Rescue efforts were well-timed, well-executed, but fire still took 5
By Torsten Ove
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Copyright 2007 P.G. Publishing Co.
PITTSBURGH — Pittsburgh firefighters have undergone several mandatory, critical-incident stress debriefings and reviewed over and over how they handled the attempted rescue of five children who died this week in the Larimer fire.
“I went home the next day and said, ‘What could we have possibly done to give these kids a chance to survive?’ ” said James Wyzomirski, captain of Truck 8 in East Liberty, the first unit on the scene along with Engine 8 early Tuesday.
“There’s nothing we could have done. Most fires, something goes wrong [with the rescue]. Not this one. I think we had those [first three] kids out of there in under two minutes.”
When firefighters pulled onto Winslow Street within four minutes of receiving the alarm at 1:23 a.m., he said, embers were falling from the sky, indicating the house had been burning for a while.
They heard no screams, and no one from the house was outside, on the street.
Capt. Wyzomirski said a live power line was lying across the street. Firefighters from Battalion 3 removed the power line while Capt. Wyzomirski and his crew parked their ladder truck and jumped out.
All they knew is what they’d heard on the radio: house fire, children possibly entrapped.
The front door was wide open but the fire was too intense for them to go in that way.
The men grabbed their ladders to reach the second floor. As they did, a woman, probably Fuhara Love, the mother of some of the children in the house, came running down the street, grabbed Lieutenant Jim Crawford and screamed, “My three babies, my three babies!”
“She screamed it over and over, my three babies,” said Capt. Wyzomirski. “That’s what sticks in my mind.”
He and firefighter Eddie Weist broke the windows on the second floor and crawled inside with their masks and oxygen tanks on. It was too dark and smoky to see anything, but in scanning the room with his thermal imager, Capt. Wyzomirski saw a red spot.
“I almost passed it over,” he said.
He reached out and felt a child. A lot of times, he said, what feels like a child turns out to be a doll.
He took his glove off and realized this was no doll. He screamed out that he had a child.
Firefighter Weist immediately moved to the ladder to direct his captain in the darkness, shouting his nickname, “Wiz, Wiz, this way, this way!”
Capt. Wyzomirski handed off the child, who was unresponsive but not burned, to Firefighter Weist, who in turn handed the child to a paramedic on the ladder.
Capt. Wyzomirski quickly located a second child, this one on a bed, and called out, “Ed, I found another one!”
He handed that one to Firefighter Weist and continued scanning for the third, since he’d heard the mother say there were three. At that point, he didn’t realize there would be two more.
As he picked up the third child from the floor, the fire blew through the rear of the house. He handed off the child and then, with Firefighter Weist, started using a hose that a crew from Engine 15 had hauled up the ladder.
The two men stayed as long as they could until their low-air bells sounded and they had to get out, with Engine 15 taking over. With a new oxygen tank, Capt. Wyzomirski returned to the bedroom, where the captain from Engine 15 screamed that they’d found another child on the floor in the rear of the room. In the very back of the room they found the fifth child, badly burned.
Capt. Wyzomirski said firefighters did the best they could.
“I’m really proud of our guys,” he said.
From the standpoint of rescue procedure and response times, everything went smoothly, he said.
Except they couldn’t save five of the seven children who were in the house — two left at the house by Ms. Love before she went out with her friend, Shakita Mangham, and three of Ms. Mangham’s four children.