls rushing for the car until they abruptly stopped. When Fonzie turned the corner, he almost puked. A woman had been ejected. As the car rolled it came to rest on her head. Otherwise, she seemed perfectly fine. She was nicely dressed as if on her way to an office job somewhere. The car had landed on the top part of her skull and squeezed all kinds of things out of her mouth, nose and ears. Doneen winced. “Are those her brains?” Lt. Walls said, “I don’t know, man, but she’s still moving.” Her arms and legs were shot straight out like a twitching starfish. Lt. Walls grabbed her wrist and waited. “She’s got a pulse. We gotta work it.” He turned to the cops. “Can you push the car so we can pull her out?” The rescue guys appeared with the stretcher and more gear. Engine 2 screamed by heading for the two cars ahead. “On three!” The cops rolled the car and the firemen yanked her out. From the eye sockets up, she was crushed. Lt. Walls said what they were all thinking. “Just four more inches and nothing would’ve been …” He blocked it from his mind. He saw her wedding ring before he could turn away. “Forget the collar. Board and go!” The rescue guys had her boarded and strapped down a minute later. They all loaded her onto the stretcher and hauled ass for the rescue. “Fonzie!” Lt. Walls yelled. “Stretch the jump-line in case it ignites!” “You got it, lou.” Fonzie headed back to the truck and pulled the line. Then he grabbed a Halligan tool and sledgehammer to pry open the hood if necessary. When he knelt down and looked inside the car, he instantly regretted it. There she was, the parts of her life. Because of the rollover, everything was on the ceiling. Her travel mug was still loaded with coffee for her ride to work. There were pictures of her kids attached to the dashboard. Her briefcase and laptop were next to her purse. Fonzie realized that six minutes ago she was just another commuter before this moment arrived to steal her life and rip apart her family. Firemen were not allowed to declare anyone dead, so if the patient had a pulse they got worked up despite likely non-survivable injuries. He found it impossible not to be humbled. The back doors of the rescue flew open. Lt. Walls yelled, “Fonzie, back-step man drives the rescue to RIH!” "Roger that.” Fonzie waddled over in full gear. He tossed his helmet onto the passenger seat and quickly scanned the dashboard. He had this. No sweat. “Fire Alarm, Rescue 2 is transporting with two men from Engine 4 to Rhode Island Hospital.” “Roger that, Rescue 2, headed to RIH at 0858.” The rescue lieutenant in the back of the squad toggled his mic. “Rescue 2 to Fire Alarm. Advise RIH that we have a thirty-eight-year-old female with a severe crush injury to her head. She is unconscious, BP is 90/50, pulse 140, we have an airway but it’s anatomically compromised. Two 14 gauge IVs established. We’re eight minutes out.” “Message received, Rescue 2.” Fonzie put the pedal on the floor and, because of the closed highway, ate up the empty road. Prologue September 26, 2012 The 911 calls started pouring in at 11 a.m. A four-story tenement home was shooting flames from every first-floor window. It was a massive building constructed one hundred years before the implementation of modern day fire codes. Sixteen apartments loaded with the belongings of forty people added to an already staggering fire-load. When Engine 4 turned the corner, Lieutenant Walls called for a second alarm before he even got out of the truck. “Lou!”— the chauffer of Engine 4 used the slang for lieutenant. “We got hangers!” “Fuck me.” Lieutenant Walls grabbed the microphone. “Engine 4 to Fire Alarm.” Dispatch answered, “Go ahead, Engine 4.” “We have people hanging from windows on Side 2. We’re making grabs. Engine 3’s gonna have to be the primary attack.” “Roger that. Fire Alarm to responding companies. Engine 4’s confirming a Code Red with people trapped on Side 2. Engine 3 is to initiate the primary attack.” Lieutenant Walls tightened the shoulder-straps on his SCBA tank, turned on his air, and headed for the side of the house where a screaming woman was about to drop a baby into an old woman’s arms. “Wait!” Lt. Walls pushed her out of the way. The baby fell ten-feet. He handed it to the old woman and then turned to help his back-step man set the ladder. They barely had time to lean it against the house before the woman pushed another screaming kid out the window. “Jesus, lady!” Lt. Walls scrambled up to the terrified kid. “Take my hand!” With the black smoke choking her out, the frantic woman dropped a third kid on top of the second and both rolled onto Lt. Walls’ helmet. Then she launched herself head first down the ladder just as the window exploded into a blowtorch above her. With two small kids draped across his head and shoulders, Lt. Walls backed down the ladder. The mother, burnt and singed, was only relieved her kids were alive. She crawled head-first down the ladder toward them while making reassurances like only a mother in the middle of an inferno could. Arriving fire trucks poured out of side streets from different directions. Ladder 2 was already swinging into position for a shot at the roof. “Jimmy!” Lt. Walls shouted to his chauffer. “Hook a hydrant up to the 3s. Me and Ronnie are heading in!” “Roger, Lou!” “Ronnie.” Lt. Walls turned to his back-step man. “Let’s clear the first-floor.” He clicked his microphone. “Fire Alarm, Engine 4A and 4B have pulled four people out of the second-floor. We are now headed into level one for a primary search.” “Roger, Engine 4A and B conducting a primary search of level one.” The chauffer of Ladder 2, alone since his officer and back-step man were part of the search teams, advanced the telescopic ladder seventy-feet until it stopped a foot short of the peak. The guys from Ladder 1 couldn’t get through the bottleneck on the tight urban street, so they climbed up Ladder 2 with chainsaws and axes. Their job was to cut a 4’x4’ hole in the roof to provide an instant chimney for the 1600 degree gasses and smoke trapped inside. Battalion Chief Riggs, in charge of the Second Battalion (B-Shift) for the last six years, knew who he could trust. As he watched the roof team readying to drop onto the peak, he swept the fourth-floor windows for fire but only saw smoke. Still, because of the balloon-frame construction prevalent in the 1800’s, he knew fire could’ve already climbed straight up inside the walls to the attic. He ordered in two more attack lines and it seemed progress was being made. Primary and secondary searches of all four floors were negative, so now they could focus on extinguishing