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Gene Stolowski outside his home in Florida, New York.
(Photo: Mary Ellen Mark)
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There
was no fire
yet, not up
here, but
there was
smoke. The
six men sent
to the
fourth floor
of the
tenement
couldn’t see
more than a
few inches
in front of
them. There
was heat
too. They
could feel
it and see
it on the
screen of a
handheld
thermal-imaging
camera,
surging
behind a
wall.
The call had
come at 7:59
on a Sunday
morning, the
day after a
January
blizzard had
shut down
the city.
There was
still more
than a foot
of unplowed
snow on East
178th Street
off the
Grand
Concourse,
and some of
it was still
swirling in
45-mile-an-hour
gusts. Wind
like that
has a habit
of working
like
gasoline on
even the
tiniest
fires. Five
trucks from
five
companies
inched
through the
snow to
converge on
the
tenement, a
cookie-cutter
version of
thousands of
other old
buildings in
the South
Bronx.
Engine 42
got there
first; its
men were
stretching
hoses from
their truck
and running
them
upstairs.
Ladder 33
got there
next, and a
number of
its men were
sent to the
third floor,
where the
fire was
burning. The
firefighters
from Ladder
27 and
Rescue 3 had
arrived
next; they
were sent to
the floor
above the
fire to
clear it and
keep the
flames from
spreading
upward.
When the six
men got to
the fourth
floor, they
started
searching
from
apartment to
apartment,
but they’d
found no
civilians
(except the
skinny guy
and naked
fat lady one
of the guys
saw
hightailing
it out of
there just
as they came
up the
stairs). Now
they were in
Apartment
4-L, feeling
their way
along the
walls from
room to
room—six men
loaded down
with gear,
sucking in
air from
their
tanks—and
soon they
got turned
around, lost
in the
smoke.
Brendan
Cawley, the
probie with
just a month
on the job,
kept seeing
padlocks on
the doors of
every room
and was
confused; he
hadn’t been
around long
enough to
know how
many
apartments
in this
neighborhood
had been
converted
into cheap,
crowded
rooming
houses. This
place had
been chopped
up, probably
illegally.
Random walls
and
carelessly
thrown-up
partitions
created a
maze. The
men were
trying to
make their
way to the
source of
the heat
surge, but
among the
locks and
the walls
and the
smoke, they
couldn’t
seem to get
there. And
there was
another
problem: The
men didn’t
have working
hoses.
First, there
was a frozen
hydrant;
then,
something
seemed wrong
with some of
the hoses
themselves.
The six men
on the
fourth floor
couldn’t
fight a fire
they
couldn’t
find—and if
any fire did
come, they
had nothing
to fight it
with.
At 8:26
a.m., Curt
Meyran, the
lieutenant
in charge of
the Ladder
27 crew,
checked in
on his
radio. He
was asked
about the
status of
the fire on
the fourth
floor.
“Slight
extension,
slight
extension,”
Meyran
said—meaning
they still
saw just
smoke, no
fire.
“Ten-four,”
came the
response.
Somewhere
between 18
and 23
seconds
later—still
8:26 a.m.,
maybe even
as the
responder
was
talking—a
turret of
flame roared
up though
the
floorboards.
None of them
saw it
coming—in an
instant, all
six were
pinned
against the
windows that
faced the
back. “We
need a line
on the floor
above,”
someone
barked into
the radio.
“We have
heavy fire
on the floor
above.
Rescue to
Battalion.
Urgent.”
In the
background,
another
voice—no
one’s sure
whose—could
be heard:
“We got no
water!”
The flames
formed a
wall between
the men and
the
apartment
door.
Walking out
was no
longer an
option.
Meyran
called in a
Mayday and
he and Gene
Stolowski
and Cawley
stuck their
heads
outside for
air. At the
windows next
to them were
two guys
from Rescue
3, Jeff Cool
and Joe
DiBernardo.
They had
lost track
of the sixth
man, John
Bellew. It
was 17
degrees
outside, but
even as
their faces
were
freezing,
the men felt
a scorching
heat on
their backs.
Leaning out,
they could
see a fire
escape two
windows
away—but it
was too far
for them to
jump.
Meyran
called in a
Mayday at
8:29.
Seconds
later,
DiBernardo
radioed an
outfit on
the roof:
“Brothers on
the roof,
you’re gonna
need to send
a rope over
the side.
