THEY BARELY HAD ANY TIME to think about what this clue meant.
Seven days later, on March 12, a call came into the 911 Center at 9:27 p.m. “Hi, how you doing?” the caller said to the 911 dispatcher. “I’m over here at the old hotel, and I think you have a fire over here at this particular building. In the rear?”
“So, you did see fire?” the dispatcher asked.
“I see a lot of smoke pouring out of one of the buildings.”
“Did you see anybody around?”
“No ma’am, I didn’t,” the caller said. “I just happened—I live down a little bit on the block, and I smelled it.”
While the caller gave his name and phone number in case they got disconnected, the dispatcher was already typing an address into her automated system, to send as many firemen as she could get toward Tasley Road. Whispering Pines was fully involved.
CHAPTER 13
”LIKE HELL WAS COMING UP THROUGH THE GROUND”
OVER IN TASLEY, the firehouse sprang into action. There was no need to wait for volunteers to get to the station—they had been sleeping there for months, in their tangles of sleeping bags and PlayStation controllers. By 9:28, one minute after the 911 call, they were already rolling the engine out of the bay. Bryan Applegate radioed in with their progress as they sped toward the sprawling, abandoned Whispering Pines resort complex, less than a mile away. “Engine eight-five responding,” Bryan said. “Engine eight-five par five.”
“Flames are showing,” the dispatcher warned the crew. “All units responding—another caller advised structure fully involved.”
“Eight-five on scene,” Bryan radioed in again a moment later as the engine pulled in front of the hotel. “I have command.”
At his home three quarters of a mile away, Tasley chief Jeff Beall had just fallen asleep in his recliner when he heard the two-toned alert of his pager. The 911 dispatcher repeating the location of the fire turned out to be completely unnecessary; by the time Beall got to his driveway, he could already see the flames shooting into the sky. “Fuck,” he said.
As he barreled down the road toward Whispering Pines, he tried to think of a particular word, a word that meant something was one’s destiny, an ultimate goal that one would eventually reach whether they wanted to or not. Nirvana, he thought. Later he would realize that it wasn’t quite the word he was looking for. Destiny, fate, Everest—all of those would have been more appropriate. But right then, as the firefighter drove to the biggest fire of his career, that was the phrase that kept coming to mind. This is my Nirvana.
Whispering Pines was his company’s first due. They would be in charge, or more specifically, Beall would. He passed his own team’s fire engine on the way to the station, changed into his gear, hopped into a smaller truck, and drove himself to the scene. His heart dropped into his stomach. In front of him, more than half of the Whispering Pines outbuildings had all caught on fire. Darkness had turned to daylight. Embers the size of softballs were leaping off the buildings, toward the front lawns of the little bungalows across the street. Those yards were guarded by pine trees, and the roofs of the houses were covered in four inches of dry pine needles. It would take only one unlucky fireball before the whole neighborhood burst into flames.
Beall scanned the other buildings, the ones that hadn’t yet caught fire. Normal protocol would have been to send firefighters into or around those buildings—the closest access point to the active flames. But they were hazardous, on the verge of collapsing even when their structural integrity hadn’t been threatened by the presence of nearby flames. Sending volunteers in there meant putting lives in certain danger.
“Chief 8 to central,” he radioed in. “We’re going to be setting up a defensive system here.” He paused. “We’re obviously going to be here for a while. Give me two more tankers and have them stage north of the scene.”
“Eleven and twelve, bring in your tankers,” the dispatcher radioed to Wachapreague and Painter, two stations from farther south in the county, which were on their way with support vehicles.
“And go ahead and have electric respond up here,” Beall said, worried about the power lines that crossed Tasley Road.
“We’re getting them up here,” dispatch said.
“Might want to send two trucks. It’s going to be a big operation.”
More tankers and engines were arriving on the scene. In addition to the ones from Painter and Wachapreague, there were ones from Onancock, Parksley, and Melfa. The neighbors across the street were all awake, standing in their yards and watching the embers pop out of the hotel’s second floor and lob toward their houses.
Beall sent the Wachapreague volunteers, who had just pulled up in their pale yellow truck, across the road to douse the Tasley homes with water. “Have them get out their garden hoses,” he called out. It was mostly precautionary, and to give the terrified homeowners a sense of control, but there it was: the homeowners of Tasley were frantically pulling their garden hoses out of summer storage and using them to defend their own homes.
Beall called the remaining fire chiefs on the scene over for an impromptu meeting in front of the dying building: “There’s not enough water on the shore to put this fire out,” he said.
They needed a new plan and quickly devised one: the goal was no longer to put the fire out. The goal was to use enough water to contain the fire, boxing it in until it devoured everything flammable inside the box, exhausting itself and going out on its own.
Beall sent Bryan Applegate around to the back of the property to monitor the spread. Flames weren’t traveling that way yet, but they could.
“How you doing back there?” he radioed back to Bryan, and kept doing so every few minutes. “How’s it looking back there? Is it spreading to any other building?”
“It’s burned all the way over to this last building,” Bryan said. “It still hasn’t made it to the roof.”
“How you looking, Bryan?” Beall called a few minutes later.
“It’s getting pretty hot.”
“Make sure eleven knows I want them to stop on Tasley Road, and I want them to be in position so that if this jumps and goes in the woods, I want them to be our first line of defense.”
“Let me know when it’s under control, for our records,” the dispatcher asked, when it became clear that there was nothing more that could be offered from the 911 Center where he was located.
“It won’t be under control for several more hours,” Beall said.