First Responders

"Now what?" The neighbor wondered aloud.

When he'd last seen Ladder 3 in the neighborhood, it had been part of a full battalion responding to Monday night's cloud of dark acrid smoke.

The origin was three separate points of ignition within a single room of the supposedly empty building, a recently closed weekly residence motel.

When the first company breached the main entrance they found a single elderly squatter inside. And whether it was age, drink or something he could blame on smoke inhalation, the old man told his rescuers there could be as many as 20 fellow residents in the building. Then again it might have been true earlier that evening, since stenciled no trespassing warnings don't deter the cty's homeless who number over 14,000 by last year's count... Like a separate transient town of the unwanted centered within a few blocks of the city's own center of power.

Inside, teams of flashlights moved room to room as outside teams with rotary saws removed all the security bars around the ground floor. Another chief, from a nearby city providing mutual aid, arrived on scene and changed into his full turnout gear, alarming neighbors watching from across the street despite the billowing black.

There were units standing ready at nearby hydrants to string lines at the first sign of open flame beyond the room where it started. The department's public information unit rolled up in case the TV stations did, too. But as the crews circled the building breaking out the glass, widespread flames never came... Nor did the cameras.

The supression strategy worked, smoke disapated and it never made the TV news. Arson blazes destroying new condos routinely do. But $35,000 damage to an unused building amidst the sea of boarded up and torn down to bare ground at the edge of downtown don't.

Neither would Ladder 3's solo midday Wednesday outing... A brief training excercise on how to deploy their massive telescoping apparatus to reach multi-story targets with a minimal adjustment.

"Now what?" He had asked.

An ISO class 1 fire department... Ready for more action. And a block of abandoned buildings certain to bring them back sooner or later to a neighborhood that's no stranger to sirens.