Duck Bridge over the Merrimack River,
Between Lawrence and
South Lawrence
4:12 P.M.
LAWRENCE FIREFIGHTER Jimmy Quinn, riding in Engine No. 5,
has just closed an emergency call for an elderly man who had fallen
in his bathroom.
The radio in Engine No. 5 crackles: Attention all companies,
alarm and fire, sending out to Box 6111. Reported address is 35
Phillips Street, located between Farnham Street and Andover
Street. Engine 9, Engine 5, Ladder 4, Rescue 1.
The response—two engines, a ladder, and a rescue vehicle—
is standard for a one-alarm fire. These calls come in all the time.
But as Engine No. 5 crosses the Merrimack River toward the Box
6111 section of South Lawrence, Quinn notices several police
cars flying past, all heading in the same direction. Something big
is happening. Maybe somebody shot somebody and lit the house
on fire, he thinks.
That’s how the job goes. The city of Boston has four thousand
structure fires a year. Lawrence? There were seventy-four in 2017.
So you train, and you practice, and you make sure you know what to
do when the big call comes. Mostly, though, it doesn’t. Your shifts
are filled with small runs—a man who fell in the bathroom, some-
thing that burned in the oven, a worrisome smell in the church
basement. The type of stuff you’ve already forgotten by the time
you get home and open a beer, or down the coffee your wife made
while you helped get the kids ready for school.
At the scene, Quinn finds members of Engine Company No. 39,
who’d gotten there first. They were already finishing up—no shout-
ing, no one running around. Just a fellow firefighter putting away
his wrench. There’d been some heat and light smoke in the base-
ment, they said. They’d shut off the gas. A quarter turn of a bolt,
easy as screwing the lid on the peanut butter.
Then dispatch reports another basement fire just down the
street, at the corner of Bailey.
Then four more:
28 Springfield Street.
259 Farnham Street.
47 A d a ms S t r e e t.
137 Adams Street.
All basement fires.35 Chickering Road
INSIDE HER HOUSE, Omayra tidies up the clutter that accumulates
in a house on a summer day when the kids are home—the magazines
on the living-room couch, the lunch plates ready for the dishwasher,
the sneakers under the dining-room table. In the basement, a load
of laundry sloshes in the washer.
Leonel and her sons w ill be hungr y soon—Leonel ends up at their
table all the time, he is like another son to her—so she puts rice and
beans on the stove. She and Shakira take turns showering. The two
of them are going to eat at a Mexican restaurant in nearby Lowell
that Omayra likes; on Thursdays there is live mariachi.
Omayra runs the clothes dryer. She takes the beans off the gas
and stirs the rice.6-8-10-12 Springfield Street, Lawrence
EVEN IF THERE really is a fire in her building—a century-old, six-
unit wood-frame triple-decker—they seem to have caught it early,
Jenny Caceres thinks. She can hear sirens approaching, which
reassures her.
A few minutes earlier, she’d been trying to scramble some eggs,
but the burners on her stove sputtered and wouldn’t ignite. Then the
landlord came to her door to tell her and her two teenage daughters
to evacuate the building immediately. The gas meter in the base-
ment was spinning around uncontrollably, he said—like a cartoon.The first fire truck to
reach the Gibbs house
was a ladder truck—no
water pump. Still, the
firefighters ran into
the house, armed only
with extinguishers.