By Jeffry Scott
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Copyright 2006 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
At Grady Memorial Hospital, firefighters have crowded the waiting room ever since Steven Solomon went down Thanksgiving night while fighting a blaze in a small abandoned house in the Vine City section of Atlanta.
Sometimes they have numbered more than 50 in the waiting room. Always, there are at least a dozen waiting, comforting Solomon’s wife, comforting each other, and serving as a greater family for his four young children as he lay in a coma with burns over 30 percent of his body.
At Solomon’s fire station No. 16 on Simpson Street, on the west side of downtown, fellow firefighters gathered in the break room. A football game blared from the TV as if it were just another autumn Saturday afternoon, and they joked --- uncomfortably.
“That’s the way we deal with it,” explained Lt. Kenneth Fisher. “We joke.”
Eight blocks away on Elm Street, Atlanta fire chief Dennis Rubin was with investigators poking through the charred inside of the building where Solomon was burned and overcome by smoke. The crew was hoping to get a fuller understanding of what happened that night.
The first 24 hours after Solomon, 33, was pulled from the house with third-degree burns on his hands, face and chest, he almost died at least four times: on the way to the hospital, and at the hospital, where his heart has stopped beating three times, said Rubin. On Saturday, the chief tried to put the best face on things.
“By no means is Steven out of the woods --- but there’s hope now,” he said. “His pulse is steady, and his blood pressure is steady. Yesterday, his oxygen saturation level was 40 percent and now it’s 97 percent. You can survive with that, 97 percent. But you’re not going to make it with 40 percent.”
He said what worries him and doctors now is “something called burn shock. We worry about infection and pneumonia. But the doctors at Grady, I can’t say enough about them. They have worked brilliantly to provide a good outcome.”
According to firefighters at Solomon’s station, he appeared to have become disoriented or lost in the small building when the blaze suddenly flared up and the crews ordered a retreat from the building.
“He might have run through the wrong door, thinking it was an exit,” said Fisher. Using an infrared camera that detects a body by the heat it generates, they located Solomon and carried him from the building.
Atlanta Fire spokesman Capt. Byron Kennedy said investigators believe the fire was started accidently by a someone who lit a fire in the building to cook or keep warm.
Firefighters at Station 16 said Saturday they barely knew Solomon, who just joined the station about a month ago after six years as a firefighter for the Macon-Bibb County Fire Department and was still looking for a new home in Atlanta for his family.
But they’ve started a Christmas fund for Solomon, asking for a minimum $25 donation from each firefighter. And on Tuesday they’re having Solomon’s wife and children to the station for a dinner of Southern cooking.
“We’re going to make sure they have a good Christmas,” said Fisher. “We’re going to take care of them any way we can, anything they need.”
The fire department is working with Atlanta hotels to house Solomon’s wife and children, said Kennedy, and has set up a Steven Solomon donation fund at Wachovia bank.