Report from Engine Co. 82 (3 page)

It was four days later that Benny Carroll asked me, “Did you hear about the fire we had the other night, the one where the
two kids were killed?”

“I was there, Benny, don’t you remember?”

“I don’t mean it that way, dummo, I mean about the investigation.”

“No. Tell me about it.”

“Well, the marshals were here last night, and told the story. It seems that the landlord wanted that apartment vacant, and
he knew that the people wouldn’t be there that night. So he hired some guy to torch the place. The guy then hires the three
kids to light it up, and when they were in there spreading the gasoline the guy threw a match in and locked the door on them.
They’re looking for the guy now for a double murder. It looks like the kid Captain Frimes got out is gonna live.”

Benny was going to continue with the story, but the bells came in. Now I am on the back step of the pumper, and thinking that
it wasn’t ironic justice at all. It’s what always happens in the South Bronx. The real devil gets away without a burn, and
the children of the South Bronx are the victims.

M
Y
name is Dennis Smith, and I’m a New York City fireman—one of New York’s bravest. “New York’s bravest,” that’s what the writers
of newspaper editorials call us. There are almost eight million people in this city, and twelve thousand of us are firemen.
We are different from the rest of the people who work in this town: bankers, ad-men, truck drivers, secretaries, sellers and
buyers, all have a high degree of assurance that they will return home from work in the evening the same way they left in
the morning—on their feet. A little tired perhaps, but on their feet. Firemen are never sure. When a fireman’s wife kisses
him as he leaves for work, she makes a conscious wish that he will return to her. She hopes that she will not have to make
those fast, desperate arrangements for a baby-sitter so that she can visit him in the hospital, and each time the doorbell
rings she hopes that there will not be a chief, a chaplain, and a union official there, all coming to say kind things about
her husband, how good he was, how dedicated, how brave.

I’m part of Engine Company 82. The firehouse I work out of is on Intervale Avenue and 169th Street in a ghetto called the
South Bronx. Of the three biggest ghettos in New York City, the South Bronx is the least talked about. You’ve heard of Harlem,
Adam Clayton Powell came from Harlem; and you may have heard of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Shirley Chisholm comes from Bedford-Stuyvesant.
Nobody you’ve ever heard of comes from the South Bronx.

Around the corner from the firehouse is the Forty-first Precinct House. It is the busiest police station in the city. There
are more homicides per square mile in this precinct than anywhere in the United States, more drug traffic, more prostitution.

There are four companies working out of the firehouse on Intervale Avenue. Engine 82 and Engine 85 do the hose work in the
district. Ladder Company 31 and Tactical Control Unit 712 do the rescue work, the ladder work, and the ax work.

Until recently my company and Engine 85 responded to many of the same alarms. Then, two years ago, we responded a record number
of times. Engine 85 went out 8,386 times in a twelve month period. Ladder Company 31 went to 8,597 alarms, and my company,
Engine 82, went to 9,111. The Fire Department saw that a change was needed, and arranged that engines 82 and 85 would not
respond to the same alarms. The plan worked. Last year my company’s responses dropped to 6,377, and Engine 85’s to 5,012.
But the plan worked only for the engine companies; Ladder Company 31’s responses increased to 8,774. Another plan was then
devised, and Tactical Control Unit 712 was created to respond only within the high incidence hours between three in the afternoon
and one in the morning. The four companies on Intervale Avenue are now each averaging 700 runs a month. It is safe to say
that ours is the busiest firehouse in the city—and probably the world.

An average of eight firemen die each year while doing their duty in New York City. Only six died last year, and I don’t want
to think about how many will die this year, or next. Almost five thousand firemen were injured in the line of duty last year.
The injuries cost the city 65,000 days in medical leaves.

There is a sign in the kitchen of my firehouse. It is inconspicuously hung, and it reads with a proper amount of ambiguity:
THIS COULD BE THE NIGHT!
We don’t talk about the hazards of the trade in the firehouse. There is no sense in talking about what we hope never becomes
a reality for us, and for our families. It’s all part of the job, and like committed Calvinists we accept what’s written in
the cards for us.

Just yesterday a man was killed. He was assigned to Rescue Company 1, and he was working on the roof of a burning warehouse.
The roof had been weakened by the fire, and it gave in. The man fell through the roof and into an air shaft. He passed eight
floors before he hit the bottom.

I was sitting in the kitchen of the firehouse when the bells came in. First five short rings, a pause, five more, a pause,
another five, another pause, and the final five. Signal 5-5-5-5 has a special meaning to us. Put the flag at half mast, and
listen to the department radio for the message.

There is a five-by-five cubicle at the front of the firehouse. Inside the small partition there is a man writing the signal
in the department company journal. He turns the volume of the department radio up as we gather around it. This is the man
assigned housewatch duty, and he knows what he has to do. After recording the signal, he moves to the outside of the firehouse
and brings the colors to half-mast. He returns to the watch-desk and prepares to write the message in the company journal.
His face is pensive, and he is asking himself the same question we all ask ourselves: I wonder if I know the guy?

The radio begins to squawk the message, and the housewatch-man begins to write.
“The signal 5-5-5-5 has been transmitted, and the message is as follows: It is with deep regret that the department announces
the death of Fireman 1st Grade Edward Tuite which occurred while operating at Box 583, at 1125 hours this date.”

None of us there knew the man personally, but we all felt the loss. We went about our work for the rest of the day without
talking about it.