Roof
team—send a
rope over
the side to
the two-four
side of the
building.”
The flames
were closer
now. Jeff
Cool could
feel them at
his neck.
Cool had a
wife and two
kids. Meyran
had a wife
and three
kids. Bellew
had a wife
and four
kids.
Stolowski
had a
daughter,
and his wife
was
expecting
twin girls
in June.
DiBernardo’s
dad was a
retired
deputy fire
chief.
Cawley had
an older
brother who
had died on
9/11.
Then came the transmissions:8:30:43: “Mayday! Mayday 56! Man down, fell out the window!”
8:30:48: “Mayday! Mayday!”
8:30:49: “Fireman down in the rear! Two firemen down in the rear!”
8:30:51: “Two firemen down in the rear—let’s go!”
8:30:54: “Seventy-five, put your pumps…”
8:30:58: “Mayday! Mayday! Two firemen jumped from the top floor in the rear. We need a…”
8:31:09: “Brother in the…”
“Oh, man!”
8:31:15: “Start a mixer off—we got a whole company in the rear, they had to jump.”
8:31:23: “No way, no…”
“We got six guys…”
8:31:35: “Roof, let the rope down!”
8:31:40: “Mayday! Mayday in the rear! We need EMS in the rear.”
8:32:20: “One, two, three, four, five, six who jumped in the rear! We need massive EMS here! Massive injuries!”
On the morning of January 23, 2005, six firefighters jumped out of four fourth-story windows of a tenement at 236 East 178th Street in the Bronx, falling 50 feet to the pavement. Two of them, Curt Meyran and John Bellew, died from their injuries; another four—Gene Stolowski, Brendan Cawley, Joe DiBernardo, and Jeff Cool—barely survived, sustaining massive injuries of their own that left several of them in the hospital for months and effectively ended their careers. Another firefighter, Richard Sclafani, died at an unrelated fire in Brooklyn that same afternoon, making that day the first since 1918 that men had died in two separate incidents in the city; the dual tragedies have come to be known as Black Sunday.
Now the surviving firefighters are telling their version of the story for the first time. To date, the men have spoken publicly only briefly, but because of litigation they’ve filed against the city, they’ve avoided giving a full account of what happened that day. In the past few months, however, the four of them have begun appearing at private firefighter gatherings to tell their story, and three of them sat with New York Magazine for their first extensive interviews, speaking out about controversies that have surrounded the fire for two years. Shouldn’t the department have outfitted the firefighters with personal-safety ropes—a piece of equipment that was once standard issue but was not provided at the time? Is the building’s landlord primarily to blame, for blocking off access to the fire escape with an illegal subdivision? Should the department have kept the six men on the fourth floor that long, given the problems with the hydrants and hoses? Or were the men themselves in part at fault for not making their situation clear to the officers on the ground? The survivors’ stories also reveal for the first time something much more personal: just how deeply the tragedy has affected them and their families. Their lives—once centered around straightforward concepts like action and adrenaline, honor and bravery—are more complicated than they once were. They are heroes, but they are lost.
It took the Ladder 27 crew longer than they expected—about six minutes—to make it just ten blocks. The blizzard was part of the problem, as was a double-parked truck on East Tremont Avenue. It didn’t help that they had the wrong address, though that was quickly corrected. When Gene Stolowski saw Engine 42 and Ladder 33 stretching hoses up to the third floor of the building, he knew this one was real. “I think we got something,” he told Brendan Cawley. “Let’s go.”
Curt Meyran, Stolowski, and Cawley walked into the front entryway, a wide foyer where they saw the first signs of smoke (John Bellew, the driver, came up a few minutes later). Up they marched, passing the guys from Ladder 33 on the third floor. But already, things had started going wrong.
At 8:05 a.m., about the same time that Ladder 27 had arrived, the driver from Engine 42 had reported the frozen hydrant. Outside, firefighters hustled to connect hoses to a booster tank on their truck, while others stretched hoses to hydrants farther away. For a moment, the third floor got water back, then lost it again; then the water came back but the pressure was too weak and the nozzle would shut. Now the hoses seemed to be frozen or ruptured: No one knew which. Without water, the fire was spreading unchecked.
