Two who escaped fire describe harrowing search

Trying to rescue others in blackness

JOHN J. MONAHAN
Reprinted with Permission, Telegram & Gazette

WORCESTER-- Two firefighters from Engine Company 3 who narrowly escaped the warehouse fire that claimed two members of their own unit spoke last night about the harrowing fire and the courageous repeated entries they made into the pitch blackness as they tried to rescue others.

Firefighter Mark Fleming and Fire Lt. John F. Sullivan entered the fifth floor of the building as a rescue team and were on the upper floors of the windowless and dark warehouse when a rush of smoke and heat filled the building.

“Within a matter of seconds we couldn't see anything. There was zero visibility,” Firefighter Fleming said. As the flames erupted and the building filled with thick black smoke, there was a tremendous amount of noise, and crashing sounds added to the confusion.

“You couldn't hear anything,” Firefighter Fleming said, adding that he had to yell to communicate with Lt. Sullivan. “Literally holding on to him was the only way I knew where he was.”

Lt. Sullivan said all the while in the darkness, the pair was still searching for two men who had radioed that they couldn't find their way out and were running out of air. They were Firefighters Paul A. Brotherton and Jeremiah M. Lucey, both from Rescue 1, who were among the six who never escaped the blaze.

“We were calling out and sounding for them,” Lt. Sullivan said, describing how he was banging his ax on the floor and Firefighter Fleming was tapping with his tools, hoping the two men would sound back or call out for them if they could hear.

While both were wearing lights attached to the front of their coats, the lights did no good in the thick smoke. “The only thing you could see was your finger, if you touched your face mask,” Firefighter Fleming said.

As the two began running low on air themselves, they made their way back through the dark, narrow maze of hallways and rooms, feeling along the walls.

“I don't know how we found our way out. We actually came out on the floor we had been on. We managed to find our way. I was holding on to the back of my lieutenant's tanks, and we ran out through a door,” Fleming said.

Lt. Sullivan said it was Fleming who found the exit, by knocking into the door in the darkness. “He just ran into the door,” the lieutenant said.

At that point the team hurried back down the stairway and outside, put on fresh air tanks, and went back up the stairway into the building to resume the search.

“We ran out of air, so we came back down the stairway for more air, twice,” Lt. Sullivan said.

The men made two more entries in the vain effort to find the lost firefighters, feeling their way through hallways and rooms, tapping and sounding and yelling for them.

“I was just going to grab them like this and pull them out with me,” Lt. Sullivan said, demonstrating by grabbing hold of a reporter's jacket. He said the blackness wasn't unusual in that type of fire. “It's always black. We are used to that,” he said.

Firefighter Fleming said there were no second thoughts about going in to conduct the repeated rescue searches.

“Firefighters don't think about what could happen. They think about what they can do. You always think you can get them out,” he said. “Unfortunately the fire was too much. There was nothing anyone could do to prevent it. Anything that could go wrong went wrong. Everything that could go wrong in that building did go wrong.”

After the pair joined in a moment of silence last night, a week to the minute after the first alarm of the horrific fire, they returned to complete the mission of searching for the remains of the firefighters still lost in the ruins.

Firefighter Fleming said it didn't seem like a week had gone by.

“It seems like it's still the same day and we are still on the same call,” he said.