the growing inferno. One hose team was just protecting the staircase so the guys from Engine 3 could bail out of the second-floor if it got too nasty. “Ladder 1 to Command.” B.C. Riggs toggled his mic. “Command, go.” “Chief, we got one hole cut. You want another on the A-B corner?” B.C. Riggs saw fire and smoke roaring out of the hole. “Negative. Clear the roof.” Windows on the third and fourth floors abruptly exploded. A mask-muffled voice shouted on the radio, “Engine 3 to Command!” “Command, go.” “Chief, we’ve pushed halfway through the second-floor—” “Evacuate the building, lieutenant. We now have fire above and below you. Copy?” “Roger!” “Command to Fire Alarm. Put out an Urgent Message for all companies to evacuate the building.” “Roger, Command.” Dispatch triggered the Evacuation Tone, a series of beeps that chirped across everyone’s radio. “Fire Alarm to all companies. Evacuate the building. Per order of Command, evacuate the building.” In case those inside had not heard their radios, firemen jumped into the trucks and wailed the air-horns in this universal message. A helmet suddenly bounced down and off the roof as B.C. Riggs looked up in time to see the peak collapse. He only saw the upper half of Lieutenant Strawchek, which meant his legs were dangling in the flames. “Oh fuck!” He toggled his mic. “Command to Fire Alarm, get me a ground ladder to the roof on Side 1! We have a roof collapse above Ladder 1 and they are trapped.” Lt. Strawchek pulled himself out of the hole and crawled face-first down the roof. His back-step man, Bobby Casper, steadied him on the edge of the abyss. Above them, the roof was gone. Below them was a forty-foot drop to nowhere. Fire was eating up the last ten-feet of roof behind them. Four firemen frantically lifted and placed a massive thirty-five-foot ladder. Casper and Strawchek barely waited for it to touch the gutter before immediately bailing off the roof. B.C. Riggs saw his own hand shaking on the mic and had to refocus. “Command to Fire Alarm. I want an immediate accountability.” “Roger, Chief.” Dispatch hit an Alert Tone. “Fire Alarm to all companies. Prepare for accountability. Fire Alarm to Engine 1.” “Engine 1 all present and accounted for on Side 2.” “Fire Alarm to Engine 2.” “Engine 2 all present on Side 4.” “Engine 3?” Silence. “Fire Alarm to Engine 3? Status?” Silence. “Fire Alarm to—” “Command to all companies. Prepare for R.I.T.” B.C. Riggs tried to corral a mounting panic. It helped that he didn’t have to ask twice, because twenty guys were already gathering at the front door with tools and bottles and fresh hose lines in case the others left behind were already burned through. Inside, Engine 3 was missing. *** Snapshot
August 18 A panicked voice asked, “Where’re you taking me?” “Shut up.” “Who are you? What do you want?” Tully climbed over the seat and stood before the cuffed and blindfolded man on the floor. He kept his balance as the van took a hard right turn. He reached for the duct-tape. “There’s not gonna be anymore talking.” “Please—” Tully slapped him. Slapped him back the other way and cut off a foot-long piece of tape. “No!” The man whipped his head back and forth. “No, please!” Tully kicked him in the stomach hard enough to make him gag and fall to the right. He stepped on his temple, taped his mouth, and then pulled him back to sitting. The man moaned sickly through the tape. Tully stepped back over the center console and sat in the passenger seat. He turned to Jason Ellzy, the driver, and decided he looked totally freaked out. “Jas, man, it’s all good. But ease up on the gas, will ya? Don’t need the extra attention.” “Okay.” Jason refocused on the road. “You’re right.” “Put your seatbelt on.” “Okay.” “Ten more miles and then we take a left. You got this.” “I can’t believe this’ actually happening.” “In twenty minutes it’ll be over.” Tears started. Jason backhanded his cheeks. Tully said, “Keep it in the lane, man, it’s almost over.” Two more lines drew down Jason’s cheeks, so he backhanded them again. He was a tall man that carried no extra weight. As a physical therapist, he knew the importance of staying in shape, so he moonlighted teaching Krav Magra. “It’s coming up.” Tully had it memorized since their cell phones were back in their respective homes. He chose this route because there were no cameras facing the desolate road. Tully pointed. “There’s a dirt path after that telephone pole.” The van slowed, blinker on. It was past midnight so there was no one in either direction. They turned down a narrow rutted road filled with oversized rocks. On either side were tall trees standing above thick walls of undergrowth that slapped against the van. The man in the back moaned every time the terrain tossed him against the wall. Tully said, “Another half mile and there’s a clearing on the right.” At his feet was a toolbox. He opened it and pushed aside wrenches and screwdrivers to get to the Sig Sauer 9mm. He snapped back the slide to load the chamber and then set the safety. Jason took a long look when he saw the gun laying on the console between them. Tully noticed this but said nothing. Like Jason, this was a first time event for him as well. His pulse felt like it was pounding through his neck. “Here it is.” Tully pointed. “Nudge us in here and we’ll walk the rest of the way.” Without the use of his mouth, the man in back started hyperventilating through his nose. Snot blew out his nostrils. Jason shut down the engine. Tully didn’t want the silence to allow for second guessing, so he said, “Let’s go.” They slid open the van door as the man blindly kicked, thrashing, the sweat and snot flying from his face. With his hands taped behind him, he could only flop and kick. “Stop it.” Tully tried to grab him. “Let’s go. You earned this.” But the man kept scrawling and kicking. He sounded like a sick animal mewling through the tape. “Enough!” Tully yanked him out by the feet. The man hit the ground and thrashed until Tully kicked him in the stomach hard enough to ball him up. He got the gun from the van and, since he was a carpenter and not a killer, awkwardly placed it against the man’s head. “Stop making this worse.” The man seemed to be trying to speak through the tape, so Tully yanked it off. “Oh thank God. Please. Please, my name is Daniel Ryanns, my family, we have money.” “This ain’t a robbery.” Tully looked at Jason whose face seemed stuck between rage and awe. “Now stand up.” “We have money, we can pay you however much—” “Stand up.” “Okay, okay.” It was hard with his hands bound, but Daniel Ryanns finally stood. He was in his mid-thirties with expensively