When the Ladder 27 crew reached the fourth floor, Meyran told Stolowski to prop open the stairway door with his maul. Meyran, Stolowski, and Cawley slipped on their oxygen masks and walked into Apartment 4-L. Everything was pitch-black—no lights, no windows, nothing but smoke. Clothes and furniture were everywhere. Cawley had to feel his way around so he wouldn’t trip. In one of the bedrooms, he ran into another firefighter, knocking him to the floor; he looked at the uniform and saw a number three. He later guessed it was Jeff Cool, who’d made it upstairs with Joe DiBernardo and others from Rescue 3.
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From left, Jeff Cool outside his home in Rockland Country; Brendan Cawley outside his apartment in midtown Manhattan.
(Photo: Mary Ellen Mark)
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Ten minutes passed as the six men from the two units did their job. The hoses still weren’t working, but they weren’t worried yet. “We’re thinking, The fire’s going out,” Stolowski remembers. “We’re thinking, This is a routine fire.” And after they smashed open a few windows in several bedrooms, the smoke began to clear, making the situation seem less urgent.
It was then that Meyran learned that the water wasn’t coming anytime soon. “We need to find a secondary means of egress,” he told Cawley. Cawley had already told him that he’d identified a fire escape. He and Meyran started feeling along the wall, trying to get to the hallway that led to it. But they were interrupted when the vibrating alert on their oxygen tanks went off. They each had just a quarter-tank left—enough in most cases to get out of a building. “Let’s go,” Meyran said.
They were on their way back to the stairwell when they spotted Stolowski, who had been in the next bedroom. His tank was already empty, and he’d pulled off his mask. They hustled Stolowski to a window, outside of which a team of firefighters on the roof had dangled a mask and supplemental oxygen tank. Meyran stood at the window. Stolowski, who was next to him with Cawley, had pulled the mask in and was on his knees, gulping air. “What I had planned on is, we’ll all take breaths and just walk out of the apartment,” Stolowski says. “Meyran had asked Brendan to take his mask off. I was going to give him the mask. That’s when the heat hit him.”
They didn’t see the fire as much as feel it. Cawley describes it as a wave of heat that smacked him in the head. Suddenly the probie was hearing Meyran calling Mayday. “I’m just out of the academy,” Cawley recalls, “but I knew we were in a world of shit.”
They were trapped at the window now, the three of them. Meyran told Cawley to take off his mask to prepare him for what they knew had to happen next. They were in the back of the building, staring into an alley ten feet below street level. If they jumped, they would plunge 50 feet.
The window wasn’t big enough for three men in helmets and masks with tanks on their backs to poke their heads out. So Meyran got on all fours, straddling the window—one arm and leg inside, one arm and leg outside. Stolowski and Cawley knelt at the windowsill, leaned over Meyran’s back, and breathed. “It was unbelievable that he could even think of doing that,” Cawley says. They waited for help, but by then, they knew there was no way out but the window.
Meyran’s place at the window made him the natural choice to jump first. Cawley and Stolowski held on to Meyran as he dangled from the windowsill. Stolowski let go of Meyran first, then Cawley let go of him. The probie watched as his boss fell to the ground. Cawley was next: Stolowski grabbed him and pulled him up and over the windowsill—but kept holding the probie’s coat, lowering him as far as he could before letting him go.
By then the fire was too strong for Stolowski to finesse his exit. He jumped out the window headfirst. Dangling on a window gate for a few moments, he could see through a lower window into the third-floor. If fire blows out that window, I’m gonna get cooked, he thought. Then he fell.
Jeff Cool had been walking toward Meyran, Cawley, and Stolowski from the kitchen when the fire came. He wound up standing at a window next to the one where the three others had gathered. Sticking his head outside, Cool was waiting for a rope from above—he’d heard something on his radio about the roof men—but help never came. At the next window, one bedroom over, Cool saw Joe DiBernardo, yelling into his walkie-talkie for help. A minute later, at 8:30 a.m., the heat was too much for both men. DiBernardo radioed again. “We’re bailing out of here. Hurry up!”
Cool pulled out a safety rope—one he’d bought months earlier at a trade show. He was the only one with a rope. He called over to DiBernardo, “I have nowhere to anchor it!”
“Throw it to me,” DiBernardo said. “I’ll anchor you.”
Cool threw one end of the rope. He wanted DiBernardo to drop first, with Cool anchoring him. But DiBernardo shook his head.
“You have a wife and kids,” he said. “You go first.”
DiBernardo lowered Cool out of the window. When Cool swung over the edge, he slammed into the side of the building, knocking the wind out of him. Either the rope slipped or Cool let go—even he isn’t sure—but then Cool fell. DiBernardo tied the rope to the window, lowered himself down, and then dropped.
