District chief made hard call

Clearing out saved other lives

GEORGE B. GRIFFIN
Reprinted with Permission, Telegram & Gazette

WORCESTER-- There are no crystal balls, no doors to the future. There is nothing to say what will happen in the next day, hour or moment.

There is the only certainty that hindsight is clear and that the present carries the seeds of infinite possibilities.

District Fire Chief Michael O. McNamee has thought countless times about the horrific future born of an uncertain present on Friday night when six firefighters under his command died at the Worcester Cold Storage and Warehouse Co. building.

Those six, and the dozens of others who raced into the burning building in the first moments of the fire, were looking for a homeless couple said to be trapped inside. The pair had already fled the building when firefighters began laying out hoses and raising aerial ladder water cannons.

But no firefighter under McNamee's command, nor any of the dozens working outside the burning warehouse, knew that. They knew only that people had been seen in the building and that the fire initially appeared small enough to control and extinguish.

None could foresee that in five seconds, the modest fire would become a raging, seething inferno of boiling flames and toxic black smoke that would engulf the building's interior and trap the firefighters where they stood.

“I've replayed this over and over and over,” District Fire Chief McNamee said in an interview yesterday. “The one thing that's keeping my head on straight is, if I pulled up to the same situation again, I would have made the same initial decisions. If I had a crystal ball, I wouldn't. But judging by what I saw, it would make me make the decisions again.”

District Fire Chief McNamee was commander of the men attacking the fire from the inside. He was between the second and third floors of the labyrinthine, windowless building when the toxic smoke flooded the structure.

He ordered his men out, cleared the only two stairways to the outside, and then prepared to fight the fire from an outside defensive perimeter. It was then, in that first moment of the regrouping, that the first “Mayday” calls came over the radio from Firefighters Paul A. Brotherton and Jeremiah M. Lucey. They were trapped, running out of air, and calling for help.

“I formed four rescue teams right away and told them to use ropes,” the deputy chief said. “I said, 'We've got two guys up there.' ”

The rescue teams went in, one by one, stationing themselves on the third, fourth and fifth floors. They scoured the areas in coordinated search patterns, moving from one area to the next until, their air supplies running low, they were called out to be replaced by other teams.

During one sweep, as the fire intensified, a second team ran into trouble. One half of the Ladder 2 rescue team could not raise the other half on the radio.

“There was never a call, never an indication they were in trouble, so now, I'm thinking, 'Oh, my God, we just lost another two,' ” Deputy Chief McNamee said. “I sent another crew up to look for them and then things started to get so bad I had to call it. ... I had to make the really tough call, and that was to abandon the building.”

At the time, there were about 35 firefighters still working inside the building, including his active rescue teams and others he had staged on the first floor.

He said it was the hardest decision he has ever had to make, and one that has changed his life in fundamental ways. But it was a decision that also, in the assessment of his peers, saved many more lives.

Other firefighters believe that if District Fire Chief McNamee had not given the order to evacuate the building when he did, another 20 firefighters might have perished.

It is perhaps a testament to District Chief McNamee's resolve that he had to physically stand in the doorway to enforce his order “because they wanted to go up.”

“I just said no, they're already lost. That's what I said. We've already lost four. We're not going to lose any more,” he recalled.

It was not until a roll call of firefighters was taken after the evacuation order that two more were discovered missing. There was, District Chief McNamee said, no warning, no call for help.

And the names of the four firefighters -- James F. “Jay” Lyons, Thomas E. Spencer, Joseph T. McGuirk and Timothy P. Jackson -- brought to six the number of friends District Chief McNamee lost that night.

He had known them all for years, considered them brothers. And one, Firefighter Jackson, he had known for every day of the 27 years he has been a Worcester firefighter.

“Timmy and I went through training together,” District Chief McNamee said.

All of the men, he said, were members of his “second family.”

“We live together when we're not with our families,” he said. “We fight together, we laugh together, we cry together. Nobody knows what we go through except for us. Nobody knows what it's like inside a building like that for us, and you can't imagine it unless you've experienced it.”

He said he has taken some brief time away from efforts to recover the remaining bodies to see a stress counselor who was sent to help firefighters and their families cope with the horror of all that occurred. His wife of 27 years, Joanne, his “best friend,” went with him, and together they talked about why he had not been able to grieve the loss of his friends.

He was told that the time for that would come of itself, that at the moment, he was numb, and that was normal.

“I have two daughters, Kate, in graduate school at the American University, and Bridget, who is a freshman at BU,” he said. “They are both coming to be here, and I hadn't cried until I went home and Kate called from Washington, D.C. And she said, “Hi, Daddy,” and then it hit and I couldn't even say hello to her.”

The counselors also believe that the worst is yet to come for District Fire Chief McNamee and the many others.

“After this is all over, it's probably going to really hit the wall, and it's nice to know that is normal,” the district chief said. “I was talking to my wife last night and she said, 'We will get through this, but from this point forward, things won't be the same. You won't look at the job the same. You won't look at the people you work with the same way. You're not going to think the same say. This is one of those life-altering situations.' ”

But he remains a firefighter, and the next time, he will approach the fire scene with the same experienced eye that has taken him through countless others.

“It's what we do,” he said.