intelligent and thoughtful man, and he wasn’t about to accept
that as an answer. Instead, for the next two hours, again and
again he led the firefighter back over the events of that day in
an attempt to document precisely what the lieutenant did and
didn’t know. “The first thing was that the fire didn’t behave the
way it was supposed to,” Klein says. Kitchen fires should
respond to water. This one didn’t. “Then they moved back into
the living room,” Klein went on. “He told me that he always
keeps his earflaps up because he wants to get a sense of how
hot the fire is, and he was surprised at how hot this one was. A
kitchen fire shouldn’t have been that hot. I asked him, ‘What
else?’ Often a sign of expertise is noticing what doesn’t happen,
and the other thing that surprised him was that the fire wasn’t
noisy. It was quiet, and that didn’t make sense given how much
heat there was.”
In retrospect all those anomalies make perfect sense. The
fire didn’t respond to being sprayed in the kitchen because it
wasn’t centered in the kitchen. It was quiet because it was
muffled by the floor. The living room was hot because the fire
was underneath the living room, and heat rises. At the time,
though, the lieutenant made none of those connections
consciously. All of his thinking was going on behind the locked