None of the
men saw John
Bellew fall.
But a
lieutenant
who was in
the backyard
told Cawley
that he saw
Bellew climb
out, hang on
for a few
seconds,
then
release,
just as Curt
Meyran had.
“It’s kind
of
consoling, I
guess,” says
Cawley, “to
know that
John knew
what was
going on and
made the
decision,
rather than
just jumping
out.”
The bodies
of six
firefighters
now lay on
the ground.
When
Stolowski
had let
Cawley go,
the probie
had tipped
backward and
started
falling
headfirst.
“I kind of
tucked my
chin to my
chest
because I
knew I was
falling
upside
down,” he
says. “I
didn’t want
to land on
my head.” He
landed on
his upper
back,
shattering
his right
shoulder,
cracking his
ribs,
splitting
his skull,
and
collapsing a
lung. He
used his
right arm to
pull himself
up to a
sitting
position so
he could
breathe
easier. Then
he passed
out.
Stolowski
caught
something of
a break when
the top of
his shoulder
pack got
snagged on
the window
guard,
swinging his
body
around—had
he fallen
headfirst,
he almost
certainly
would have
died. Still,
the force of
the impact
broke his
neck. He
stopped
breathing,
but when a
firefighter
administered
CPR,
Stolowski
awoke,
feeling snow
on his face.
His oxygen
tank had
kept his
head from
snapping so
far back
that he
would have
died.
DiBernardo
landed feet
first,
shattering
everything
from his
waist down.
“I didn’t
even feel
the cold,”
he would say
later. “All
I felt was
the pain in
my legs.”
Cool broke
both his
shoulders,
fractured
his skull in
two places,
shattered
his pelvis
in three,
and broke
thirteen
ribs and an
arm. But he
was
conscious
enough to
talk to two
firefighters
who held a
shower
curtain over
him to keep
burning
embers from
falling on
him.
Eileen
Bellew made
it to St.
Barnabas
Hospital in
the Bronx in
time to say
good-bye to
John. When
his body was
taken out of
the ER, 200
firefighters
were packed
in the
hospital
hallways,
lining up in
a double
formation
and
saluting.
Racing in an
FDNY van to
the
hospital,
Jeanette
Meyran tried
to calm
herself.
There’s no
chaplain
with me?
We’re good,
then. We’re
going to St.
Barnabas,
not the Burn
Center? All
right.
She was
ushered into
the hospital
past a
gauntlet of
TV-news
crews.
Firefighters
escorted her
through the
crowds and
into a
waiting
room. There
was a man
there she’d
seen before,
a man much
shorter than
Curt. It was
Mayor
Bloomberg.
“Mrs.
Meyran,” the
mayor said.
“I’m so
sorry.”
“Sorry for
what?”
The mayor
flinched.
She hadn’t
been told
yet.
“He did it
for the
city,” he
said.
“He did
what for
the city?”
The mayor
tried again.
“He didn’t
make it.”
It took time
for Curt to
be cleaned
up so that
Jeanette
could see
him. In that
time, she
collapsed.
Finally, she
was brought
through
hospital
hallways
packed with
firemen
still
wearing
their gear,
grime still
on their
faces.
Then she saw
her husband.
Curt looked
exhausted.
“I knew him
25 years,”
she
remembers.
“I knew his
lip would
dip a little
when he was
tired. But
this just
wasn’t real.
And I just
kept asking
him to wake
up.”
The two
firefighters’
funerals
were
full-scale
FDNY
tributes—one
in Pearl
River, the
other on
Long Island,
each drawing
more than
8,000
people.
Meyran’s
16-year-old
son, Dennis,
wore his
father’s
blue FDNY
jacket.
Bellew’s
oldest boy,
Jack, wore
his father’s
helmet.
Black sunday
was
instantly
seen as one
of the
department’s
darkest
moments, and
no sooner
had the four
surviving
firefighters
arrived at
the hospital
than people
started
looking for
causes and
attempting
to place
blame.
First, there
was the
issue of
safety
ropes. The
FDNY had
long
supplied
firefighters
with them,
but had
stopped
doing so in
2000—ostensibly
because they
were too
bulky and
the men
weren’t
using them
(some say
cost was a
factor). Now
the question
was whether
the lack of
ropes cost
two men
their lives
and four
others their
careers. By
April 2005,
the four
surviving
firefighters
and both
widows filed
notices to
sue the city
for not
supplying
ropes; the
cases have
since been
consolidated,
and the
lawsuit is
still
pending.