cut blond hair. This was not a place he would ever visit. “Who are you?” “The ghost of Christmas past.” Tully mashed the gun into Daniel’s cheek. “Do you want to get shot?” “Okay, okay. Oh God, I can’t see anything!” “Walk straight.” Tully pushed him. “Get moving.” “I’m sure we can figure this out.” Blindfolded, Daniel slowly stepped ahead. “I don’t want to walk into anything!” Tully pushed him again. “Walk.” Jason, who was the reason all of this was happening, took the gun from Tully and followed them into the woods. *** August 10 One Week Earlier As a practicing physical therapist, Jason Ellzy had seen patients in unimaginable pain. He had helped hundreds of people over a fifteen year career. People who had been mangled in car wrecks or falls or had an unfortunate day at work. Alleviating and fixing these ailments filled him with pride. He was sipping coffee in a half-empty diner when Tully walked in covered in saw dust and dirt. He took the bandana off his shaved head and slid into the booth, asking, “How long have we known each other?” Jason blinked. “Twenty years?” “I’ve never seen you look like this, bro. I mean it’s rough. You still not sleeping?” “Not a wink.” “It’s been three weeks, man.” “I know. Believe me. Talking about it every time you see me ain’t helping.” “I hear ya. I’m with ya.” Tully ordered coffee from a bleary-eyed waitress. “You know he bonded out, right?” Jason stared into his cup. “That’s what I heard.” “I don’t know, bro. I’m worried about you.” “I know.” The coffee arrived and Tully sipped it. “He’s connected as fuck. The whole family. They’ve never answered for anything in a hundred years.” “He’s gonna walk, isn’t he?” “Man …” Tully did not want to answer the obvious. “Would it surprise you?” A sudden grief did funny things to Jason’s face. It scrunched and twisted, but the tears came anyway. “I don’t think I could live with that.” “Me neither.” Tully flipped over a place mat and pulled a carpenter’s pencil from his jeans. “Let’s get started …” *** A lifetime before, a 2x4 nailed into a roof blew out and hit the ground seconds before Tully joined it in the mud. The twenty-five foot fall dislocated his hip. Out of work for months, the only reason he recovered was because Jason, his best friend, was an osteopath/PT who saw Tully for free. Ski accidents, road bike crashes, and jobsite disasters involving ladders and roofs were only a few of the ways Tully landed on Jason’s table. On the weekends they rode bikes and shot guns and survived Jason’s eventual divorce from a childhood sweetheart who wanted out. It was then that Uncle Tully doubled as babysitter so Jason could train Krav Magra or teach a class or even go on a date. In turn, Tully got to watch the kids morph into people. When Samantha got her period but had run out of gear, Tully flew to the pharmacy. When he let little Brian build a jump in the backyard before he promptly broke his leg, Tully called Jason from the ER riddled with guilt. He even left work if the kids needed a ride from school. But that stopped after Samantha got her license. Incredibly, two years later she was getting ready for college. *** July 17 Three Weeks Earlier Jason’s ex-wife had the kids, so he and Tully went shooting at the gun range before grabbing a few beers. Jason was not a drinker, but Tully was a bad influence, so Jason finally had to get them a ride home. They were at Jason’s grilling late night burgers when a state police cruiser pulled into the driveway. Since one of their close friends was a trooper, Jason said, “Fucking Smitty. Surprised he didn’t come flying in lights and sirens like last time.” “Yeah, man, that wasn’t cool at all.” “Huh.” Jason squinted. “That ain’t Smitty …” Tully was busy in the kitchen. “Maybe you’re a wanted man.” “We didn’t even drive home.” Jason pushed open the screen. “Evening trooper.” “Evening, sir.” The trooper was 6’3” and filled the doorway. “May I come in?” “Of course.” Jason closed the door behind him. The trooper looked at his notepad. “Is either one of you Jason Ellzy?” “That’s me.” Jason shook his hand, perplexed. “Mr. Ellzy, we received a call for an assault this evening.” “Excuse me?” “Do you have a daughter? A miss Samantha Ellzy?” “Yes. Her mother has her this weekend …” Jason felt a thud through the alcohol and realized it was the bottom of his stomach. “What is this? What’s happened? She and her mother and brother went out to eat.” “I hear you, sir.” The trooper held out a license. “Is this your daughter?” “Yes …” He searched his pockets for his phone. “There must be some kind of mistake. Lemme call my wife.” “Sir, please. Trust me, it’s her.” “But …” “The fire department did everything they could …” “Fire department?” “She was alive when she was found … I’m very sorry but I’m afraid she’s passed away.” “She’s dead?” “What the fuck is going on?” Tully stepped in from the kitchen. “She can’t be dead. She just went out to eat.” The trooper said, “Excuse me, sir, who are you?” “A family friend.” “This is the worst part of my job.” Jason said, “What do you mean assaulted?” “I have a daughter myself—” “Tell me what’s happened!” “Sir…” There was no other way to say it. “She was raped and stabbed six times.” “Please no. No, no, no. Don’t let this be true.” “She lost a lot of blood, sir. They did everything they could. I’m very sorry.” “This …” Jason was only listening in the sudden dark. “Does her mother know?” “Not yet. This was listed as her primary address.” Jason sat down instead of collapsing. *** September 2 Seven Weeks Later Tully spent six hours on a ten mile stretch of road. He drove it again and again. Then he biked it slowly. He cased the apartment where the girlfriend lived. There were no cameras anywhere in between there and the turn off. He would’ve called Jason but he had made sure to leave his cell phone at home. *** September 3 The Next Day “The whole thing?” Jason asked. He was sitting next to Tully on a bench at Basker’s Park. There were kids and people enjoying a sunny day near where these two men barely existed. Tully said, “Drove it a dozen times. Biked it too. There ain’t nothing, man.” They both stared ahead. Kids played Frisbee. A man shouted for his dog. “It’s one thing to talk about it,” Tully said. “Imagine the real deal is gonna be pretty goddamn bad.” “It might’ve been different, you know?” “I hear ya. We never should’ve gone to the morgue.” Knowing it was going to be bad was one thing, but when Jason broke down and bent to hug her one last time, the sheet got yanked back accidentally to reveal the first stab wound. Then the next and the next. Tully tried to stop him from seeing what someone