ENGINE 207/LADDER 110/SATELLITE 6/BATTALION 31/DIVISION 11 (CONTINUED)
LADDER 110 LODD
FIREFIGHTER KEVIN C. KANE LADDER 110 SEPTEMBER 13, 1991
A Firefighter's Death as a Rallying Cry; Fatal Blaze in '91 Comes to Symbolize Dangers of Cutbacks
By Michelle O'Donnell
June 2, 2003
Shortly before dawn on Sept. 12, 1991, smoke poured from an apartment in an abandoned building in the East New York section of Brooklyn. At the apartment's entrance, firefighters with Ladder Company 110 passed members of Engine Company 236, who had directed their hose into the apartment.
Engine 236 was working with four instead of five firefighters because of staff reductions. As a result, the firefighter holding the nozzle of the hose cautioned the ladder company, Engine 236 did not have enough hose line on hand to reach the back room where the ladder team was headed.
But the search for victims could not wait, and the ladder company disappeared into the darkness. Moments later, a fiery section of the bedroom ceiling came crashing down on Firefighter Kevin Kane, 31. His screams anguished firefighters who tried, but failed, to make their way past the burning timbers.
Engine 236 rushed to pull up additional lengths of hose so that the stream of water could reach the back room. When Firefighter Kane leaped from a window minutes later into the bucket of a tower ladder, he had severe burns over 80 percent of his body. He died the next day.
To many firefighters, the 1991 fire has become known as the Kevin Kane fire, emblematic of the dangers of reducing engine staffing. Each time the city broaches the subject of formally reducing all engine crews to four members, as it has in recent months, the story of the Kevin Kane fire is retold in firehouses around the city.
But the story of the fire, like the issue it has come to symbolize, is complicated, deeply emotional and, in truth, not well understood.
The city, for instance, has always rebutted the claim that having one firefighter fewer in the crew of Engine 236 that day played a role in Firefighter Kane's death. Indeed, the question of how many firefighters can safely work in engine crews has been a thorny one for decades.
Firefighters say that, in one sense, no number of crew members can ensure complete safety. They believe that any reduction is reckless, and they argue that the move by the city in recent months to reduce the last 53 engines operating with five firefighters to four is intolerable.
City officials, including senior members of the Fire Department, have called such complaints little more than fear-mongering. They note emphatically that 150 engines operating out of firehouses across the city have been working with four crew members for years, and that no meaningful evidence exists that lives have been risked or lost.
Additionally, they note that the fire union that is now so vehemently objecting to reductions in the remaining engines agreed to the earlier reductions as part of bargaining on a contract in 1996.
Union officials say those negotiations were handled by different leadership, during a time of reorganization when the union was forced to make concessions.
The dispute is destined to go on, and a recent effort by firefighters to go to court to prevent the reductions is in danger of foundering after a Brooklyn judge last week ordered the union to post a multimillion-dollar bond to proceed with its action.
Still, the Kevin Kane fire offers a useful example for appreciating not only what firefighters do once they jump off the trucks that go screaming through the city streets every day, but also how few formal standards exist across the country for determining how many crew members are needed to safely battle fires.
While federal safety guidelines exist for protective gear and exposure to hazardous materials, staffing levels are left for cities to decide.
While Boston and Chicago already use four- and even three-member crews, that fact does not convince many New York firefighters that they could safely operate with the same number.
''America's fire is a one-story fire,'' said Vincent Dunn, who retired as a deputy chief from the Fire Department. ''That's where most people die. You look at Chicago, Philadelphia or Boston, where their poor live -- where fires happen -- and it's all two- and three-story row houses. But in New York City, our buildings are bigger. We have five- and six- and seven-story tenements, so our stretches are greater.''
It is the very act of stretching a hose line, the fundamental step in any firefighting effort, that is most hampered by a reduction in crew size, firefighters say. While ladder trucks ventilate fires and search for victims, an engine's function is to put out a blaze with a quick and steady force of water. The hose that must swiftly be put in place is cumbersome. It is pulled off the back of engines, dragged across sidewalks and hauled into buildings up often narrow and dark stairwells.