Next there
was the
matter of
the
chopped-up
apartment.
From the day
after the
fire, the
FDNY blamed
the landlord
for
violating
the fire
codes and
building a
wall that
kept the men
from the
fire escape.
A year after
the fire,
the Bronx
district
attorney
charged
three
people—the
landlord and
two
tenants—for
making
alterations
in the
building;
the case is
still
ongoing. If
convicted,
the three
people
charged
could be the
first in the
city to be
held
criminally
responsible
for deaths
because of
alterations
made to
their
apartments.
In September 2005, the FDNY filed a response of sorts to many of the questions about Black Sunday in the form of its official fatality report. The product of dozens of interviews and reviews of the transmissions and logs from that day, the report acknowledged that ropes might have been helpful that day but stopped short of recommending reissuing them departmentwide. The wall that blocked the fire escape was cited as a problem, as was the weather. But the report found fault elsewhere too—particularly with the men on the scene. For the first time, human error was suggested as a possible factor in the tragedy.
The six victims, according to the report, stayed on the fourth floor too long without a working hose line and failed to tell anyone on the ground that they were essentially trapped. Others were blamed, too—like the men on the ground who didn’t order the men back downstairs as soon as the hoses failed and the men working the booster water pump when the hydrant failed—who, the report says, might not have understood how certain new equipment worked. And Curt Meyran, the report found, didn’t identify himself properly with his first Mayday call.
The issue of whether the city is culpable for anything it did or didn’t do, it bears noting, was scrupulously avoided. But a month after the report was released, the FDNY brought back the ropes.
It’s a clear day just before New Year’s, and Gene Stolowski is standing in the driveway of his split-level house in the foothills of the Catskills, an hour’s drive from the George Washington Bridge, watching his 4-year-old, Briana, teeter on a bike with training wheels. Of the four survivors, Stolowski has endured the slowest and most painstaking recovery. He was given his last rites three nights after the fire when he developed a blood clot on his spine. Doctors took seven hours to place titanium screws in his skull and neck. He had eight more surgeries in the first two weeks and fought off infections and 106 degree fevers. Doctors gave him a 5 percent chance of survival. Then, weeks later, Stolowski moved his fingers. His physicians began to see hope for a recovery.
Briana was kept from seeing Stolowski for a month after the accident because he looked so scary. When Briana asked one day if her daddy loved her anymore, Stolowski’s wife, Brigid, decided to let her see him. “That’s not my daddy,” Briana said.
On February 22, 2005, Stolowski was released to a rehab center but given a 30 percent chance of walking again. He didn’t come home until the following September, eight months after the fire. On April 12, 2005, thrown into labor two months early by the stress, Brigid delivered twin girls, Kaitlin and Kailey. For the next year, Brigid was handling two newborns, a toddler, and a husband who couldn’t get to the bathroom on his own.
Stolowski’s firefighter pals built a shower on the ground level of his house and rigged it for a wheelchair. He walks now, with a limp, and he can hold the babies in his lap, even lift them. But he’ll always have a neck problem; he can’t turn his head more than a few inches in either direction. Sometime in the next few years, he’ll need another neck surgery. And money’s a problem: On permanent medical leave, he’s collecting just his regular salary now, no overtime.
The other survivors have lived through variations on the same grim themes. Doctors had to remove Jeff Cool’s vital organs from his chest to reduce swelling; he received 46 pints of blood and stayed in a coma for three weeks before being released from the hospital on February 18. He still walks with a limp, has constant pain and needs regular physical therapy, and, like Stolowski, was placed on permanent medical leave. Joe DiBernardo underwent eleven hours of surgery on his right leg and nine hours on his left; his coma lasted eighteen days, during which he twice received last rites. When he finally awoke, he was 40 pounds lighter—despite the addition of ten titanium plates and 60 screws in his lower body. On May 10, 2005, he was promoted to lieutenant, though it was clear he wasn’t going back on duty; that day, he took his first steps without a cane, and a few months later, he danced at his sister’s wedding. But he lives with chronic pain, and by Thanksgiving, he was back at Weill Cornell when some of the screws in his left leg had begun to shear off, ripping into his muscles. In January 2006, he signed his retirement papers.