had done to Samantha’s bleached dead body. She lost a lot of blood, sir. The naked beauty of his little baby slashed and punctured and stolen away. The coroner’s assistant politely tried to cover her up. “No.” Jason pulled the sheet back down. A minute later Tully said, “Jas.” He put a hand on his shoulder. “Meant to show you this. Found it the other day.” From his wallet, he pulled a wrinkled sixteen-year-old photograph. It was Tully in his dirty work clothes and bandana standing behind Samantha, who was two-years-old and could barely stand. Tully was grinning and holding her pigtails straight up while her tiny hands shot toward the camera, the smile one she never lost. “Put the sheet back, man, this is her.” Jason blinked. He re-covered her body and hugged Tully, the photograph locked in his shaking hand. *** October 6 Four Weeks Later The interview room at State Police Headquarters had a table, two uncomfortable chairs, and a pair of cameras. Jason Ellzy was sitting across from a detective who had a flattop haircut and wrinkled suit. He seemed to be a man of few words and even fewer emotions. He said to Jason, “So you’re saying you never left your house.” “Yes, sir. Ordered pizza at around eight and got pay-per-view on the TV. Fell asleep on the couch after that.” “If it was me, and that was my kid …” “You say you’re trying to exclude me. But you keep coming back to the same thing.” “I can’t say I’d blame you either …” “Detective … check my credit card. The pizza was even delivered. Check with the cable company. I’m telling you I never left the house.” “You don’t find this odd? I mean what’re the chances?” “Good and bad, detective, people die every day.” Consistency was the one thing Freddy Corsair had stressed. A childhood friend of Jason’s, Freddy had been a city cop for seventeen years until Internal Affairs busted him stealing cocaine off a wired informant. Freddy served three years at Medfield, lost his pension, and was released with no love for his former profession. After Jason posed hypothetical’s with vague or nonexistent details, Freddy ultimately told him, “Listen, the only point of interrogating anyone is to trip them up, break their story down. Simpler the better. Getting cute in a shark tank ain’t smart.” Now, the detective clicked his pen a half dozen times. “Me and the wife watch movies. What’d you watch?” “Hurt Locker.” “Huh. That’s a damn good movie.” “It was some crazy shit.” “Them boys saw some shit. You ever serve?” “No.” “I was in the Marines. Bravo Company, 3rd Battalion, Second Marines. Loved it. We had each other’s backs. Kind of like you and your buddy. What’s his name?” “Who?” “The guy that was there the night of notification. You two went out drinking, right? Pretty good friends?” “Sure.” “What’s his story?” “Tully? He’s a carpenter.” “Short fuse kind of guy?” “No.” Jason frowned. “He’s just a carpenter. Works like six days a week.” “I wonder where he was Friday night?” “You should ask him. I don’t spend every second with the guy.” “It’s kind of crazy though, right? You gotta admit, might be the coincidence of all time.” “You’ll pardon my lack of empathy, detective.” Jason made a show of checking the time. “If there’s nothing else, I got a whole afternoon of paperwork at the office.” “If you really had nothing to do with this, you wouldn’t mind us searching your house would you?” “For what?” “How about a gun for starters? Duct-tape?” “My .45 is registered, I’m licensed, it’s kept in a gun safe in my bedroom.” He took his house key off the ring and slid it across the table. “Have at it.” “I want what’s in that gun safe.” “Then let’s go.” Jason took the key back and stood up. “Just don’t wreck the place, because you’re not gonna find anything.” “You better hope not, Mr. Ellzy. First degree murder in this state can still carry death.” “Talk like that is gonna force me to call a lawyer, detective. But I’ll temporarily side-step the disrespect this department apparently shows victims’ families.” The detective swung open the door and followed him out. *** “By the way, what kind of name is Tully?” Tully, stuck in a box with the same cop and two cameras, was getting sick of the games. “I’m James the III, my dad is James the II, and his dad’s the first. We’re all nicknamed Tully.” “James McMaster the III. Or just Tully, right?” “That’s right.” “The one part of this story that intrigues me most is the van. Strange, don’t you think?” “Haven’t we been over this?” “A guy you knew. His van gets stolen and used in the commission of an aggravated kidnapping and felony murder of a man accused of raping and murdering your best friend’s daughter? That’s some fucking coincidence. This whole caper is coincidence after coincidence. Like two guys thinking they could pull off the perfect crime.” “Fuck you. How about that? How about you and the rest of them never putting a finger on him ever?” “He bonded out, didn’t he?” “So what? He shouldn’t have been out for the last twenty years. Ain’t nobody forgotten what happened. So no, I ain’t exactly shedding tears. Whoever’s van and whatever don’t mean shit. Someone just finally gave him what he’s always had coming and there ain’t no one in this county that would say otherwise. Not even the cops. At least the ones that aren’t already on the payroll.” “That’s a bold statement.” “Accusing innocent people of murder is even bolder, don’t you think?” “Nobody’s accusing—” “I think this is where I ask for my attorney.” Tully finished his soda and looked at the camera. “This interview’s over.” *** November 3 One Month Later When word of his depression spread, Jason’s family drove in to celebrate what would have been Samantha’s nineteenth birthday. In the backyard sunshine, his cousins’ kids played while uncles and aunts reconnected. On a table next to the food was a picture of a smiling Samantha to help push back the sorrow. Tully arrived after work covered in the usual sawdust and grime. Jason poured them two beers from the keg. The sound of kids filled the gathering dusk as he and Tully walked the perimeter. They both watched Jason’s sixteen-year-old son, Brian, toss a football with a cousin. Tully asked, “How’s junior?” “He’s good, man. Coming around, you know?” “At least someone is.” “Ease up. I’ll get there. Just gonna take some time.” Tully sipped his beer. “Must be nice to sleep again.” “Right? That was a bad fucking month, man.” “Dude, this is way off topic, but I forgot how hot your cousins are.” “I know. We got good genes.” “I’m a creepy bastard, right?” “One of the creepiest.” Tully grinned, thankful it was getting easier. In the weeks afterwards, those last moments kept