July 1, 2000, 12:00 AM
The Perfect Fire
It started with a candle in an abandoned warehouse. It ended with temperatures above 3,000 degrees and the men of the Worcester Fire Department in a fight for their lives.
It's not so much a bell, really, as an electronic horn, short and shrill. When it goes off, firefighters freeze and listen for the sound that comes next. Usually, only words follow. "Engine 1," the dispatcher might say--or "Engine 8" or "Ladder 5," but only one truck--before reciting an address and a task. One tone signals a medical run or some minor emergency, like going out to stabilize a car-crash victim or a coronary case until an ambulance arrives, breaking a toddler out of a locked-up Taurus, or squirting water on a flaming car. Milk runs.
Sometimes, maybe every fifth time, a second tone will follow the first. Two tones is more serious, perhaps a fire alarm ringing somewhere, probably triggered by nothing more than a stray wisp of cigarette smoke or a burp of electrical current jiggling a circuit. Dispatch sends two engines and one ladder truck for those, picking whichever units are available and close.
Even rarer is three tones. Three tones means a reported structure fire, a house or a condo or a strip mall already blowing smoke into the sky. Three tones means blazing orange heat, black smoke, and poison gas; sirens and lights and steam and great torrents of water; men ripping into walls with axes and long metal spears, smashing windows and cutting shingles from roofs, teetering on ladders a hundred feet long. It doesn't always turn out that way, but three tones, at least, offers the chance of action. Firefighters love a triple.
Late autumn had been a slow stretch for the men working under Mike McNamee, the gray-haired forty-nine-year-old chief of Group II, North End District, Worcester Fire Department. They had spent their shifts cooking and cleaning and sleeping, interrupted only by sporadic milk runs and false alarms. The night of December 3, 1999, was quiet enough for McNamee to tend to his bureaucratic duties, riding shotgun in a Ford Expedition to the far-flung stations, retrieving vacation requests from the rank and file. Once his aide, George Zinkus Jr., had wheeled him to all six stations in the district, they would return to Central Station, where dinner, twenty-five pounds of beef, was roasting in the oven.
Thirteen minutes after six o'clock, McNamee's Expedition--or Car 3, as it is officially known--was on Clark Street, in the northern reaches of the city, Zinkus steering it toward the Greendale Station, when the first tone sounded. McNamee cocked his head toward the radio. A second tone, then a third. "Striking box 1438, Franklin and Arctic, for a fire at 266 Franklin," the dispatcher deadpanned. "Engine 1, Engine 6, Engine 12, Engine 13, Ladder 1, Ladder 5, Rescue 1, Car 3."
McNamee and Zinkus stared at each other, brows arched, eyes wide. "That's a bad building," McNamee said. He let out a breath, said it again. "Bad building."
Two-sixty-six Franklin. Everyone in Worcester knew that building, if not by the address then by the shadow it had cast over downtown longer than anyone could remember. It was a hulk of brick and mortar rising eighty-five feet above an old industrial park immediately east of Interstate 290, eight elevated lanes that cut through the heart of the city. Civilians knew that building because of the giant words painted in white on the wall and underlined by the freeway: Worcester cold storage and warehouse co. Firefighters knew that building, dreaded it, because it sat there like a colossal chimney. No windows interrupted the endless rows of brick, save for a few tiny panes on the second floor, which meant there were no easy vents to bleed out heat and smoke and, if things got really hairy, no obvious escape hatches for anyone trapped inside. Hardly any of the firefighters had ever been in it, except for a few old-timers who'd cleaned up gas leaks or doused spot fires before the warehouse was abandoned in 1987 and, later, a captain named Robert A. Johnson, who got lost in a maze of meat lockers during a routine inspection. "Jesus," he had whispered to himself then. "We'd better never get a fire in here."
They would talk about it now and again the way firefighters will, guessing at a danger that might come to pass and, at the same time, hoping they won't be on duty if it does. Only two weeks earlier, driving through town in his gold Buick, McNamee had nudged his wife and pointed at Worcester Cold Storage. "You see that building?" he asked her, for no reason he can remember now. "It scares me. That building scares the &@#$ out of me."
AFTER CAPTAIN Johnson decided the beef had been roasted to a proper shade of pink, Paul Brotherton grabbed a knife from the rack above the sink in the Central Station kitchen and started carving it into neat, thin slices. For Brotherton, this was risky business. In five years on Rescue 1, pulling people (and, once, a parrot) out of fires, he'd never so much as twisted his ankle. But at the station, he could bust himself up good. He'd needed his hand sewn back together once after he lost control of a chopping knife in the kitchen, and he almost tanked his career when he slipped on a patch of ice in the back lot, landing so awkwardly and hard that he tore his thumb clean out of its socket. The doctors thought he might have to retire. Brotherton rehabilitated himself by playing video games with his sons.