In a five-person engine company, there are five positions: the nozzle, backup, control, doorman and chauffeur (or driver) as they are called in New York. (There is also an officer leading each company, but that position is not included in the tally.)
At a fire, the nozzle, the backup and the control firefighters leap off the rig and begin carrying 50-foot lengths of hose into the building. The chauffeur opens the hydrant. The doorman opens the valves of the pump on the engine so that water can course through the line, and also helps carry up the hose line, checks it for kinks and feeds up additional lengths of hose.
The doorman is the fifth firefighter. In four-member companies that do not have a doorman, the control firefighter must stay outside to activate the engine's pump. There is one less set of hands to carry hose into the building, which can leave a company short when it comes to aggressively pushing into a fire, a quality that has distinguished the city's department nationally.
The department's official procedure with four-member engines is to send a second four-member engine company to assist with stretching the hose into a building.
But firefighters say this strategy is inefficient. They say that they often must wait critical minutes for the second engine to arrive, and that this goes against a central tenet of firefighting: early containment. They would be better served, they say, using a five-member crew on one hose line, rather than two four-member crews to move the same single line.
And they point to a 1987 department study that found that four-member crews took longer to stretch hose lines and tired twice as quickly as those with five members.
At the 1991 fire that killed Firefighter Kane, Engine 236 was, in fact, expected to help Engine Company 290 stretch its hose line into a burning apartment. But when Lt. Tony Variale of Engine 290 sized up the flames pouring out of the windows, he told Engine 236 not to assist his company, but to begin stretching its own line into a smoke-filled adjoining apartment.
''When I see that much fire, I need a backup line,'' recalled Mr. Variale, now a captain with Engine 24 in Greenwich Village. ''I mean, that's basic firefighting procedure. Because if there should be a problem with that first line, the second line is there to save you.''
It was not easy for either company to bring up its hose. The stairwell of the abandoned building was filled with furniture that squatters had dragged inside. A hole gaped in the stairs. The crews needed to drop extra hose line out a landing window -- an accepted practice, firefighters say -- so that more length would be available to press into back rooms, like the one that Firefighter Kane, a former paratrooper and the son of a retired assistant fire chief, entered.
But when the room suddenly filled with flames, Engine 236's hose was still hanging out the landing window. The company desperately tried to pull the hose line, but it was heavy with water and hard to pull without a doorman on the landing to help.
''I remember looking back and seeing this line like a Band-Aid, stretched,'' Captain Variale recalled.
Firefighters eventually succeeded in pulling up more hose and putting out the blaze. But those who heard Firefighter Kane's screams remain haunted by the thought that his death might have been prevented. Engine 236's control man, Greg Fagan, went on to Squad 1, which lost 12 men on Sept. 11, 2001, a fact that Mr. Fagan, now retired, recounted mournfully but dry-eyed in the garage of his Long Island home, surrounded by his Harley-Davidson motorcycles.
But when Mr. Fagan recalled Firefighter Kane's screams, his lower lip trembled and he wept. Mr. Fagan said he carried a profound sense of guilt for the death of Firefighter Kane. ''I remember everything about it,'' he said. ''I could still tell you the layout of the building.''
Captain Variale said a re-enactment soon after the fire showed that the 20 to 25 seconds that Firefighter Kane had been burned without water could have been cut to five to seven seconds if Engine 236 had had a fifth firefighter.
''If we were in a position to have pulled more hose, we could have saved him to a point where he wouldn't die,'' said Charlie LaSala, now retired, who was Engine 236's backup firefighter. ''It was a long, long hallway. You have to make turns, and it takes time to do that with a charged hose line in heavy smoke conditions. But we might have been there sooner to knock it down so he didn't burn so severely.''
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/02/...laze-91-comes-symbolize-dangers-cutbacks.html
FDNY REPORT ON FATAL FIRE SEPTEMBER 13, 1991