appearing like a rotted stench come back to haunt them. “What’s the word?” Jason asked, checking to make sure they were alone. “Nothing. Not a peep. You?” “It’s weird. I get the feeling I’m sometimes not alone.” “We just need to be careful. Remember what Freddy said. Statute of limitations doesn’t exist for this.” “I kind of feel bad for your buddy. That was his work van.” “So what? Dude’s owed me like ten grand for a job I did three years ago. You saw it. It was on its last legs, man, I stole it with a freaking screwdriver. Three Molotov cocktails later, problem solved.” Jason smiled until it faded. “You know, it was easy. What comes afterwards …” “Yeah, man. I always told myself I could, but I guess you never know.” “I had to.” “Never would’ve been right if you hadn’t.” “What happens if we have to spend the rest of our lives in prison?” “That thought is not allowed inside my head. There are two people out of seven billion on this planet. That’s it. As long as we never say a word to anyone ever, we walk on.” “You’re my best bro, Tully.” “I loved her, dude. Hopefully she’s at peace.” Their perimeter tour ended back at the keg. All around them the late fall was fading away. Winter, after all, was fast approaching. If Clint Eastwood ever made Battalion Chief, he would remind of you Al Kraweic. A no-nonsense man of few words, he made all of them count.
January 18, 2017 TT: Let's go back to the very beginning. How old were you? And what year did you get on? AK: I got on in '82, and I was born in 1948, so you do the math (34 years). I had no expectation of getting on this job. The list that I was on was like four years old, it was surprising they were even maintaining a list. TT: Were you born in the city? AK: I was born in Pawtucket but I lived in an apartment until my girl bought a house in Attleboro and I've kind of flipped back and forth. TT: What did you do before you got here? AK: I was working as an iron worker. I did a lot of things, mostly construction. The economy back then was like now, it had its ups and downs, and construction was always the first to be hit when things got bad. At the time I was an iron worker in Connecticut. TT: Were you in the union? AK: No I was working on permit. TT: Were you a welder? AK: No I was doing decking. A little bit of connection but not much. Some repair work on bridges but at the time I was doing decking on a big insurance building they were building near Hartford. I got a phone call at work--Ray Church--I didn't even know a Ray Church. He says, "if you want to get on the fire department be here tomorrow." So I had to leave. Fortunately I had a car. Because usually I would ride in with my brother, because I was working with my brother and another guy. For whatever reason, that time I had a car, so I said, "I'm getting out of here." And my brother said he'd catch a ride with somebody else. At the time I was making, I was doing quite well, taking home about a grand a week. Back then that was damn good money. Coming to a job that, uh, that's what is was paying almost for a month. When I first got on. But it was steady. The job I had I had no idea--I could've been pink slipped the next week, the next day-- TT: Especially without the union, right? AK: Yeah. And I knew a lot of guys that were out of work at the time. Me working was--my brother even said don't volunteer your work on permit--so anyway I got on the job and I went for the physical and ran into Richie McDowell and Bobby McGeehan, they were getting their physicals, and we all got on the same day. When we got on we didn't have a school, it was OJT. TT: Right on the job. AK: The only training we had was you had to get an EMT license, I already had that. I was going to school with a bunch of guys who were already on the job. But other than that we had no training. Back in '82, that doesn't seem like that long ago to me, but everyone didn't have Scotts. Some trucks only had one Scott. Some trucks had a Scott and a Rescue Pack. Most trucks had at least two. The ladder trucks didn't always have Scotts. I remember my first fire I went in, I had a rescue pack, which was a small Scott bottle which lasted not even fifteen minutes. And if--all it was for was to go in and rescue somebody and get out. You weren't supposed to stay and fight fires with it. You know how a Scott is, when you're at a fire it's supposed to last over half an hour, but some guys can't even get fifteen minutes out of them. (Laughs) TT: Sucking wind. AK: Well, they're excited, so I don't know how long I was in--it was my first fire--and to tell you the truth I got lost (laughs). Fire was in the cellar, I was bouncing around on the first floor, not realizing at the time that fires aren't like what you see in the movies or on TV. You don't see anything. TT: It's all smoke. AK: I couldn't my hand in front of my face. So when I came out I was like, "That was interesting." (laughs). It was my first experience. At least when you went to school you got the experience of being in a smoke-filled room and not being able to see, moving around. That was my first house--and it was a pissy ass couch fire in the cellar-- TT: Now the cellar fires are, I mean Thurber was talking about almost getting killed twice in cellars-- AL: Well, usually there's only one way in or out. As you know, cellars are full of shit. TT: We had one last night in the 5s. Um, so that was your first fire? AK: That was my first--it wasn't really a fire--I wouldn't even classify it as a house fire. My first one after that was in the 5s district, on Acorn Street, which's one of the shortest streets in the city. And it was another cellar fire. That was my first fire with Timmy Hayes who I found out could suck smoke like--he didn't need a Scott. I don't know how he did it TT: Chickee talks about the sponges... AK: Oh yeah. Well, I never did that. But following Timmy Hayes into a fire my eyes would be watering and burning and he'd be standing up telling you what to do and I could barely do anything. I was just gagging. And that was another small little fire, but it was the first that I worked with someone like Timmy, you know, that didn't even use a Scott. TT: What happened when he retired? The guys that ate all the smoke, no one worried about this stuff back then, right? AK: Timmy's still alive. I saw him at the last big function at the Le Foyer. He was there. He showed up. I was surprised, to tell you the truth, I didn't think he'd--he smoked cigarettes plus he ate all that smoke, you know. TT: And there was a lot more fire back in the day then there is now. AK: Timmy was--I think everybody you would talk to would say he