Firehouse (2 page)

A firehouse, most firemen believe, is like a vast extended second family—rich, warm, joyous, and supportive, but on occasion quite edgy as well, with all the inevitable tensions brought on by so many forceful men living so closely together over so long a period of time. What gradually emerges is surprisingly nuanced; the cumulative human texture has slowly evolved over time and is often delicate. It is created out of hundreds of unseen, unknown, and often unidentified tiny adjustments that these strong, willful men make to accommodate one another, sometimes agreeably and sometimes grudgingly. It incorporates how the men live with one another day in and day out, and surprisingly the degree to which, whether they realize it or not, they come to love one another (sometimes even as they dislike one another)—because love is a critical ingredient in the fireman's code, which demands that you are willing to risk your life for your firehouse brothers.

The men not only live and eat with one another, they play sports together, go off to drink together, help repair one another's houses, and, most important, share terrifying risks; their loyalties to one another, by the demands of the dangers they face, must be instinctive and absolute. Thus are firehouse codes fashioned. When a probie—a probationary or apprentice firefighter—joins a firehouse, he must adjust to the firehouse culture, rather than the firehouse adjusting to him. It is like the military in that respect: Idiosyncrasy can come later; adherence to the rules and traditions comes first.

Reverend Scholz long ago decided that there was something special to firemen and their traditions, that they had chosen this profession because it expanded their lives and gave those lives additional meaning. Many of the men, he said, were not necessarily angels or saintly—far from it, in fact—and they were not, in the traditional sense, necessarily very religious. But there was also a certain spiritual redemption to what they did. They could be on occasion rowdy and combative and they had their allotted share of human flaws, of which they themselves were often all too aware. But whatever they had done wrong the night before, the next morning when they were at the firehouse, they were able to take extra meaning from their lives, and to find some form of redemption because of the nature of the job, because of the risks they take for complete strangers.

Scholz believed that outsiders would never be able to understand who these men were and what they did unless they understood the job for what it is—nothing less than a calling. Jim Gormley, now captain of Engine 40, completely agreed. “We all have our daily conversation with God,” Gormley once said. “Do we do what we do for God? No. But it's there, the religious part, just the same. We do it for people. We do it for the sense of rightness. And we like doing it, like the life because we're never ashamed of what we do.”

The men are loath to talk about the daily risks, even with their wives. “People think they know what we do, but they don't really know what we do,” says 40/35 veteran Ray Pfeifer of the real danger, of being in a burning building when there is a collapse and the exits seem blocked. It is not unusual for a firehouse to lose a man to a fire periodically. And there are those awful times, graven in everyone's minds, when there is a truly devastating fire, when the Fates are more powerful than all the skills and resources of the firefighters. This happened in Astoria, Queens, on Father's Day 2001, when a fire broke out in a hardware store, cans of paint and chemicals exploded, and three men died.

All firemen in all firehouses tend to think that theirs is the best of all firehouses, a chosen place, one with the highest sense of duty, with the toughest mission, and the greatest sense of élan, but it is true that the men of 40/35, located as they are in midtown Manhattan, feel this even more passionately than most. It is considered an unusually strong house, filled with veterans who do not want to transfer out. Content to remain firemen, they often do not want to take the exam to become officers. This is not just because they like being firemen and like passing on their unique traditions to the younger men, but also because they love this particular house; if they became officers, they would have to go elsewhere. As such, 40/35 has an unusually high sense of cohesion and loyalty. When a young fireman named Kevin Shea did so well during his three years of rotating among firehouses that he was allowed to choose his house, he did a good deal of checking around and was told by a number of senior people to try 40/35. “It's the hidden jewel in Manhattan,” Captain Gary Ruiz, a battalion chief told him, recalling that his seven years there, before he had been promoted, were among his happiest as a fireman.

About fifty men work at 40/35 in shifts, eleven at any given time. Eight of the men are officers—two captains and six lieutenants. The house contains both engine and ladder (or truck—when the firehouse terminology is written out, it is Engine 40 and Ladder 35; when it is spoken among the firemen, it is always 40 Engine and 35 Truck). By tradition and assigned role, it is the truck that finds the fire in a given building, and whose men search for any survivors and get them out of the building; the men on the engine pump the water, attack the fire, and finally put it out. The rivalry between truck and engine and the competition over whose role is more important and who are the
real
firemen are constant, and given the raucous nature of firehouse humor (if firefighting was easy, goes the joke, the cops would do it), sharply edged. The engine men like to refer to the truckees as firemen's helpers. Once a year the firehouse has Medal Day, and, the engine men say, most of the medals are inevitably be-stowed upon truckees because they are the ones who do most of the rescuing. “Privately we call it Truck Appreciation Day,” says Pfeifer, a 40 Engine guy. “We feel they really deserve the medals because we're so busy putting out the fires and having all the real fun, so they ought to get something to compensate.”

The truckees say that all engine men are terrible cooks, that the engines get lost all the time, and cannot find a fire without the help of the truck. Because of that, they can never go anywhere alone. Besides, the truckees note, since the engine men have to get down low to fight a fire, sometimes crawling once they're inside a building to get under the heat, all engine men are short and stubby. To which counters Pfeifer, firemen are selected for their different roles—engine or truck—when they're still at the academy. “The doctor comes in with a stethoscope and he checks out the young fireman's heartbeat, and if it's strong, a real
thump-thump-thump
, then you go to the engine. But if it's fainter, something of a
pitter-patter
, then it's to the truck.”

