He glanced around the lobby again. A young woman in a nightgown and a flannel robe was trying to fight her way back onto the residential express elevator; several firemen and a male tenant, probably her husband, restrained her. He knew from long experience what the story was. He searched the crowd for the police officer in charge, finally locating him by the phone booth at the cigar stand.
The officer hung up just as Infantino walked over.
“You the ranking police officer here?”
“That’s right-until a superior shows up. You?”
“Division Chief Mario Infantino; I’m operating chief here.”
The officer looked uncertain. “Chief Fuchs is here; wouldn’t he be in charge?”
“It’s been delegated to me; check with him if you want.
In the meantime, better set your barricades a block farther out in all directions-there’ll be glass and maybe masonry and aluminum panels dropping into the street.
You know where the chief of security for the building is?”
“He’s with some of the other building officials in their monitoring room. Want him?”
“So long as I know where he is; I’ll get hold of him later.” He nodded at the hysterical woman. “You’ll need more patrolmen to handle scenes like that, too; there may be others. I can’t detail firemen to do it.”
The woman was screaming hysterically: “Let me go, let me go! Oh God, he’s still up there!”
The police captain looked surprised. “I thought that was her husband standing next to her,” Infantino shook his head. “It probably is.
Chances are she’s hysterical because they’ve left a kid up there.
If they have three or four, in the rush to get them out they either miscount or lose track of them; somehow, they always think they’ve got them all together. We usually find them when it’s too late, hidden in closets or under blankets; if we go into a burning house or apartment and we know a kid has been left behind, that’s the first place we look.
It’s hell when you find them afterward.” He recalled the painful scene two years before when he and a man in his company had found two children in the second story of their gutted home. They had pulled pillowcases over their heads and crawled under the rug in their bedroom. They had died from smoke long before the fire had found their room.
A residential elevator on his left opened to discharge more tenants and several firemen. Some of the tenants were hacking badly from smoke inhalation. One of the firemen yelled, “Get a respirator over here!”
He was half carrying another fireman; heavy strings of dirty mucus streamed from the nostrils of the unconscious man, smearing on his turnout coat.
Infantino watched them fumble with the respirator a moment, then muttered to the police captain: “Get this lobby cleared as soon as you can; We’re going to be having a lot more of that.” He walked away, brushing past two Red Cross men in blue hard hats talking with several tenants and taking notes.
He found one of the building’s security guards, looking very young and very frightened, and had him act as escort to the security monitoring room. The room was already half full. Infantino introduced himself to the. chief of security and his assistant-Dan Garfunkel and Harry Jernigan; they both looked worn and strained. Garfunkel introduced a worried-looking chief of maintenance named Donaldson.
Garfunkel’s suit and face were smeared with smoke; Infantino guessed he had headed up the building crew that had tried to put out the fire with hand extinguishers. “Have you got a census of who’s left in the building?”
he asked.
Garfunkel shook his head, his face haggard. “No real way of knowing.
There are maybe half a dozen tenants unaccounted for from the commercial floors. As far as the residential tenants go-no idea.”
“Casualties?”
The security chief shook his head sadly. “Griff Edwards, senior engineer. He was with us when we first went up; it was too much for him. He’s in the hospital; doctors suspect a coronary. I haven’t had time to check back.”
“Where’s the building supervisor?”
“Vacation. His assistant went home this afternoon with the flu.
Griff was third in line.”
Infantino looked over at Donaldson. “What about your hVAC system?
Can we use it to exhaust smoke from the building?”
Donaldson looked sour. “The fans should have reversed automatically.
Two jammed, one with a motor burnout and another with frozen bearings.
The others are on exhaust.”
His face suddenly reddened with fury. “I told the bloody bastards it was cheap gear the moment I laid eyes on it!”
Infantino glanced around at the monitoring tubes. “Any way we can use these for anything?”
Garfunkel shrugged. “Don’t see how. They cover the lobby, the bank entrance, the Credit Union in National Curtainwall, and the restaurant lobby and sky lobby. The one for the Credit Union is out; the Union’s on the eighteenth floor.” He hesitated. “We have infrared personnel sensors set up in the stairwells. Several of them are gone, too, but just before one of them went, we detected some people in the south stairwell on seventeen.”
“How many?”
“Three, maybe more.”
The south stairwell, Infantino thought. The north stairwell would be relatively smoke free; the south stairwell … Well, good luck.
The crippled hVAC system would help keep it partly free of smoke-but only partly.
By now, three of the four battalion chiefs on duty had shown up and he turned his attention to them. “Where’ s Captain Verlaine?”
“On the seventeenth floor; he’s got his hands full,” a voice said.
Infantino turned toward the door. “It’s good to see you, Chief.”
Fuchs nodded. “Gentlemen, in case you’re not aware, Chief Infantino has complete charge of this operation. I know you’ll give him every cooperation, as will I. I’m not abandoning my own authority; I’ll be here all the time.
But Chief Infantino’s the best man for over-all command. I won’t hide my own disagreements with him in the past, but for the moment they’re irrelevant. It’s a serious fire-one of the worst our city has ever had-and we’re all here for the same reason-to knock it down.
Mario?” Fuchs retired to the back of the room. Infantino turned to Captain Miller, who had just taken over Engine Company 23.
“Any ideas on origins and fire load?”
“It looks like it started in a storeroom near the utility core on seventeen. Heavy load of solvents, cleaning fluids, and the like. It spread from there down the hall to an interior decorating shop; bolts of fabric, bales of polyurethane foam for upholstery. There was a lot more than the standard fire load on the rest of the floor.
Dropped ceilings on all the floors so the fire can spread unnoticed.
It’s a new building and consequently attracted a lot of wealthy commercial tenants, almost all of whom had their offices professionally decorated. You know the rule of thumb there: The more expensive the furnishings, the more flammable they usually are. The alarm system was apparently faulty and let the fire get a foothold. We have no record of it being logged in automatically at headquarters.”
“Present status, Chief Fleming?”
“Seventeen is completely gutted, a few fires on sixteen which were minor and quickly darkened down. Situation on eighteen is serious; it looks like it’s getting away from us. Smoke damage is heavy on nineteen,and above -we don’t know how far above except that smoke penetrated to the residential area.” He paused. “There’s going to be a lot of water damage on eighteen and seventeen and the floors immediately below.”
Infantino nodded. “I’ve ordered up another salvage company, as well as rescue and wrecking companies.
Chief Castro, what’s our own position?”
“We need more men. We’ve been concentrating on seventeen but nobody can work in there for longer than