was one of the best, if not the best firefighter they ever worked with, he was really an old school firefighter and wearing a Scott--I mean he wore a Scott at the end because everyone had to. The old timers, they wouldn't even go in because they just didn't like putting a Scott on. And it's understandable because some guys just don't like something on their face. When they first got on they didn't have to do that. A lot of it was surround and drown before they had Scotts. If you couldn't put it out right away, you stood outside and put it out. TT: So Timmy Hayes, when you got on, how far into his career was he? Like when did he retire? AK: Well, he was still on when I first made lieutenant after nine years. My eighth or ninth year I made lieutenant and went to the 1s and he was the senior lieutenant on the 1s. They didn't have captains back then. So I would think he made it another ten years, probably 2000 when he retired. TT: The 4th of July stories are unbelievable, as far as the sheer number of fires. Lighting up neighborhoods... AK: If you were on the 1s you were up all night. That was it. Nothing would happen until after the fireworks at the baseball game (McCoy Stadium), and that's like ten o'clock. From ten o'clock on you were going til four or five in the morning. Warren Ave was a big one. I don't know where they got the shit to burn but they kept finding more stuff to burn and they'd keep lighting fire after fire. TT: It just seems so incredible because you hear these stories and you're like, "Nobody stopped this?" It went on for like fifty or sixty years. AK: Oh yeah. I would write down...all I did as an officer on the fourth of July was write down where we were going to next. You ran with four or five guys to a truck. Everyone ran heavy, and all I did was write down go to Warren Ave, go to Anthony Street (laughs), that's all you did and you'd just keep a list and the only time you'd over ride it is if it was a reported house fire. Or a bonfire next to a house. You'd say, "Okay." And you'd go there first. TT: So you'd have a list of fires that you were trying to get to but couldn't even get to sometimes. AK: And every now and then someone--like the 4s might be in the 1s district and say, "Well, we're near Anthony, we'll take that one next." And you'd cross it off your list (laughs). TT: How did they--you'd just hit a hydrant, load up, and head to the next fire? AK: You'd put out fires and when you got low on water you go out of service to refill. My first fourth of July I was on the ladder. And the old guys said, "Oh you're on the ladder. You won't go nowhere tonight." We ended up with two house fires and a bakery on Smithfield avenue burned down. A vacant house, another house, and a bakery-they lost a business block on Smithfield ave. TT: Was this Burn the Block Brindamour? AK: No that was after. (Laughs) TT: So this is all on the fourth of July, you're just going house to house or whatever they're lighting up, sometimes piles in the middle of the street. AK: They actually would collect it and store it behind their houses. And wait for the fourth to burn it all. TT: Would they go through to the next night or was it just the fourth? AK: It would carry over but it wasn't anything--usually if it carried over it was only in the 1s district. It wasn't in the other districts as much. And my father grew up in the 1s, and he even asked me, "They still doing the bonfires?" And I said, "Yeah." At the time there was a trolly track that ran down Main Street, and he said, "We used to pour gasoline down the trolly tracks down that hill and light it on fire, and it'd be a wall of fire." (Laughs) TT: These stories are so great. No one would ever believe it. So it went for like 60 years? AK: Oh it went on for a good long time until they finally decided they were going to have a night court, and just bring people in. They were arresting people and bringing them in to court right then and charging them. The day before, trucks would go around--we would go around before the fourth of July looking for piles of trash. TT: To try to preempt it? AK: Yup. and call the department of public works and they'd come in and take the trash away. But it did work, because in about two years it quieted everything down. TT: Wow, that's amazing. That was after 2000? AK: Yes. I was still in the 1s. And we were going back to the same address for like the fifth time. And the same guys were standing out there drinking their beer and chuckling and laughing and we're putting it out. The last time we went, the cops came and took them all away in handcuffs. That was the end of that. And I even said it then, "It was funny the first few times but it ain't funny anymore." TT: Let's talk about bad stories. What's the closest you ever came to being killed? AK: One, I was on Branch Avenue. Looking back on it it doesn't seem so bad, but at the time it was because I was on the ladder, and me and John Nolan went up search and rescue because as usual you get there and someone yells, "Someone's on the second floor!" You couldn't see your hand in front of your face. And we're bumping into stuff on the second floor. We went through the whole apartment, we both came out, we started going down the stairs, and as we started going down the stairs, it was getting hotter and hotter and hotter and I says, "John, are you getting hot?" And he says, "Yeah." I says, "Let's go back up." And fortunately there was a window to an upstairs porch off the hallway. So we could get out. It was the only time I threw my helmet. Back then, they used to tell you to throw your helmet out the window to get attention. And they got us down from the second floor. And that was a funny--not funny--a strange fire in that we had like mutual aid from Lonsdale there, and they got there later on in the fire, and they pull up and we were all standing out front and one of them says, "Ain't you guys going in?" Someone said, "Go take a walk around the back." Well, the whole house was gone. It was like a Hollywood movie set. Just the front of the house was standing. (laughs) We went in and there was fire in every wall. Every time you poked a hole in a wall there was fire. Balloon construction, the fire started in the basement, it went up every interior wall. TT: It ate the house. AK: Completely TT: That's the one thing, especially here, Central Falls, New Bedford, Fall River, places with triple and quadruple decker houses build 150 years ago, it's the same story, right? You just try to get there quick and smash a wall and stop it from getting to the roof. So the radios don't really come into play until after