People were screaming and a fire was raging when Engine 3 pulled up in the 200 block of East Madison Street in Lancaster early Feb. 18.
Desperate friends and family of Pauline Stone, 39, and Leilani Roman, 6, had heard their cries for help from inside a burning house.
In a frenzy, they begged the three firefighters on Engine 3 to rescue the trapped pair, who they said were in a second-floor front bedroom of the rowhouse.
The firefighters were undermanned and under-equipped to handle the fire that was doubling in size every 30 seconds that dark morning on the narrow street, their fellow firefighters say.
What happened in just the next three minutes, the firefighters say, demonstrates the potential risk to the public and to firefighters of having a bureau that is stretched too thin by budget constraints. It is a problem faced by cities across the country.
The woman and child died. Three firefighters were injured, one critically.
STATter911: Mayday audio & video: Mother & child believed dead at Lancaster, PA house fire. Two firefighters hurt trying to make rescue. Lt. Andre Kelley, critical but stable at burn center.
“We knew it was going to happen sooner or later,” says one of four city firefighters interviewed for this story. “One of those perfect storm type of calls was going to come in.
“The horseshoe fell out of the city’s ass on this one. They have been operating on luck for so long.
“I know fire and police cost the city a lot of money. But when you need it, you need it there, not in three minutes, or in six minutes.”
Says another firefighter: “It’s not having the right people when you need them. You can’t compensate if you have a million people, and it’s too late.”
City officials agree they would like to have more people and more equipment to fight fires. Of course, that all comes at a cost to taxpayers, they say.
Those officials are now talking with the firefighters’ union to try to find a way to make that happen, Lancaster Mayor Rick Gray says.
“We’re concerned,” he says. “We don’t think we’re utilizing our people as effectively and as positively as we can.
“And to that extent, I think we could utilize them better for their own safety and for the public’s safety.”
The alarm sounded at Station 3 at 4:25 a.m. that Monday. Three men at the 333 E. King St. firehouse jumped on an engine and headed to 225 E. Madison St., which was on the east side of town, closest to their station.
Across town, nine firefighters at two other stations also were dispatched and jumped into action. They were the three firefighters on Engine 1 and the three on Truck 2, both at the 425 W. King St. station, and the three firefighters on Engine 2, at the 843 Fremont St. station. A shift commander also was on duty on Fremont Street and headed, in a separate vehicle, to the fire.
Thirteen people all raced to the fire but it was Engine 3 that arrived first, with Lt. Andre Kelley and firefighters Tom Bender and Don Mohr on board.
Reacting immediately to the chaos on the sidewalk and the pleas for help, Kelley and Bender pulled on their face masks and grabbed a hose, to knock down the flames as they entered the house, and a thermal imager, to show where people might be trapped inside. Mohr served as the pump operator feeding water to the hose from a 500-gallon tank on the engine.
It was clear from the start this was going to be a ferocious fire, say the four city firefighters who were interviewed for this story.
The four, who have about 85 years of combined experience among them, asked not to be identified for fear of, they said, reprisals.
Fire can seem like a living, evil thing. It feeds on its environment, jumping to a new spot when it is fought, building in intensity until it can reach a flashover, blowing out windows and rolling like a flaming surf.
They didn’t know it at the time but this fire was well on its way to flashover when Kelley and Bender began feeling their way up the stairs toward the front bedroom in heavy, black smoke.
A flashover happens usually about eight to 10 minutes from the start of the fire, though that time is growing shorter as we use more synthetic materials in the construction and contents of our homes, says Ken Willette, of the National Fire Protection Association.
At flashover, the fire becomes so hot that everything reaches its ignition point at the same time. The temperatures in a room are in excess of 1,000 degrees, Willette says. The fire burns so intensely that the smoke itself burns.
“The amount of fire that was there, we never run into that,” says one firefighter. “This fire was so far ahead of us. … It was really rip-roaring when we got there.”