Brendan Cawley’s mother pleaded with the doctors not to let him die. Cawley’s brother Michael, also a firefighter, was killed on 9/11—one son lost was more than enough. In fact, Cawley was the luckiest, relatively speaking, of the four survivors. Despite his multiple fractures and a brain hemorrhage, he was released from the hospital just six days after Black Sunday. At first, he thought he’d be back at the firehouse by September. “I didn’t have a shot,” he realizes now. For the next year, he was in physical therapy. He did light duty at the fire academy last summer, helping out instructors and hanging around with the probies. But then he needed another shoulder surgery in September and was placed back on medical leave. Kerry Kelly, the chief medical officer of the FDNY, has encouraged him not to give himself any deadlines. “She said to me, ‘Let’s get Brendan back to being Brendan again, and then being a firefighter.’”
The survivors and the widows share other common bonds—grief, guilt, doubt, anger. “I always tell the probies when they go out to the field that if you’re going to see this report, to take it in the bathroom stall and wipe your ass with it,” Gene Stolowski says of the fire department’s summary of the tragedy. It’s not that the report fails to deal with the ropes or illegal partition wall, he says. It’s that it weighs them equally with all the other factors; it assumes everything has the same importance. He particularly bristles at the notion that Meyran should have ordered the men out earlier. “Some guys can read this report and think that we were in an untenable position and should not have been in there. They don’t get the sense from this report that we were driven to the floor. You know, we weren’t hanging out in there for no reason. The shit hit the fan as fast as it could.”
Still, it’s not like Stolowski doesn’t replay the fire in his mind. “For whatever reason, I never went into the kitchen,” he says. He’s talking about how he might have found the hallway that led to the fire escape. “I don’t know why. Sometimes I kick myself in the ass. You always second-guess yourself.”
Then he turns wistful. “Yeah, I tell everybody I would go back tomorrow and do it again,” he says. “I will always say it’s the greatest job. To be able to do what we did—you know, just run into a burning building? It’s crazy!” He laughs. “I won most of the fires I was in. And I guess I only lost one. That was January 23rd. We lost.”
Unlike the others, Brendan Cawley is still hoping to get back to work, but even if he proves physically able, he still has emotional issues. “I don’t want to say I’m claustrophobic,” he says, “but when I think about what I had to do that day, I’m probably more scared now.” He has grown close to the widows and their families; being with them, oddly enough, helps assuage his survivor guilt. “I guess I can relate to their losses because I went through it, losing my brother,” he says. “But these poor kids, losing their dad, that’s hard. And it was so avoidable.” He says he owes a special debt to Meyran. “A lot of guys say he was the boss, he should have been the last one out,” Cawley says. “But I don’t know if I would have went if he didn’t go first.”
Joe DiBernardo was the only one of the four survivors who wouldn’t be interviewed for this story; going over Black Sunday again wasn’t good for his recovery, he said. But his feelings about the case against the landlord and tenants are clear. “They can lock them up, put them away forever on manslaughter charges,” he told a newspaper last year, “but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m not going to be a firefighter again, that I’m living with a broken body and there are two widows and all these fatherless children.” (All three defendants maintain their innocence. Ironically, one of their lawyers, Sam Braverman, has seized on the ropes issue as a defense. “The illegal subdivision did not cause their deaths,” he said last March. “If these firemen had ropes, my client would not be in jail right now.’’)
Even from his bed at St. Barnabas, Jeff Cool begged fire commissioner Nicholas Scopetta to bring back personal-safety ropes. Now he’s become an activist on the subject, lecturing at fire trade events and lobbying officials around the country. New York’s getting them is not enough, he says—though he says it’s clear why the men didn’t have them that day. “I’m telling you right now, it had everything to do with dollars.” As sure as he’s standing there, he says, the $375 rope he’d bought with his own credit card saved him and Joe DiBernardo. Now he wants national legislation for every firefighter to have one. Failing that, he’d like the National Fire Protection Association to change its standards to include personal ropes and harnesses for each firefighter. He’s also lectured probies on the subject, “but I think I scared the shit out of them, because I haven’t been asked back.”
Cool is just as outspoken on the question of the chopped-up apartment. “Here we are on the two-year anniversary of this fire, and there’s no end in sight on where we are with this trial,” he says. “We’ve got three criminals, safe as can be, walking around with their lives. They were enjoying Christmas, enjoying New Year’s. The four of us are screwed up beyond belief. Two of us are dead. And these guys are walking the street.”