Hargraves, like the mid 1990's. Did you ever have a mayday? AK: We had Domkowski's. Over by the hospital. I forget which street it was. And that was in the basement. Fire started in the basement, went up through an inside wall, upstairs, the whole house was pretty--as I recall you couldn't see anywhere in the halls. They were on the first floor, I was in the basement with John Leite, and we're all talking and all of a sudden I heard a mayday and shushed everybody up. "Quiet! Quiet!" And they call us all out and fortunately, Biely, a very good firefighter, while chief Jack was trying to get everyone together, it was gonna be me and Halprin going in to look for him, Biely took it upon himself to go in because he knew the last place he was with him, and he walked in and got him out. He was in a closet. (laughs) TT: I heard that. Was he out of air? AK: He was close. I think you could hear the alarm going off in his mayday. But he just got disoriented, got himself into a closet, I don't know if the door shut behind him, or he just got scared and turned around and you can't see... TT: That's got to be terrifying. When you became chief, as you step up in your career, and advance up the chain, you were confident enough in what you knew, but did you ever sometimes sit back and go, "I got thirty-three guys I gotta worry about." And on top of that, you have the whole city to worry about. It's not like--it's two in the morning, there's nobody there but you, did you ever have those moments where you were like, "Wow, This is a big deal." AK: It gets to um, a point...at first it's put the fire out. But you also, when you get to Battalion Chief, you realize I have to put the fire out but I have to make sure everybody comes back. You know? You don't want to put anybody in harm's way ... so you start to realize who's assessment of the situation you can trust and whose you can't. There were times when I asked the officers inside, "Well, how we looking? Does it look like we can put it out or...?" And some guys, because of the way they are, their assessment was we should just come out and surround and drown. Well, I don't want to stay here all night either, you know? The longer we're here the greater the chance someone's gonna get hurt. I think, after a while, you get to a point where you know who you can trust for an assessment, and when you pull guys out or put guys in. I think Chief McLaughlin now, he's good at assessing fires. TT: Strategically AK: Good tactics, good at assessing a fire...every now and then some guys just have another sense as far as fires. He was one of them. He was good at it. He was one of those guys, and I've heard him say this too, chief would be pulling guys out and he'd be like, "Hey do you want to put this thing out or watch it burn down?" And that's what it comes down to. I was always of the perspective of Let's get there, put it out, pick up and get out of here. Basically, I don't like working anymore than I have to. But sometimes you don't have a choice. When Morris Novelty burned down I was in charge. And I had guys that wanted to go in and I said no. I had been in that building before, it's too easy to get lost, and I knew there were escalators that went up through the building from the basement to the top that had open floors and things were cooking already. And I says, "No, we ain't going in." TT: That was the fire where an off duty Providence guy drove by and called up saying, "I think this building was on fire." I remember because I dispatched the whole thing. I was pissed off for days. And by the time you guys got there it was ripping. AK: Oh yeah, it was puffing out of everywhere. Dave Reed was on the ladder. Everything he opened up near the roof was just blowing out. Gary Gould wanted to go in and I was like no. This wasn't that long after that Worcester warehouse fire either, and I'm not losing guys over a vacant building. I'd rather sit here and pour water on it. TT: At that time it was a storage place, right? There' wasn't-- AK: There wasn't any business running in there. It was just storage for the old novelty stuff. A vacant building TT: So as Chief, talking about responsibilities, you do see it on the fireground, as far as how the chiefs will turn to certain guys, you're talking about assessment, but also to send them in to do certain tasks because they know it will get done. If you're gonna send somebody to do something, even if it's dangerous, you still know that guy is gonna get it done. Like you said before, there are some guys that're ultra aggressive and there're some guys who're like, "Yeah, I'm all set with that. I'm gonna take care of shit out here." As far as aggressive dudes, does anyone else come to mind? AK: Bobby Ogle was very good aggressive firefighter. We had a big, i would call it a mansion. It was a huge house over in the Oak Hill neighborhood, on Charles near where the Children's Museum used to be? (laughs) Well, there was house over there, it had three stories, it had a huge walk in to a huge central stairway area. And that was another house, we got there, Code Red, I came in with Ogle, we laid a line from Engine 1, we went in. We walked into the stairway area and there wasn't a lick of smoke in the whole building. None. But it was going in all the inside walls, everything was burning, every place we opened. Ceiling, walls, there was fire going everywhere inside the walls. And finally it opened up and started burning heavy and I was up on the second--no the third floor. Me and Ogle were up on the third floor, we were going into a bedroom, kicked open the door, the bedroom was hot as heck, and Bobby pulled me out of there. He says, "Don't go in there." I says, "Why?" He says, "The fire's going--" Anyway, he pulls me out and we opened the door and went back in, and it couldn't have been more than five minutes later, we went back in and the roof and ceiling fell into that room--you could see the stars. (laughs) I don't know how he knew it, but he pulled me out. And I wanted to go in. He was good. He was another guy that was good at assessing and had an instinct. He knew where to go and where not to go. He was good at that. TT: When you were outside calling the shots as BC, I guess you're right. You're looking at it and asking, "Hey, can we put this out or not?" You're not gonna put guys into situations just to get this job done. You're looking to make strategic choices on which way you attack a fire, like would you watch the smoke or the color of the smoke and--I've heard different things about smoke. Colors, one color means it's being put down, but as the color turns more aggressive it's