Tom Ziegler - Bronx Burning

 

Good evening [clears throat]. We arrived before the engine. We got fire blowing out of two windows on the third floor. And the people in the street are screaming, “There's two kids in there.” We're about to get our ass kicked and there's nothing we can do about it.

 

It's 1976 and Lieutenant Tommy Anello leads the way as usual. He is simply the finest fire officer I have ever worked for. Besides having cast [beep sound] iron balls, he has a sixth sense that leads him to trap victims. We run up the stairs, we get to the third floor, it's quiet. It's scary quiet. I put the tip of my Halligan in between the door and the jamb. Pat takes his axe out and he starts slamming into it. We spread the door from the jam. We pop that door in just a couple of seconds. 

 

The only water we have is the two and a half gallons and the extinguisher that the Pat's carrying. And with what's waiting for us inside that apartment, that two and a half gallons is a bad joke. We swing the door open and the smoke just comes right out. It fills the entire hall. Turns night into day. We drop down onto our bellies and we crawl in. We got to go in deep as fast as we can because we got nothing to-- no water, there's no engine company. So, we got to get in and we got to do the search as quick as we can. We get in three rooms. We go in the door, there's a hallway to the right, it leads into the apartment, there's rooms off the hallway on the left-hand side.

 

We push all the way back. Pat's knocking the fire back with his can till it starts sputtering and we run out of water, three rooms in. As far as we can go, the fire owns the apartment in the back. Lieutenant Anello turns into the furthest room. Pat grabs the second room. And I crawl back to opposite the doorway that we came in. And I start crawling in through the kitchen. Can't see nothing. I go down, straight down the middle till I hit the wall as quick, it's dirty. I figure if anybody's down, I'll run into them as I'm crawling through.

 

Can't take the windows because we can't feed this thing any more air. It's already rolling across the ceiling and down out the door behind us. This place is going to light up in a couple of seconds. I reach the far wall, turn around, come back, find nobody. Tommy screams, “Get out. Get out. It's going to light up.” We get outside, we close the door behind us, the relative safety of the hallway. The engine's coming up the stairs. They charge their hose line. Tommy gives them the layout of the apartment, where they got to go. It's time to go back in. We push the door open, the [beep sound] fire comes out, meets us in the hall. The engine just starts hitting it. They're pushing it back in.

 

As they go in, we're right behind. We can do a search now. We can do a better search because we got water protecting us. As they're pushing the fire down the hallway, the three of us go into the kitchen. I go right back to the window, and I take the glass out with my tool. Right then Tommy, sixth sense kicks in. And he looks in the cabinet, looks down at the cabinet under the sink, and [sobbing voice] he sees this little arm laid out. The two brothers, five and three, who started the fire playing with matches while their mother went grocery shopping, are under the sink. The little guy's got his arms wrapped around his big brother, and that's how he died. [sobs] His big brother tried to close the door to protect him from the fire, and he died trying to save his brother's life.

 

Pat grabs one kid, I grab the other one. We run out of the apartment, down to the floor below the fire, and we pass them off to other firemen. We're beat. We can't do nothing. The other firemen start doing CPR on them, and up the stairs comes Mom, a bag of groceries under each arm. She sees the dead kids laying on the floor, and the firemen try to breathe life back into them. She drops the bags and says, “Oh, my babies.” I got right in the face and I said, “You didn't give a [beep] about your babies when you left them alone, did you?” Why did I do that? I must have been angry at myself for crawling less than a foot away from these kids and not finding them, but I took it out on her.

 

I don't regret much in my life. I really don't. Regrets are useless. But if I could change one thing in my life, I would put my arms around that woman and comfort her on what had to be the worst day of her life. Thank you.