by Michael Daly
He spoke with the voice of a firefighter who might have never uttered another word. A firefighter who had suddenly found himself trapped and blinded and disoriented more than a dozen floors above the street in smoke so black and thick and poisonous he was sure it would fell him in just two or three choking breaths if his air tank gave out.
"I didn't panic, which is good," he said yesterday, with the understanding he would not be named. "Don't get me wrong. Another 10 minutes, I might have."
He recalled that the air had still been clear when he stepped off the elevator that carried him up the outside of the former Deutsche Bank building to the floor below the fire. He donned his air mask and started toward the core of the building.
Maybe 50 feet in, he encountered a wall of smoke banking down from the floor above. He suddenly passed from a sunny summer day to near total night.
"Visibility was nil," he recalled. "You could barely see anything."
He was carrying a powerful personal light and he turned it on, but the beam could not pierce the all eclipsing smoke.
"It looked almost like an oil burner," he said.
With the darkness came danger. He proceeded on, but very slowly, knowing the building was being demolished.
"You don't know if there's going to be an open shaft," he said.
The ongoing demolition work in the building had erased any floor plan. He had none of the points of reference a firefighter can determine with groping hands in even the thickest smoke.
"No layout like make a left and a right and there's an exit door and you're out of there," he said.
As if that was not bad enough, plastic sheeting that had been hung to contain asbestos now became part of a trap. He nonetheless managed to reach a stairwell. He came upon a standpipe.
"Inches away," he recalled.
He opened the valve, hoping for a rush of the water that could change everything.
"There was nothing coming out," he said. "So, you knew there were going to be problems."
He tried to continue on, but found himself losing his bearings, no longer sure which way he had come or where he should go. He knew an air tank is only good for 25 or 30 minutes. He also knew that smoke this thick and black had to be deadly.
"You take two hits of that and drop," he said. "You really don't want to breathe that in."
He might have reached the point of panic had he not heard the voices of other firefighters in the darkness.
"You hear guys talk and then you follow the voices," he said.
The voices grew louder as he drew closer and he came to some firefighters who had reached the building exterior. The firefighters broke some windows and suddenly there was air.
But, then he heard other voices, crackling on the radio with the word firefighters call out when they need help. The word came again and again from firefighters in trouble and officers looking for missing members of their companies.
"Mayday!"
"Mayday!"
"Mayday!"
He started back into the smoke, and encountered another firefighter who helped him find the exterior elevator and his officer. The situation seemed to be improving. He learned his comrades had run a line up the outside of the building. Water was reaching the fire floor, and Engine 24 was there along with Engine 10 and others.
"It sounded like things were going in the right direction," he said.
He rode back down the elevator with his officer.
He heard something on the radio about Engine 24. The elevator had ascended and now it came down again.
He suddenly might have been better off blinded.
In cruelly clear light he saw the bodies of two comrades he loved and admired being carried from the elevator. Firefighters Joseph Graffagnino and Robert Beddia were with Engine 24, and their firehouse had already lost 14 members in 13 years.
The two must have been as trapped as he had been, only they must have had it much worse up on the actual fire floor. They would have felt the vibra-alert telling them they had only five to 10 minutes of air left.
And then the moment must have come when they had no air at all, when there was only that black, deadly smoke.
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