Details the heroic efforts of the Worcester, Massachusetts Fire Department fighting a horrific three-alarm blaze on December 3, 1999.

3000 Degrees

The True Story of a Deadly Fire and the Men Who Fought ItBy Sean Flynn

Listen & Live Audio

Copyright © 2002 Sean Flynn
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781885408839

Chapter One

The smoke banked down like bolts of black velvet, heavy sheets curling and rolling and folding together. A man could lose perspective in such a cloud, the vapor so dense and oily that it carried a physical weight, like tar, hot and sticky and misted into the air. Through the plastic of his face mask, Lt. Mike McNamee could see a dirty orange glow in the haze, brighter when the smoke puffed one way on a searing updraft, then dimmer when the fog closed again. If he trusted his eyes, which he didn't, the flames might have been forty feet away, or sixty, or maybe only twenty. So he trusted his skin, believed in the warmth pushing through his turnout coat. He was down on all fours, crawling across a wood floor, staying low, ducking under the worst of the heat. Down there, in the coolest inches, he figured the temperature was only 125 degrees, maybe 150. He guessed the fire, burning at the back end of a warehouse storeroom eighty feet deep and half as wide, was about forty-five feet away.

"Lieutenant, you wanna open it up?"

The nozzle man, a lump in the dark barely an arm's reach away, shouted the words. Every man in a firefight had to shout, throw his voice through the mask on his face and the droningthunder of the flames. The sound was muffled, almost slurred to an unpracticed ear.

"Not yet," Mike hollered back. "Let's keep moving. Get up close where we can hit it directly."

There were three of them, creeping across the warehouse floor and dragging a hose two and a half inches in diameter loaded with almost four hundred pounds of water. The nozzle man in front and another firefighter in the rear flanked Mike, the ranking officer that night in 1981 on Engine 4 out of the Worcester Fire Department's Park Avenue station. Mike was young for a lieutenant, just a few months past his thirty-first birthday. With his shallow chin and thin-framed spectacles, he sometimes looked like an English professor, which is what he had wanted to be before he dropped out of college. He had a reputation as being mildly bookish anyway, a man who studied fire, the alchemy of oxygen and heat and fuel, and the choreographed chaos of fire suppression: how and when to attack and vent and retreat. But he also had the sturdy build of a fireman, a solid frame conditioned by years humping up smoky tenement stairs and clambering over flaming roofs with seventy pounds of gear on his back. In almost nine years since he'd joined the fire department in his hometown in the middle of Massachusetts, Mike had helped put out more than a thousand blazes, which wasn't an unusual number for a man working that job in that place in those years.

Worcester in the 1970s and early 1980s was a withered industrial city, a factory town abandoned by factory owners and factory workers. Below downtown, just beyond the interstate overpass, old warehouses stood hollow, their insides gutted except for the trash and scraps that could feed a renegade spark. The hills above the Blackstone Valley were lined with sagging wood-framed triple-deckers, tinder-dry and stacked dense as cordwood. The Main South neighborhood was a sprawling slum of deteriorating tenements and abandoned storefronts. And for most of the decade all of it was on fire, the whole city burning lot by lot and night by night. Frayed wires spit sparks onto carpets and curtains, corroded black pipes leaked gas into antiquated kitchens, drunks passed out with Marlboros between their arthritic fingers. Pyromaniacs, half-crazed or half-witted or both, set light to trash cans and gas station bathrooms and flophouse porches and dry stands of grass. What didn't burn by accident or for sport burned for cash. Arson was epidemic, landlords and investors charring the last scraps of profit from decrepit properties, a depressing number of which were worth more as heavily insured ruins than as cheaply rented apartments or vacant commercial space. Some shifts, it seemed all of Worcester might burn to the ground. In the worst years, an engine crew would routinely fight three fires in a single night, and five wasn't uncommon.

After a decade on the frontlines, a flaming warehouse wasn't a particularly formidable foe. Potentially dangerous, sure. But predictable, not exceptionally different from a hundred other skirmishes Mike had been through. He knew the best attack was in close. A two-and-a-half-inch line sprayed out roughly 250 gallons every minute, enough to wash the life out of most medium-size fires. But if the stream missed the flames, if it fell short and hit nothing but superheated air, all that liquid would atomize, instantly mushroom into steam, blow back and down in a scalding vapor. So he ordered his men, nearly blinded by the smoke and hobbled by the weight of their gear and the hose, to keep inching forward. Another fifteen feet, twenty at the most.

Mike was judging the distance to the flames not just by the heat but also by his fresh memory of the building. This was the second time that night Engine 4, along with three other engines, two ladder trucks, and the rescue squad-the normal complement sent to a working fire-had been dispatched to Jacques Street, a short block of squat brick warehouses and machine shops along the tracks of the Providence and Worcester Railroad. The first alarm for 82 Jacques Street came in just after dinner, when the men in the Park Avenue station were wiping the last drops of gravy from their mustaches and splashing their plates into a sink of sudsy water. Three tones sounded, abrupt and abrasive, electrified burps. Then the dispatcher's deadpan voice from the speaker bolted to the wall: "Engine 2, Engine 4, Engine 5, Engine 10, Ladder 4, Scope 3, Rescue 1, Car 4. Striking Box 1575 for a reported structure fire at 82 Jacques Street."

A dozen men working the third tour out of Park Avenue, four each on Aerial Scope 3 and Engines 4 and 10, were moving before the dispatcher started repeating the assignments, hustling into their turnout gear. Most of them pulled on long boots that rose to the middle of their thighs, just above where the bottom edge of their coats would fall. A few, including Mike, stepped through the legs of newfangled fire-resistant pants and into shorter boots. In less than twelve seconds, every man was on his designated truck. The officers took the seats on the passenger sides of the cabs, where they could yank the air-horn cords and toggle the sirens on and off. On the ride south along Park Avenue, each man except the driver slipped his arms through a fire-resistant coat hung on the back of his seat, the sleeves already laced through the straps of an air tank. When Mike's boots hit the pavement outside the warehouse three minutes after the first tone, all of his men were ready to square off against an inferno.

But there wasn't much of a fire left. When the first flames heated the air to 165 degrees or so, tiny metal plugs melted in the sprinkler heads plumbed through the building, opening the spigots and dropping a heavy shower on the fire. The only thing left for the firemen to do was shut off the main valve to the sprinkler system, soak a few embers, and then track down the owner of the building to tell him to replace his spent sprinkler heads and board up his doors and windows. A quick knockdown. Thirty minutes later, they were back at the station, scrubbing the dinner dishes.

If the fire had been accidental, then the sprinklers had saved the building and protected the men who came with their...