No one did the engine-truck humor more caustically than Bruce Gary. Truckees were, in his vernacular, Big Dumb Truckees, or BDTs. Once last year Ladder 35 had had to cover for Ladder 15, down on South Street, which was out on a run. It was not a trip the men had wanted to make, and nothing had gone well. The call had come late in the day, all of their plans for the evening were obviously shot. It had been a bad enough day anyway, but, as they were leaving, they heard Bruce Gary's voice as he sang over the firehouse's loudspeaker system his own version of the old song “South Street”: “Where do all the dummies go? … On South Street, on South Street …”

One of the things that the men particularly like about 40/35 is that they have to deal with a variety of fires—fires in tenements (a few remain), fires in brownstones (generally considered easier), and, of course, fires in high-rises. There are not as many fires as the men working in ghetto neighborhoods have to contend with—sometimes during what are now known as the “war years” of the late '60s, '70s, and even '80s, the ghetto firemen were called out on as many as three or four real jobs a day—but skyscraper fires are infinitely more dangerous and harder to control because the buildings are so much bigger.

Everything is more complex and more dangerous in mid-Manhattan. Firemen who work in the outer boroughs like to think that Manhattan firemen have it easy, that it is a plush assignment, and occasionally someone from one of the boroughs who has never struggled with a high-rise fire will talk about Manhattan's being a firemen's retirement community, because there is less action. But the men at 40/35 talk as readily about the men from the boroughs who rotate in to fill a slot and who, sampling their first high-rise fire, are ready to leave the next day—they want no part of it. Mid-Manhattan, says Jim Gormley, “is a carnivore. It doesn't eat often, but when it does, it eats hungrily.”

Gormley is the son of a fireman—his father, Hubert Gormley, had been a Deputy Borough Commissioner in New York—and his sense of the dangers of Manhattan, where buildings seem to be ever higher, is acute. The worst fire Jim Gormley ever caught at 40/35 was in January 1997. It was known in the neighborhood as the Lionel Hampton Fire, because it started at the famed vibraphone player's apartment, at Sixty-fourth Street and Columbus Avenue, only three blocks from the firehouse. The Hampton fire had all the right ingredients to end in real tragedy: Hampton lived on the twenty-eighth floor of a forty-three-story building, it was a violently windy day, the windows in the apartment had either popped or been broken because the heat was so great, the door to the apartment had been left open, and the materials in the apartment were highly flammable. In short, the apartment turned into nothing less than a giant flue, Gormley, then still a lieutenant, recalled. The Ninth Battalion chief, Joe Grosso, known among the men as “The High-Rise Drifter” because he looked like Clint Eastwood, took one look at the fire and asked for all the help he could get. Over 200 firefighters from more than fifty units responded. The heat was so intense that the firemen could not last long fighting it—it made them go through their air tanks too fast. Because of that, men had to be rotated in and out as quickly as possible. When Gormley first arrived, he saw Hampton, who was confined to a wheelchair, and his nurse in the lobby. Gormley got the keys to the apartment from the nurse and asked her if she had closed the door (thus limiting the spread of the fire), and she said yes; but when he got up to the twenty-eighth floor, it turned out she was wrong—the door was open, allowing the fire to draw with a ferocity all its own.

Gormley had never seen or heard anything like it before. He felt the terrible heat when he was still behind a closed door one floor below. The noise of the fire was a giant, terrifying roar, like a gargantuan engine churning at fever pitch. Down on the street, there were connections for two hoses, and they poured more than 500 gallons of water a minute into the fire, but the fire was so hot that the water turned into steam just a few feet from the nozzle. It took firefighters twenty-four minutes to battle the fifty-four feet from the staircase to the fire, even with the two water lines. It was the first time in his long career that Gormley thought,
This is it, this is the one that I might not make it back from
. He and his men did their first tour, went downstairs and got fresh air tanks, then did a second. Two young women were working in an office on the same floor as the Hampton apartment, and somehow Stan Sussina, a fireman from Rescue One, an elite Special Operations Command unit, managed to save them. Sussina was lowered down by rope from the twenty-ninth floor, crashed through the window, placed breathing masks on the women, and got them out. Miraculously, though twenty-seven people were injured, no one was killed at the Lionel Hampton Fire. For months after, however, when Jim Gormley thought about the fire, he could still feel the heat on his face, legs, and back.

The schedules for that fateful morning, September 11, 2001, are still on the two house blackboards, unchanged, exactly as they were written out. They stand as if time had stopped on that terrible day—which in some ways it has for Engine Company 40, Ladder Company 35. On top of one blackboard someone had written “CARRY A CHOCK!!” Then the blackboards give the slots and the names:

If any one moment brought home the sheer human horror of that day, it was when John Morello, father of Vincent Morello, one of the men from 40/35, found out what had happened. In the early-morning hours of Wednesday, September 12, John, a retired battalion chief, was still trying to determine what had happened to Vincent, who was listed as being on Ladder 35 and was missing. Communications with fire authorities had been terrible; the city's Emergency Command Center in 7 World Trade Center had been destroyed early in the terrorist attack, and any real information had been sketchy.