like, "Uh-oh, we might be losing this thing." AK: Before I was Battalion Chief, we had a fire, I was on Engine 2 at the time. It was me, Boislcaire, and I think Chief Sisson at the time was on Engine 2. It was a hot, hot summer day. Had to be upper nineties, maybe low triple digits. I just remember it being very hot. It was over by Pine street. We were going up the stairs and I was with Bober, that's right, Bober was on overtime, Boisclaire was pumping. Bober and I were going up to the second floor and as we're going up you can see smoke puffing out of cracks in the walls, in the door frames. I think McGeehan was behind me, and maybe Billy Malloy, I think he was on Engine 3 at the time. We knocked open the door, as soon as we knocked open that door the whole room was orange/black. Which is...the smoke is burning. (Laughs) As soon as we opened it my ears started burning. All I had was my flaps down, I didn't have my Nomex hood on, My flaps are down--I didn't wear the fire gloves because you couldn't do anything. TT: Yeah, they're like wearing pillows. AK: My hands are burning. (Laughs) I turned on the hose just to wet my hands down. Looking for a window so we could--as far as I knew the fire had already vented itself but it was still that hot in there. Looking for a window so we could get the heat out of the place. That was a color of smoke I've always remembered. (Laughs) When it's just black/orange/black, you can't see anything, yeah the smoke itself was burning. TT: Did you ever have a flashover on your watch? AK: I probably did but it wasn't like someone would've seen on television or in the movies, as far as a large explosion. Probably one that did flashover before we got there was a mill on Conant Street. When we got there all the windows on the top floor were blown out and there was fire coming out of everywhere. I'm assuming that flashed over because it blew everything up. TT: Were you at Greenhalgh Mill? AK: No. My shift was working but I was home. I had my hip replaced (Kraweic was always known for his top physical conditioning. A distance road cyclist, there are many stories that showcase his stamina at a fire. One lieutenant remembered a large fire in a field they could not reach because of a high fence. Kraweic, a captain at the time with twenty-something years on the job, appeared, pointed over the fence, and said, "We need to get over there." When the lieutenant turned back, Kraweic, in full turn-out gear and with a forty pound SCBA on his back, was already standing on the other side motioning for them to hand the hose over the fence. The lieutenant, to this day, swears he has no idea how this occurred). It was a strange story. I was watching cable news, flipping through the channels, I hear the cable news say, "Multiple Alarm fire on Cottage Street." And this was CNN. "Cottage street?" I thought to myself, "We have one in Pawtucket..." (laughs). So I kept watching and sure enough Greenhalgh Mills was going (a 250,000 square foot mill caught fire on a windy Friday afternoon and took out half a neighborhood and 17 houses. A State of Emergency was issued. Hundreds of firemen from nearly every town in RI, plus much of Massachusetts, responded and, upon arrival, were famously told by the Assistant Chief, "Pick a house fire and put it out.") So I walked out onto my deck--I only live maybe three miles away as the crow flies--I couldn't see a lick of smoke. The wind was blowing forty to fifty knots, and all the smoke was blowing toward Seekonk. It wouldn't even go high enough, it was blowing so hard. I remember Frank Chassis said, "It was snowing fire embers. He was right over here, by the fence on Kenyon, he said, "We're just sitting there watching these fire embers blow by us." They were trying to set up a water screen because (the embers) were catching hoses on fire. Because they'd be landing on roofs and even travelling to other cities. Lemay worked that day. He could probably tell you more. TT: Thurber too. He told a funny story about how they were getting their asses kicked and working their balls off for hours. And when he finally had a second to drop his pack and take a break and have a smoke, he thought they were making great progress until he turned around and saw half the city on fire. (laughs) AK: Mutual Aid was coming and they'd just tell them, "Find a fire and put it out." There were house fires everywhere. And there was probably a lot more that they caught and put out before they went up. The older guys tell stories of events that become continuous parts of their careers. There was a fire in the middle of the day. A mother was severely burned after multiple attempts to get to her eight-year-old son who was trapped on the third floor. Her hair was burnt off and she had second and third degree burns to her feet and hands from those attempts. She had to be restrained from entering the house again. While the rescue guys were tending to her injuries, a call went out over the radios that the child had been found. She left the rescue and saw her son rushed to another truck and then off to the trauma center. He did not survive. Understandably, the distraught mother was suffering. The loss was something she just could not process. She went into a spiral of depression and psychotic breaks that had the police and fire department at her residence sometimes on a weekly basis. She was placed on powerful medicines that took a toll on her daily existence. She had two younger children that, because of their mother's continuing struggle, were permanently taken from her and placed in the custody of the state.
On an afternoon earlier.this week, she approached our station. She can no longer drive, and so walked the four blocks to ask for help. Mentally, she was not in a good way and wanted to go the hospital. On the way, she told us her daughter had turned eighteen the day before. The two of them had lunch, and the mother told us how proud she was. But the next day everything came crashing back. At the hospital, it was busy and patients were stacking up on beds in the hallway. She sat in a chair at the ER and watched the activity while waiting to be treated. She told anyone who would listen about her daughter's upcoming transition to college. . |
AuthorTom Trabulsi was born in the Midwest, attended high school in Rhode Island, and graduated from Boston University with a degree in American History. He was a bike courier in Boston and New York City, worked construction in the mountain west and east coast, and is currently a firefighter in a northeast city. Archives
August 2022
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