Few sights are harder to eject from your memory than the blackened ruins produced by a house fire. The unimaginable heat generated by flames melts refrigerators, lamps and a dozen other recognizable household objects into obsidian lumps.
Fire spares nothing and no one in its path. Its terrible wrath is indiscriminate and I defy anyone who has ever picked their way through a fire scene in the aftermath of the flames, smoke, terror and confusion to not fall into the habit of walking through their kitchen triple-checking the dials on their stove.
In an age of instant communication and high technology, fire still kills with the swiftness and terrible destructive force it has always wielded. It killed again on Wednesday, snatching the life of Worcester Fire Lt. Jason Menard in a house fire even as the department veteran saved the lives of fellow firefighters.
Imagine going to work every day and walking out of your house, saying goodbye to people you love, with the shared knowledge that you could die on the job. Training, technology, the skilled support of fellow firefighters, is all in place to keep you safe. But fire with its brutal terrible wrath is more than capable of claiming lives.
I have stood, notebook in hand, at dozens of fires over the course of a 32-year career working at daily newspapers. I had been working at the Item for mere months on the night the Ben Crest fire took its toll on Oxford Street just a half a block from where the Item’s office is now located. The meager sources of salvation for the people living in the rooming house included ropes bolted to floors that would have tested the mettle of a Marine Corps recruit, never mind a middle-aged boarding house resident.
I will never forget the sight of the late great Dave Hicks, high atop a fire department platform tower, picking through the Ben Crest’s ruins in search of bodies.
I remember standing near the corner of Nahant and Ocean streets on a night when Lynn firefighters rushed to two major fires, including one in the big apartment building that formerly stood at the intersection.
By dawn, fire scene commanders declared the fire extinguished with no reports of casualties until Doug Smith, who was always extra kind and patient to a wet-behind-the-ears reporter, announced that a tenant who rushed back into the building to find his cat was the fire’s sole fatality.
I stood on a freezing January afternoon on Lewis Street as firefighters spent hours battling a blaze that tied up traffic on two major Lynn streets and stubbornly defied their efforts to extinguish it.
My hands turned numb and my legs shook and I tried to imagine what it was like trying to work burdened down by protective clothing and equipment while being assailed by flames, smoke and water that froze as soon as it left a hose.
I climbed Mountain Avenue in Revere on one of the many subzero days in the brutal winter of 2015 to cover a fire at the top of the hilly street. Snow banks and uncollected recycling items left out in bins by residents hemmed in the roadway, forcing emergency vehicles to form a long line up the hill. Firefighters strung hundreds of feet of hose to reach the fire and Revere Chief Christopher Bright rushed to the scene and learned the fire killed his uncle.
I rushed from my house several years ago into a December dawn scented with the unmistakable smell of a big structural fire. Hours earlier, Lynn firefighters fought through flames and smoke to rescue everyone they could from a home on Bruce Place. But fire again claimed victims and decimated a local family.
At every fire scene, standing stunned at the center of the commotion and chaos, are fire survivors — people jarred from sleep by firefighters, smoke alarms or screaming neighbors or police officers — who huddle wrapped in blankets, sometimes clutching pets or one another.
Their lives are turned upside down. Home — that place we all seek out for a sense of familiarity, refuge and comfort — has been ripped from their lives.
I’ve covered fires where I have overheard survivors ask firefighters or police officers if they can return to their homes when it is safe to search for a pet or personal belongings. The response they receive is polite and sympathetic but, more often than not, the answer is no.
What survivors don’t know and what understanding and caring emergency workers don’t tell them, is that fire so absolute in its destruction has left them nothing to find or retrieve except for blackened and crystalized remnants of beloved objects and keepsakes.
With the holidays and the heating season here, please take extra precautions using candles, space heaters, stoves and all other heat-generating devices — and thank a firefighter next time you see one.