At one point, a wave of dense smoke billowed out of the house and completely enveloped Engine 3, blacking out its headlights and flashing lights for a short time, making it invisible to those standing only a half-block away.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that in my life,” a firefighter says. “It tells me a heckuva lot of heat had built up in that house by the time we got there.”
In a perfect world, two pieces of equipment – an engine and a ladder truck – would have responded together to the fire, as it was building in intensity.
Firefighters on the two vehicles work in a familiar, choreographed dance, each doing a vital job to attack a fire and save lives.
Firefighters on the engine would quickly hook up hoses to their onboard tank and to nearby hydrants. They would begin fighting the fire, trying to cool it down and contain it.
Firefighters on the truck would grab ladders and tools, knocking out windows to ventilate the house and let off the smoke and heat. Others from the truck would enter the building to do the search and rescue.
At one point, a ladder truck, Truck 1, was in service with Engine 3 at its East King Street station, but it had been taken out of service in June 2011, in what was characterized at the time as a temporary move needed to use firefighters more efficiently.
Truck 1, firefighters say, is smaller and nimbler than Truck 2 and would have been better suited for what happened that day.
So it was that as the two other engines and Truck 2 still were on the way in the first crucial minutes after the fire started, the firefighters on Engine 3 were at the scene, alone.
They could not fight the fire and do the rescue at the same time, and so they plunged into the rescue.
What happened next was the “perfect storm” of conditions.
Fighting their way through pitch-black smoke, Kelley and Bender went to the wrong room, at the front of the house. The two victims, it turned out later, actually were in a room to the rear of that bedroom.
The two firefighters reached the top of the steps in the house, which was crowded with belongings and furniture. In all of his gear, Bender had to crawl over a dresser to get into the front bedroom, where he fell to his hands and knees and began the search, as Kelley waited in the hallway.
Feeling his way around the room, Bender found a bed. On top of it was a body of what he thought was a person, possibly a child. He had broken out a window in the room and began the rescue, only realizing later that what he thought was a person actually was a dog.
“He took it to the window and held it out and no one was there to take it,” a firefighter says. “The next crew didn’t have the front of the building laddered yet.”
Out on the street, other firefighters had just arrived and were working hard to break out windows and get water to the fire.
They were hustling, having to carry equipment from Truck 2, which was too large to navigate a tight turn on the narrow, one-way street that bends between Lime and Lemon streets, near the Lancaster Cemetery.
Mohr, the pump operator, was asking Kelley and Bender if they needed water. When they didn’t reply, he began feeding it anyway to the hose.
He could not see it, and so did not know that the hose already had burned through from the intense heat of the fire. So the water was not getting to the crucial point where the firefighters needed it to fight back the flames.
In the meantime, the ladders were going up outside but it was too late.
Raging already out of control, with no water to cool it, the fire lit up in the flashover.
Bender jumped out the second-story window as the flames erupted in the room, falling through a porch roof to the ground.
Frantic now, he sounded a “mayday,” the signal for a downed firefighter. With the conditions so intense inside, firefighters knew that the unprotected family members could not survive the flames and high temperatures.
They turned their attention to rescuing Kelley, who was in protective gear at the top of the steps. His own hands burned, Bender tried to help other firefighters as they battled their way back up the stairs to Kelley.
To the rear of the house, other firefighters were now knocking out windows to ventilate the fire. Firefighter Craig Robertson, who tried to enter the house through a rear door, was blown back and injured.
Seventeen minutes into the fire, seven minutes after the flashover, firefighters got Kelley out of the house and into an ambulance. He later was airlifted to the Crozer-Chester Medical Center in Delaware County, where he is now recuperating.
Firefighters turned a high-capacity water cannon on the fire. The bodies of the two victims were recovered several hours later.
James Stone, Pauline Stone’s brother, says his sister loved Leilani, whom she often baby-sat. He is comforted by what a firefighter told him about how the two were found.
“Pauline was holding Leilani,” he says. “She never let go.”
What went wrong in the fire?