Now he had Yogi growling at him. His given name is Steve Connole, but everyone calls him Yogi in homage to his bearish girth and bottomless gut, which once got him booted from an all-you-can-eat buffet before he'd had all he could eat. Yogi likes his meat in big pieces. "For chrissakes," he groused, his walrusy mustache curling with his snarl. "Cut it like a man, will ya? What's with the women's portions?"
"What are you?" Brotherton popped back. "The *&%@%' portion police?"
The first tone sounded before Yogi could answer. A second, then a third. "Striking box 1438, Franklin and Arctic..." And fifteen men were moving, stepping into their gear, before the next syllable came out. In three quick motions--step through the trousers and into one boot, then the other, pull up the pants and snap the suspenders over the shoulders--each man was half dressed for battle.
Yogi and four other men clambered onto Ladder 1; Brotherton piled into the back of Rescue 1 with Jerry Lucey, his partner for the night, and three others; and Captain Johnson, whom everyone calls Robert A., hoisted himself into the front passenger side of Engine 1.
The sirens were on as soon as the yellow doors to the garage bays opened. Ladder 1 turned left onto Central Street, the rescue and engine trucks right behind. They roared two blocks to Summer Street, turned right, and screamed into the rotary at Washington Square. Robert A. could see smoke blowing from the top of the warehouse, now less than an eighth of a mile away.
Seconds later, Robert A. hopped down from Engine 1 to the pavement, turned his face to the sky, and saw nothing but clear night air. Maybe his perspective, staring straight up a wall of bricks, was too steep to bring the smoke into view. Or maybe the wind had shifted, blowing everything over the back side of the building. Or maybe the old warehouse had sucked the entire cloud back inside, as if holding back a secret.
"What the @%#@ ?" Robert A. muttered to no one in particular. "Hey. Which @&%#%#' building's on fire?"
AT THE TURN OF THE LAST CENTURY, keeping a few thousand sides of beef from spoiling required an enormous amount of insulating materials, layered one on top of another, to hold in the chill generated by massive blocks of ice and the wheezing coils of primitive refrigeration systems. The brick walls for Worcester Cold Storage and Warehouse Company, then, were laid eighteen inches thick and coated on the inside with a half foot of cork infused with asphalt. Chicago Dressed Beef, down the block at 256 Franklin Street, was constructed in a similar fashion, part of a complex of eleven buildings that a Lithuanian immigrant named Max Jacobson built after settling in the BlackstoneRiver valley with his wife, Lena, in 1905.
As the years went by and the business changed hands, newer and better insulation was added. Polystyrene and polyurethane and Styrofoam, all derived from petroleum, were layered and sprayed over the cork and, in some spots, coated with a smooth laminate.
The building itself was shaped like a stout capital L, 150 feet on its long edge, along Franklin Street, and roughly 100 on the short side, parallel to I-290. A fire wall--solid brick punctured by a handful of fireproof doors--split the building in half where the base of the L met the spine, a line of demarcation drawn perpendicular to Franklin Street.
Inside, though, those dimensions and shapes were meaningless, lost to a jumble of narrow hallways and catacombed meat lockers. The doors were spring-loaded and heavy, designed to fall shut automatically, and the door handles were thick iron rings that nestled into round pockets, leaving the walls flush and smooth. One freezer might open into three others, all with identical doors. Even employees would get lost in Worcester Cold Storage, opening a wrong door that looked like the right door and every other door. Only the lower floors, where the forklifts operated, were different: At the top of the L, in the half of the building left of the fire wall, the first and second floors were open caverns, fifty feet deep and twice as wide, broken only by six cement columns, three on each side.
Chicago Dressed Beef closed in 1983. Worcester Cold Storage limped along for another four years before it, too, was emptied. The building was never completely abandoned, though. As late as April 1999, after firefighters drowned a minor blaze on the roof of an adjacent building, the city's Fire Prevention Unit complained that homeless people could easily find their way inside that building and Worcester Cold Storage, and ordered that both be more solidly secured. By June 7, the owner, a developer named Ding On "Tony" Kwan, had finally sealed the warehouse tight.
Thomas Levesque still figured out a way to get inside. He was a thirty-seven-year-old drifter with a history of mental illness, a veteran of Worcester's soup kitchens and homeless shelters. In the spring of 1999, he met Julie Ann Barnes, a waif with dirty-blond hair and hollow eyes who'd dropped out of WachusettRegionalHigh School after her sophomore year. She was nineteen when she became pregnant with Thomas's child. The two of them took their meals at the Mustard Seed, a soup kitchen, and spent their nights on the second floor of Worcester Cold Storage, minding Julie's cat and dog. Julie loved animals.
