He was pretty annoyed, particularly when I said we had just filled the tanks the first part of the week.”
“What’s he want done about it?”
“He’s done it already-called City Gas and Oil; they’re sending over a truck to pump out the tanks and fill them with water to force out the explosive vapors.”
“Better call Greenwall and tell him the truck will be coming through his barricades. North entrance again.”
It wasn’t very likely that the fire would ever reach the basement, but there was no sense in sitting on a time bomb, either. He had noticed the spillage and the fumes in the basement when he had parked………. Oh, crap!”
He turned and ran for the escalator stairs. Garfunkel had just finished giving instructions to the fireman at the relay station. He saw Barton forcing his way through the crowds and ran after him. “Mr. Barton, what the hell’s wrong?”
In the lower lobby, Barton noted that the restaurant was filled; the hysteria and,frightened looks had given way to a quiet murmur of conversations and discussions of what to do next. A few dozen of the tenants were leaning against the lobby wall of the restaurant, sipping coffee and eating sandwiches and stale doughnuts. The atmosphere was changed now, Barton thought. The survivors were beginning to enjoy the thrill and store up memories for reminiscing later. Barton ran past them to the stairway leading to the parking garage. He plunged down them, Garfunkel after him. “Where’s the car hiker, Dan?”
Garfunkel bellowed, “Hey, Joe!” The young parking lot attendant came out of his booth, looking scared.
“Look, Mr. Garfunkel, how bad is it upstairs? I’ve been afraid to leave, but I don’t know a damn thing about what’s going on. How bad’s the fire?”
“It may get worse. A truck should be here any minute from City Gas and Oil to pump out the tanks.”
The attendant blanched. “It’s getting closer?”
“It’s precautionary,” Barton interrupted. “We want to get the cars out, too. How many down here?” The floor looked half empty, probably because of the holidays, he thought.
“Seventy-three, Mr. Barton. Not counting my own.”
“How many car jockeys do you know personally whom you could get over here in a matter of minutes?”
“Maybe half a dozen. The weather’s lousy and the clubs in the area aren’t doing any business.”
“Call them up and ask them to come over. I want all these cars out of here. as soon as possible.” It was a remote chance, but if a fire started, the presence of the cars would be as bad as the full tanks themselves.
“Where’ll we take ‘em?”
“There’s a city garage at Elm and Taylor, three blocks away. I’ll have the police call and make the arrangements.
Turn your tickets over to the garageman there.”
He started back upstairs, Garfunkel trailing him.
Mario Infantino was waiting for him at the communications desk, looking tired and grim. Barton felt his stomach begin to knot. Now would come all the questions he was afraid to ask and all the answers he didn’t want to hear. & “How bad is it, Mario?”
“A lot worse than I thought it would be. You might as well have sprayed your walls with kerosene. So far as we can tell now, it started in a storeroom stocked with solvents and waxes. Once it got a foothold, there wasn’t any stopping it.”
“Casualties?”
“One of my men dead, three to the hospital-smoke inhalation and burns. Two tenants, maybe more, we don’t know yet. Smoke may have caught a lot of them while they were sleeping. Carbon monoxide builds up slowly; you don’t notice it. I understand one of your maintenance people is in the hospital with a coronary.” He shrugged.
“That’s all so far.”
Barton forced himself to ask the next question. “What about fighting the fire itself?”
Infantino hesitated. “A lot depends on luck. The seventeenth floor is gutted but it’s also pretty much burned itself out. We should be able to contain it on eighteen.
A lot of windows were broken on both floors; that vented the fire and helped a lot. For a while I thought we might have to hole through the nineteenth floor and try and get at it from above, as well as venting it. We don’t have to do that now. There’s been a lot of smoke dammage-it’ll probably cost Curtainwall a fortune just to clean its own offices.”
“That’s Leroux’s worry. What about the floors above?”
Infantino seemed a little less certain. “I haven’t been able to spare the men to check all the floors. There’s been smoke as high as the thirty-fifth, probably much higher depending on what side of the building you’re talking about. The wind’s from the north so that side of the building is relatively free from smoke. One thing for sure, both the fire and the smoke spread fast. The building’s like Swiss cheese, Craig. There’re so many poke throughs in the floors and the walls, I don’t think there’s an effective fire barrier in the entire structure.”
“The hVAC system should have changed over to exhaust once smoke -was detected,” Barton said slowly.
It couldn’t be that bad, he thought desperately.
“A lot of things should have happened that didn’t, Craig. Part of your system did exhaust-but only part.
One of your maintenance men can fill you in. We also should have received a smoke and fire warning at department headquarters automatically. We didn’t; the alarm was phoned in.” He caught the expression on Barton’s face. “Nobody’s blaming you, Craig-you didn’t build it.”
It had started when he had noticed the cladding around the elevator banks, Barton thought. Since then, the building had been full of surprises for him, all of them unpleasant.
“You said the smoke spread fast and so did the fire. Even if the hVAC system was only partly operating, at least it was either shut down or on exhaust. How come the fire itself spread so quickly?”
A fireman interrupted with a message for Infantino.
He scanned it, then turned briefly back to Barton. “It depends on the fire load. On the seventeenth floor, it was exceptionally heavy-solvents and waxes in the storeroom, an interior decorating shop jammed with flammable draperies and upholstery materials, a number of very posh offices that were decorated like tinderboxes. What you end up with is a fire load that makes for a lot of smoke and a very hot fire.” He turned toward the elevator bank. “Be back in a few minutes-I’ll have to know about the fire loading on the other floors.”
Barton was silent for a moment after Infantino left then said: “Do we have any kind of a building census, Dan?”
“Not one that would be worth a damn.”
“What about the commercial floors?”
“One of the cleaning women is missing; the others got out. So far as we know, aLex Hughes who works in your Credit Union never left the building, though it’s possible he got out during the height of the confusion. And there’s one of the partners in Today’s Interiors, Ian Douglas.
He tipped us about the fire to begin with. We have no record of him leaving the building, either.”
Today’s Interiors was on seventeen, where the fire had started, Barton recalled. The upholstery and decorating materials that Infantino had mentioned were in his shop.
Douglas probably didn’t make it.
“Anybody else?”
“One of the maintenance men-Krost. Nobody knows where he is, either.”
Jernigan snorted. “Nobody ever does.”
“There’s also a John Bigelow, a veep for Motivational Displays.
We’ve been trying to raise their executive suite by telephone. He apparently was entertaining a client back there; he called Donaldson to have a refrigerator fixed. So far, nobody answers. It’s a couple of floors above the fire floor so maybe he got out, too, though we have no record.”
“What about the evacuation of the residential tenants?”
Jernigan shook his head. “It’s been one mother of a mess, pretty disorganized, as you can see. Nobody really knew what to do including me. None of us were ever told. But I think we got almost everybody out. The firemen got Mrs. Halvorsen and her husband down.”
Barton vaguely remembered them-an elderly couple.
