“Six-seven, responding par two,” responded a truck from Bloxom. “Six” was their station number, “seven” the truck number, and “par two” indicated that the truck contained a pair of firefighters. Bloxom’s truck was the first to arrive at the fire, even before Phil Kelley. The Bloxom firefighter holding the radio got out of the truck on Dennis Drive and assessed the situation. “Be advised,” he said into his radio, “structure is fully involved.”
Kelley, a compact man with a ruddy face and parchment-pale eyebrows, got to the scene and immediately wondered if he might need more water. He was an experienced firefighter. When he wasn’t commandeering Parksley’s volunteer department, he’d obtained the only kind of paying fire work one could in Accomack County—on Wallops Island, the NASA facility off the Accomack coast in the northern part of the county. There, a team of federally employed firefighters with security clearances obsessively checked and rechecked launch equipment, NASA believing that the best rocket-related fire was one that never happened to begin with. Landing the NASA job had been a life goal for Kelley. He’d grown up in Accomack and had signed up as a support volunteer for the firehouse when he turned fourteen, helping to clean equipment and learning to pack and unpack hoses. Now he was middle-aged, he knew fires, and he sensed that the burning house on Dennis Drive would deplete the water resources on the scene before the fire could be put out. Most of the towns in Accomack County didn’t have a municipal water supply, which meant they didn’t have fire hydrants. Water was not an unlimited resource. “You pump what you brung” was an old fireman’s saying: the volunteer firefighters carried water to scenes in giant metal tankers that held twenty-five hundred gallons each. They pumped the water from their tankers using their engines, and hoped they had enough, or that they’d be close enough to a pond or stream to get more.
“Central, what tankers do I have?” Kelley radioed into the dispatch center, asking for a list of all the trucks present. He listened to the roll call and made a decision. “I need another tanker.”
Luckily, one was already on its way.
“Eight-seven, responding par two,” said Richie Bridges, a captain with Station 8, the department from the town of Tasley, as he barreled down Lankford Highway in a massive tanker.
Tasley was farther away from the fire than Parksley and Bloxom had been, located ten miles down the Eastern Shore. Tasley had the crummiest firehouse with some of the most lovingly cared-for trucks; members entered them into competitions where they won trophies for their high shine. Tonight, for the Dennis Drive fire, the Tasley company brought two of these vehicles: the tanker driven by Richie, whose sister Shannon Bridges sat in the passenger side, and an engine, driven by the Tasley chief, Jeff Beall. Beall was a tall man with a bristling mustache and a wit as dry as sandpaper. He’d drive thirty miles to loan a friend $20, but whether a person liked him depended on whether they understood that some people showed their love through exacting expectations and constant sarcasm. When Beall’s new volunteers told him they were ready to start driving the trucks, he liked to take the aspiring firefighter in a twenty-four-foot-long engine to an empty mansion with a complicated circular driveway and instruct the newbie to drive the engine around it, backward, without touching the grass. It was a little bit of a showboating move, but the Tasley crew were good drivers. Tonight both Bridges and Beall had made it from asleep in their beds to standing in front of a fire, ten miles away, fully suited in protective gear, in less than fifteen minutes.
At Dennis Drive, Kelley saw that Beall’s engine had arrived. The two men were friends; they worked together on Wallops Island. They respected and trusted each other, and Kelley immediately ordered Beall’s team to fill a two-and-a-half-inch hose with water and start attacking the west side of the building. The plan, he’d decided, would be to put out the fire where it was most virulent, and then force the house to collapse to the ground while they doused the rest of the flames. “Eight-five,” he told Beall’s engine. “Charge that line!”
Three tankers had arrived now, and three engines, and more than a dozen men and women had all come to fight the fire on Dennis Drive.
“Central to Chief 7,” the dispatcher back at the 911 Center broke in with a time check. “You are now fifteen minutes into your incident.”
“I copy, fifteen minutes,” Kelley responded from the front yard where he’d designated a makeshift command post. The air apparatus that each firefighter wore on his or her back carried only forty-five minutes worth of breathable oxygen. Dispatch made sure fire captains were aware of the time.
But right now, Kelley had other considerations besides air supply. He had been right to worry about water: The first tanker to arrive on the scene, the one from Bloxom, was now almost out. So was the tanker that Tasley had brought to the fire. “I’m dry,” Beall said into his headset. The fire was cracking like a whip and roaring loudly enough that a headset was the easiest way for men standing just across the yard from each other to communicate.
“I’m out,” another firefighter said into his headset, and then a third: “We’re out of water.”
If the fire cleared the field, it would reach a cluster of houses that stood closer together, with trees that the flames could leap between. It couldn’t be allowed to clear the field. Kelley instructed an empty tanker to switch places with a fuller one, sending the empty one to find a place to refill, orchestrating a ballet of heavy equipment easing in and out of the gravel drive. Some fire chiefs didn’t mind socializing during fires; they liked when volunteers or neighbors stopped by to ask questions or lament the burning structure. Kelley wasn’t one of those chiefs. At a scene, his volunteers knew to give him a wide berth while he figured out the fire. He viewed each one like a puzzle with a unique set of pieces: which hoses to use and where, which access roads needed to stay clear and when. Holding all of those pieces in his head required concentration; he went still and silent while he figured things out.
“Central to Chief 7,” the dispatcher interrupted. “You are now thirty minutes into your incident.”
The dispatcher asked if they had enough lighting, and Kelley told him the lighting was fine, but the amount of smoke was becoming a problem. Fifteen minutes left on the air packs. If the smoke stayed black for longer than that, he would have to start sending in relief teams or request more backup.
For now, he decided that the best thing to do was continue with what they were already doing: more water, more tankers, more water, putting out the fire in the way that, at its most elemental, was the only way to ever put out fires since the beginning of time.
Communication between the dispatcher and the firefighters on the radio slowed, as Kelley requested face-to-face meetings with his deputies. “Surround and drown,” he instructed them, when they met him in the front yard. Get the fire out by attacking it from every direction.