I had a friend we don’t talk about either. His name was Mike Carr, and he was an upstanding kind of a guy. He was the union
delegate of Engine 85. Only a few days before his death I had mentioned to him that we should clean out an old locker and
use it for our union business. It was a shabby old locker, but it could be used to store medical forms, work contracts, information
bulletins, and other union material. Mike thought it was a good idea, and within the hour he had the locker cleared and had
begun painting it. Anything that had the smallest benefit for firemen would interest Mike, and he worked untiringly for the
men in the firchouse.

Then a nine-year-old boy reached up and pulled the alarm-box handle. Kids do this a lot in the South Bronx. His friends giggled,
and they all ran up the street to watch the fire engines come. The box came in on the bells—2787—Southern Boulevard and 172nd
Street. Mike pulled himself up on the side step of the apparatus. The heavy wheels turned up Intervale Avenue, the officer’s
foot pressing hard on the siren. At Freeman Street the apparatus turned right, and Mike lost his grip. He spun from the side
step like a top. Marty Hannon and Juan Moran jumped off the apparatus even before it came to a screeching stop. There was
blood all over. They could see that Mike had stopped breathing. Marty cleared some of the blood away with a handkerchief,
and began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He told me all he remembers of those agonizing minutes was the Battalion Chiefs voice
blaring over the Department radio:
“Transmit signal ten ninety-two for Box 2787. Malicious false alarm.”

The following day the city’s newspapers ran the story stating that the Uniformed Firefighters Association was offering a thousand
dollars reward for information leading to the arrest of the person who pulled the box. That afternoon a nine-year-old boy
was led through the heavy iron doors of the Forty-first Precinct House. News spreads quickly in the South Bronx, and the boy’s
friends told their parents, who called the cops.

While the boy was being questioned at the police station, people from the Hoe Avenue Association, a neighborhood action group,
painted alarm box number 2787 black, and hung a sign around it. The sign was in two parts, the top half in Spanish, and the
bottom in English. It read:
A FIREMAN WAS KILLED WHILE COMING HERE TO A FALSE ALARM.
Before the paint was dry another false alarm was pulled at the same box, and the men of Engine 85 took the sign down.

Mike had two sons, one seven, the other nine—two brave and frightened boys now walking on either side of their mother, walking
slowly behind a shining red fire engine that moves between endless rows of their school chums, and hundreds of firemen. They
look up at the flag-draped casket on top of the fire engine and feel proud that their daddy is the cause of all this cereaiony,
but they are also frightened because they are old enough to realize that there is a tomorrow, and it is going to be different
without him.

The young boy in the police station is frightened too, but in a different way. He is confused, and wonders why everyone is
so upset. All the kids pull false alarms. At least the kids he pals around with do. He came to this country from Puerto Rico
five years ago, and the kids on the block taught him that you have to make your own fun in the South Bronx. You can play in
the abandoned buildings, they told him, or on the towering trash heaps in the backyards, or in musty, rat-infested cellars.
There used to be a boys' club in the neighborhood, but it burned down and never reopened. He learned, too, that pulling the
handle of a fire-alarm box causes excitement, and a certain pleasure that comes with being responsible for all the noise,
the sirens, the air horns. Why is everyone so upset?

I know why I am upset. My company alone, Engine 82, responded to over two thousand false alarms last year. Many of them were
caused by kids like this. Kids with no place to go, nothing to do. Kids whose parents never talk to them, never have a surprise
gift for them, or a warm squeeze. Kids whose real meaning in the family is that they symbolize a few extra dollars in the
welfare check each month. Kids whose parents did not know anything about contraception to begin with, and never learned to
love what they did not ask for. Kids born of poverty and ignorance into a system of deprivation.

What do you do with a nine-year-old boy who has pulled a false alarm that has resulted in a death? It is easy to say that
the death was unfortunate, but peripheral to the crime of pulling a false alarm. It is even easier to say that the perpetrator
is only nine years old, and so should be made aware of the severity of his actions merely by being given over to the social
services for guidance care. This, in fact, is what happened to the child.

I do not advocate cutting off the child’s hand, but I do think he should have been institutionalized for a year. I understand
the sad social conditions in which this child has been forced to live, but I have lost sympathy for the cry that poverty founded
the crime, not the boy. Anyone found guilty of pulling a malicious false alarm should be sent to jail for a year, or, if under
sixteen, to a reform school. But, in the eight years I have been a fireman, I have seen only one man jailed, and I have responded
to thousands of alarms that proved to be maliciously false.

In the city of New York last year, firemen responded to 72,060 false alarms—an average of 197 daily. Yet, the courts and the
Police Department do not look on the pulling of a false alarm as a serious offense. Few are arrested, fewer are found guilty,
and fewer still are punished.

Besides Mike Carr, I know of two other firemen who were killed en route to false alarms in New York City in the past eight
years. But, it is not just firemen who are victimized by false alarms. Often while firemen are answering a false alarm at
one end of their district, a serious fire breaks out at the other end. Time is the most important factor in fighting fires.
I can remember many fires where, had we been there a minute or two sooner, we probably would have saved someone’s life. Three
hundred and seven people died in New York City fires last year. Statistics are not available, but you can be sure that some
of those deaths could have been avoided if firemen had not been answering a false alarm minutes before.

Mike Carr is dead, and his widow will have to make it on just half the salary she was used to. It’s strange, but had Mike
come through the accident with a disabling injury, he would have been pensioned off with three-fourths of his salary. His
wife would have been happy to have him alive. But he died, and she gets half his salary to support his family. The same will
go to the widow of the man who fell through the roof yesterday.