NEAFC 31st Annual Conference.pdf - New England Association of ...

NEW ENGLAND ASSOCIATION OF FIRE CHIEF,S
dust; ragged, bleeding and injured~, and it stays in my memory because there were ram,
ily groups. There was a woman with two or three children; there was a large boy
helping a mother. It wasn’t a man’s group; it was a family group. One look at that,
the number of people, the reports of the other areas, and my eyes on that increasing
cloud .f9 black smoke and reports frdi~’ it! I was getting calls c0ntimially for more apparatus,
and telling me of tragic injuries and property damage.
There was one particular fellow that I had to quiet down. He was doing the best
he could about the situation but he was using up valuable radio :_ti~me--which only
showed: the stress he was under. Well, that one look, and the understanding and mental
view I was ~ble to get from my radio, filled out the picture. I will give you the timing
on it now, and you can judge it.
There is a clock in the gym of l~he Assumption College (an electric clock) which
stopped at five-twelve. Reviewing my lire department records, the box alarm which
the first district chief called for came in at five-seventeen. At five-thirty I was at the
point I have just described to you, and had those reflections. At live-thirty-live, according
to our records, I called for a multiple-alarm status, called~ in all off, duty firemen,
called in all civil defen.se lire auxiliary, got the lire department ambulance to the point
where the above-mentioned injured were immediately, and made a special request that
am~bulances be sent from every surrounding town, adding, "You cannot get too many;
quote my name in getting them." And if I may digress for a moment, in that call for
ambulances, the Town of Webster, which.is about twenty miles away, sent one, and
before the fellows in the lire d~epartment office who handled the out-of-own ambulance
calls had completed calling the other communities, they heard the screeching of her
brakes-outside the office windows. There were a couple of young fellows driving
who claimed they had made .the trip in eleven minutes. I will be conservative and
call it twenty-two minutes, and it might be right. We got live ambulances on those
calls. That was just my own call, so don’t confuse it with the tremendous number that
later came of a general and civil defense call.
I have considera, ble data in my records that is coming together pretty much like the
pieces in a jig-saw puzale. All have rendered reports to me telling everythingthey had
done--from the time the aml~ulances came until they left town, etc. In an attempt to
get the further record of the =thirty lire companes, I have had each company give me
a record of all duty performed. It is surprising, but it does put the pieces together and
the picture is formed.
The area struck by the tornado is quite broad: the circumference, I should’ say, is
live miles in travelling distance--because you do not have all through streets where
you might like them, and the diameter is a mile and a half to two mlies. As I moved
around through it and reflected afterwards, it was my impression, as I recalled the work,
and my contact with all the various fire companies--"Where is Engine one, two and
three, etc,"---in my mind, surprisingly, I could account for having seen andl contacted
at some point in the di’saster area and knew something a.bout them all. I ’didn’t quite
believe it might be that way. I had to see the record which; when it came in, showed
that every one of the thirty companies sconer or later worked in the devastated area.
While occupied with the actual disaster work I also was concerned with what was
to be done a.bout protecting the res tof the city while this tremendous demand was on
the department, and with thoughts of calling additional help from out of town. In
such a situation it is a regular procedure in hte department to depend on the use of a
limited number of well.maintain_ed but old reserve apparatus.
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