Their relationship was fluid at best, volatile at worst, imploding one day, rekindling the next. The night of December 3, they were officially broken up but still huddling together inside the warehouse against the chill. Thomas wanted to have sex. Julie didn't. They squabbled, then tussled. A candle, the only light they had in the meat locker where they were, tipped over. The wick brushed a pile of clothing. Orange flames began dancing across the cloth, higher and faster, then leaped to a pile of old papers. Thomas and Julie tried beating the fire to death, flailing at it with a pillow. Flushed with air, it only continued to spread. Then they gave up, making their way down a narrow stairway to the street. Once outside, they walked along Franklin Street and under the elevated highway to the Worcester Common Outlet, a mall where the music store has headsets attached to terminals so customers can sample new releases. Thomas and Julie each slipped a pair over their ears and listened to CDs.
They never reported the fire. It burned for nearly two hours before the first puffs of smoke pushed up four floors and out through the roof.
MIKE MCNAMEE AND GEORGE ZINKUS were running four minutes behind the rest of the crews, barreling south on the interstate, the Expedition following a rise in the pavement that brought it parallel to Worcester Cold Storage. At that point, the fire was only a one-alarm blaze, meaning only the initial response units--four trucks from Central Station and four from three other stations--had been dispatched. At 6:20, as Zinkus wheeled down an exit ramp and into Posner Square, McNamee eyed the plume of smoke seeping from the roof and considered how bad a building Worcester Cold Storage could be. He decided to strike a second alarm, calling the order over his radio. In fire stations across the city, three sharp tones sounded, followed by dispatch ordering two more engines and another ladder truck to the scene.
The first wave of firefighters was already attacking the building. Captain Mike Coakley and Bert Davis positioned Ladder 1 on Franklin Street, put the jacks down to stabilize the truck, and started stretching 110 feet of high-tensile aluminum ladder from a turntable on the back of the truck toward the roof. Yogi and his partner, John Casello, trotted down Franklin Street to their left, toward a pair of loading-dock doors. To simplify things in the chaos, firefighters reduce the contours of a building to the first four letters of the alphabet, starting with A for the front wall and moving clockwise around the structure. Yogi and Casello headed toward the AB corner, where they forced open two doors near the bottom of a stairwell. They made a quick sweep of the first floor, which was huge and empty and quiet, bounded at the far end by the brick fire wall. No sign of flames. They backtracked to the stairwell and climbed to the second floor, hustling up three short, twisting risers of black steel steps.
Other firefighters had followed them to the same loading-dock doors and were already piling up the stairs. Robert A. and one of his men went all the way to the top, spot-checking for fire at every landing, poking their heads in to look for flames, before forcing open a bulkhead to the roof. Four men from Rescue 1 were right behind. Lieutenant Dave Halvorsen and one of his men stopped at the third floor for a more thorough search. Paul Brotherton told Halvorsen that he and Jerry Lucey were going up to the roof with Robert A.
On the roof, the top of the fire wall poked up as a short parapet, cutting the building in half from the A wall to the C wall and promising to contain any fire to one side or the other. The problem was, no one knew which side the fire was on. Near the back, along the C wall close to the parapet, was a glass cubicle fifteen feet wide and fifteen feet deep, reinforced with wire mesh, that capped a double elevator shaft. It would make a fine vent. "Clean it out," Robert A. told Brotherton.
Every firefighter carries a tool. Some have hoses and ropes, but everyone else wields a piece of medieval hardware--a flat-head ax, for instance, or a Boston Rake, which looks like an old vaudeville hook, except it's made of solid iron and can rip out a plaster ceiling in three swift strokes. Brotherton's weapon of choice was a Haligan, a rod of hardened steel roughly the size of a baseball bat, with one end flattened into a two-pronged claw. The other end, a flat wedge that can slip between a door and a jamb to pry it open, is attached perpendicularly to the shaft. Next to that, also at a 90 degree angle to the shaft, is an adze, a pear-sized steel point that can puncture the most solid walls and doors.
Thirty-eight-year-old Jerry Lucey was carrying a flat-head ax. He and Brotherton destroyed the glass cap in seconds, smashing it to bits before Coakley and Davis even made it up the ladder to the roof. They still didn't know where the fire was, but they knew something was burning: Smoke pulsed out of the hole in fast, wispy streams.
At about the same time, down on the street, Bill McNeil, who runs an all-night diner just on the other side of I-290, grabbed a cop directing traffic. "Hey," he told the cop, "some homeless people live in there."
The message that there might be people inside was relayed over the fire-department radios. Brotherton and Lucey walked back across the roof to the AB stairs, tromped down one flight, and started searching the top floor for people. Routine. At 6:22, only the thinnest haze of smoke hung in the corridors. More than two dozen men were in the warehouse, looking either for homeless people or flames. Each man had a tank strapped to his back filled with oxygen compressed to forty-five hundred pounds per square inch--enough for thirty minutes of relaxed breathing, half as long humping through a burning building--and connected to a plastic face mask. But the air was so clear that no one had bothered to put his on.