76 June 2019 _ PopularMechanics.com
TREVORPAULUScan’t go any higher in the building until they deal with this. They
grab a standard line—an inch and three-quarters, 200 feet long—
pull it up the stairs, and tell the driver to charge it.
They manage to knock the fire down, which allows them to safely
evacuate the last remaining people on the third floor. There is no
time for anyone to collect their belongings. From across the street,
at the R Arias Market, where the people in this building buy milk
and bread and Gatorade and lottery tickets, the manager sees peo-
ple he recognizes running—streaming out of the building, “saving
nothing but their lives.”
Though at first the firefighters seem to be having some success
on the third floor, the situation changes: It becomes an exterior fire,
meaning it has a fuel source—leaking gas. You can keep hitting that
kind of fire, but it’s not going to go out.
When the fire reaches the cockloft, the top of the roof explodes
and shoots out flames. The chief orders his men out of the building.
Inside, in the narrow stairwell, it is so hot and smoky that the last
two firefighters clearing the building get tangled up and fall down
the stairs. They are rushed to the hospital.
Moriarty had put out a call for a second pump to station itself
behind the building, and one finally arrives. “Lay in the alleyway,”
he says. “You gotta use your gun from the back of the building.” They
get the deck gun up—a mounted rotating high-pressure hose—and
start pummeling the building.
Jenny Caceres watches from the street—frozen. Numb, even.
She and her kids ran out of their apartment so fast that her younger
daughter, who is barefoot, hadn’t even had time to grab her shoes.
Her older daughter, who’s eighteen, forgot the glass eye she has worn
every day since she was nine.
Lawrence Police Department
Lowell Street, Lawrence
4:15 P.M.
OFFICER IVAN SOTO is in the interview room at the Lawrence Police
Department. Cinder-block walls, thick white paint, gray f loor.
Across a laminate-topped table sits a woman, a victim of domes-
tic violence—he is walking her through the process of securing a
restraining order. Suddenly, his radio, which he’d kept on at a low
volume, crackles in the background.
A fire.
The door flies open. That’s unusual, to be interrupted during a
sensitive conversation like this one. It’s his sergeant, who tells him
to drive to South Lawrence right away.
Soto asks where, exactly.
“Just listen to the radio,” the sergeant says.
That isn’t what you want to hear as an officer—you want to get
where you’re going as efficiently as you can. But Soto hops into his
cruiser, lights and sirens. Glanc-
ing at the map on his onboard
computer, he sees it says FIRE
in at least thirty different places.
35 Chickering Road
ITS MASSIVE WEIGHT makes
a chimney stable. That weight
pushes down much harder ver-
tically than most forces that
might want to push it horizon-
tally, like a hurricane. As long
as that equation holds, so does
the chimney.
But an explosion is much
stronger than a chimney is
heav y.
The walls of 35 Chickering Road give before they blow out: Wood,
as a material, has significant elasticity. Masonry has far less. When
the shock wave crashes into the right side of the house, the chim-
ney absorbs most of its force.
The chimney kicks away from the house. The energy it absorbed
is translated into torque, which travels from the strong, broad base
of the chimney to the narrow upper portion, which has less weight
above it to protect it.
The chimney is coming apart now. Like a whip cracking, it
throws off a chunk of masonry that flies into the air, coming apart
into at least t wo pieces as ang ular rotationa l forces continue to work
on it. The smaller pieces land harmlessly on the driveway. The larg-
est piece crashes down onto the roof of the silver CR-V.
The impact is like a head-on collision at high speed, but from
an angle that no car-safety advocate or automobile designer could
ever plan for. Chimneys aren’t built to withstand explosions, and
car roofs aren’t built to repel falling blocks of masonry.DEPUTY CHIEF TO DISPATCH: We have one person
taken out of the house. We have one entrapped in the
vehicle. We need EMS here immediately. —Lawrence
Fire Department radio communicationLAWRENCE CHIEF OF POLICE Roy Vasque is first on the scene. He
looks around at the debris everywhere. He smells gas.
Chief Vasque had heard about these things in the past, whole
neighborhoods wiped out. There is, he believes, the possibility of
more explosions.
What is the magnitude of this thing?
How are we gonna handle this?
He gets to work. The house looks like a ship that a storm seized
and smashed against the shore. You can barely distinguish
between the structure and the things that used to be inside. A
gray mass has been disgorged onto the front yard—furniture,
tufts of insulation, shards of wood and drywall, grotesque tan-
gles of electrical wire.
Neighbors spill out of their houses onto the street—people who had
been ma king dinner or get ting ready to go to work. They have bew il-
derment and fear on their faces. Vasque yells at them to leave the area.
Some people by the destroyed house see him and run over. They
are screaming, in hysterics; he has difficult y ma king sense of what
they are saying. Soon Vasque understands: Somebody is trapped
in the vehicle.SHAKIRA CLOSES HER eyes when she feels herself falling. Every-
thing goes dark. It all happens in an instant. She isn’t sure where
she lands. When she opens her eyes, she sees dust and insulation
floating in the air around her,
like a snowfall out of season.
Her house. These walls
had held her family together
these last years, when other
families might have come
apart. Shakira used to have
a twin. Joshua. When they
were thirteen, there was
this one morning in May
when a bunch of kids were
playing down in the Merri-
mack River, not far from the
house, like they always did.
There was an accident, and
Joshua drowned. The pain
was almost unbearable, andOfficer Ivan Soto, a first responder,
helped evacuate houses in danger,
even as his own home burned.