The firefighters interviewed for this story say the bureau simply did not have enough resources on hand that morning to fight the fire, an accidental blaze believed to have likely been caused by an electrical problem with an extension cord.
Because the fire was so ferocious and raging so hard when they got there, they don’t know if they could have saved the woman and child.
But they feel that they would have had a better chance at it, and Kelley would have had a safer day, if they had more equipment and firefighters.
One of the main problems is that there is only one ladder truck in service to cover the entire city, they say. They say they need two trucks, manned with three firefighters each, to properly do their jobs.
“To not have a truck on the east end of town is absurd,” one firefighter says. “The truck is on West King, all the way across town. It’s a crazy, nonsensical decision.”
If Truck 1 had arrived with Engine 3, one group could have been doing the search while the other could have been getting the fire under control, to keep it from reaching flashover.
“That’s textbook stuff,” the firefighter says, “the way they teach you at the academy.”
Says another firefighter, “You have to do search and rescue, ventilation and fire attack. It’s almost a simultaneous operation. But you need manning to do it.”
Mayor Gray and Fire Chief Tim Gregg say they are still doing an analysis of the fire and have not come to any final conclusions about what happened that day.
In response to firefighters’ concerns, they say staffing a fire bureau is not a simple or inexpensive task.
Gray notes that the city fire budget, which is $10.5 million in 2013, has increased by 38 percent since 2005. But staffing during that time has decreased by 15 percent. That means more money is paying for fewer firefighters.
One of the issues is that a growing part of the fire bureau budget is devoted to benefits. Firefighters don’t pay into or receive Social Security, relying on public employee pensions, he notes, so those pensions are important. And from 2005 to 2013, benefits for firefighters increased from 34 percent to 46 percent of the budget.
Cities everywhere are faced with similar challenges in their fire bureaus. A check of fire bureaus in Bethlehem, Altoona and York shows they have similar staffing levels for their cities. (Harrisburg did not respond to several requests for figures.)
All are trying to do more with less.
York, for example, puts two firefighters on each piece of equipment, one fewer than in Lancaster.
“We would love to have three people on each piece of equipment,” says Deputy Chief Gregory Halpin. “It’s just not fiscally possible.”
Willette works in the public fire protection division of the Massachusetts-based National Fire Protection Association, a nonprofit fire prevention and public safety group. A retired career firefighter, he says fire bureaus are struggling with staffing and budget issues across the country.
After a fire like the East Madison Street one, he says, “The community can ask themselves the question: What can we do to prevent this from happening again?
“Is this something we feel is important enough that we want to provide the funding for it?
“And that’s a tough question in today’s economy. It’s a very difficult question and it’s being asked across the country.”
The city firefighters’ union recently had a change in leadership, and the city is working with the new union officials to address staffing, Gray says. He declines to give many details on what the talks include.
“I’m not going to negotiate it in the newspaper,” Gray says.
Union officials also decline to talk specifics, saying that they want to try to work with the city.
But Gray does note that one area of discussion has been a scheduling change that would allow more firefighters to be on duty at one time.
In the past, the firefighters’ union has resisted this change, which would mean a lifestyle change and many extra hours at the same pay, they say.
Firefighters now work two 10-hour days followed by two 14-hour nights. A possible new schedule calls for 24 hours on and 48 hours off.
A schedule change could open up the possibility of bringing Truck 1 back into service, Gray says, but notes that it’s not the only possibility on the table.
“We’re talking now about a lot of different things,” Gray says, adding that both sides have extended a hand across the table in the discussion.
Change is needed, he says.
“Is it the way we would want it right now? No, it isn’t,” he says. “We would sooner come up with a system that would have more firefighters on duty. You would be able to have that truck on duty and you’d have a larger complement of people working.”
Now is the time to work toward a solution, when people can understand how staffing a fire can impact the community’s safety, Willette says.
“If the community can have the discussion and understand what the gap is, and what is provided,” he says, “and the direction they want to go in providing fire protection, that’s a good starting point.”