On February 9, two weeks after the fire, with department personnel still chauffeuring her and the kids, Jeanette Meyran asked to visit the building where Curt died. She came away appalled. Even forgetting the fire, “the place was filthy,” she remembers thinking. Then she got mad. “I can’t believe he risked his life for people like that. Poor is one thing, filthy is another. This is what he was fighting for?”
Then, just as quickly, she softened. “I never knew this was what he faced every day. He risked his life—putting aside the adrenaline and the thrill-seeking. There was never an impossible situation for Curt. With him, there was always a way. He could fix it. He was so good at making us feel so secure. A few weeks later, I remember being at a mall with the kids, and my son turned and said, ‘Mommy—I feel so unprotected.’”
“It’s a dirty, dirty game,” said the widow. “Human error.
Lines frozen. Hydrants. I know who to blame.”
Exiting the apartment, Jeanette made a statement to the press, who’d been tipped off to the widow’s visit. Inside, she’d seen a radiator and a TV console. Curt could have tied off to either one, had he been given a personal-safety rope. By the following October, when the city announced it was giving safety ropes to every firefighter again, Jeanette came to the event uninvited and said, “A day late and a dollar short, obviously.” Later, turning up at another FDNY event, she remarked, “I would not be here today but for a lousy piece of rope.”
As for the FDNY’s official report, she says, “It’s a dirty, dirty game. Human error. Lines frozen. Hydrants. If my husband had a rope, he might be here. If John Bellew had a rope, he might be here. I know who to blame. They died in that building. They worked for the City of New York.”
In January 2006, at a ceremony marking the first anniversary of the fire, Bloomberg and Jeanette met again.
“Jeanette,” she remembers him saying. “You have to stop this crusade. It’s been a year. You have to move on. Curt would not want his widow to live this way.”
“I appreciate your concern,” she remembers replying. “But how does that help me and my children?”
Bloomberg looked away from her. “Take care of this woman,” he said, and walked away.
“There’s a protocol for the FDNY widow,” Jeanette says now. “You’re in shock, then you go away. I’m not following that protocol.”
Eileen Bellew is also a party to the ropes lawsuit. But unlike Jeanette, she’s reluctant to play a part in any publicity about the tragedy. In a sense, culpability is a nonissue for her; she’s resisted making her husband’s life about any one issue. “I still have to get up every morning,” she said when the charges were filed, “and take care of four kids.”
Jeff Cool is retiring today. It is the Tuesday before Christmas, and Cool, wearing a black Rescue 3 golf shirt and dark-blue jeans, is at the FDNY headquarters in Brooklyn. “Why now?” someone he knows asks him in the lobby. The answer has to do with his medical benefits: He’ll still have three-quarter’s salary, but now that he’s sufficiently recovered, he’ll go to an HMO.
Cool takes the elevator to the office where the final paperwork will be done, wandering through a maze of gray cubicles and stopping at one in the back. There is a woman sitting there. He takes a breath.
“I’m retiring today,” he tells the woman.
“Regular or three-quarters?” she asks.
“Three-quarters,” he says. “Here’s the form.”
She looks at the form. “Oh, you’re Mr. Cool!”
“Yeah,” he says. “The chief told you about me?”
“Yeah. How you feeling?”
“Pretty good,” he says. “Well, I have pain every day. I’m lucky to be alive.”
“I hear that.”
It’s time to get a picture taken for his retired-firefighter I.D. “You’ll have to put a firefighter shirt on,” she says.
He glances at his Rescue 3 golf shirt—but she points to a gray filing cabinet behind him. Dangling from the lock on metal hangers are a few FDNY dress shirts with ties pre-done around their collars.
He has a choice: white or blue. He puts on a white shirt and black tie.
Jeff Cool has a recurring dream now where he’s back at probie school. An instructor he remembers is talking to his class of 109 guys, and he’s sitting there with the rest of them, listening. The instructor is talking about someone, he’s not sure who. But he’s saying, “He was a good firefighter. But he died. Look around at this class. Some of you guys aren’t going to make twenty years.”
And in the dream, Cool looks around and says to himself, “Well, we’ll see.”
That’s when he usually wakes up.
“Are you ready?” the woman says, fiddling with a digital camera.
“Yes.”
“Smiling is good.”
He smiles.
Flash.
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