Summer Heat Wave Takes Its Toll on Firefighters — and the People They Save

It was a Thursday in Charlestown, and temperatures were creeping toward 91 degrees.

A man rolled a cigarette at 284-86 Bunker Hill St., and then went out on the back porch for a smoke.

The Boston Fire Department received reports of a fire, and arrived on scene at roughly 1:45 p.m.

Within an hour, it had reached six-alarm status and spread to neighboring 282 Bunker Hill St.

And around 2:30 p.m., Liz Whiteley saw the first in a long series of texts.

"Are you okay?"

"There’s an enormous fire on Bunker Hill Street, and I think it’s your house.”

That Charlestown blaze was the first of three large fires within a five-day span that overlapped a late-July heat wave in Boston — all sparked by discarded smoking materials, according to Boston Fire investigators.

Those five days underscore the perils of firefighting in such blistering conditions, the catastrophic potential of a single mistake, and the human toll behind it all.

In less than a week, 54 people lost their homes, Boston's fire commissioner said. Among them were Whiteley, her husband and their two children.

Whiteley pulled up the feed from a local news station and watched live that Thursday as her neighborhood burned. The texts kept coming. “Your house is on fire." "Are you okay?" "Where are you guys?”

"To see something like that from afar, watching it happen real-time — it’s an out-of-body experience," she told Patch.

She and her husband were hours away, working. The kids were at summer camp. There was no point in rushing back, Whiteley said. So, feeling helpless, they texted their neighbors and they watched.

On Bunker Hill Street, smoke was billowing under a hot sun. Firefighters were working the scene as best they could without entering the homes, where the back decks appeared to be at the point of collapse.

Boston Fire's rehabilitation unit arrived on site, bearing water, Gatorade and ice. The volunteer support crew from the Boston Sparks Association rolled in with cold water and wet towels. The number of firefighters working the scene climbed above 100.

• SLIDESHOW: Boston Fire Department's Long, Hot Summer

That kind of heat demands manpower, said Steve MacDonald, a spokesman for the Boston Fire Department who was on scene in Charlestown.

"One of the reasons we hit multiple alarms is to get fresh firefighters to the scene, to rotate them in," he said.

Each firefighter is carrying about 60 pounds of gear, MacDonald said. In their helmets, hoods and masks, they're "sealed up."

"It really holds whatever heat you have in," he said.

The fire department's policy is, if possible, to rotate firefighters out every 15 minutes. Get them away from the fire, take off their coats, and get them hydrated, MacDonald said. It's key in any fire, but especially important in the midst of a heat wave.

Extreme temperature is one factor, but the real danger is duration.

"You never know, when you go out the door — you could be at an incident for eight hours, you could be there for a lot less," MacDonald said. "We're always cognizant of the toll it takes on the firefighters."

Most fires are knocked down (firefighting parlance for "put out") within 30 minutes, he said. The Charlestown fire took nearly eight hours.

Around 7:30 p.m., crews climbed into the belly of the buildings to douse remaining hot spots still stubbornly burning in the basement.

By that time, five firefighters had been treated on the scene and transported to nearby Massachusetts General Hospital for heat exhaustion and other heat-related issues, according to Boston Fire Commissioner Joe Finn.

Two weeks later, Finn was squinting into another scalding, midday sun as he told reporters the Charlestown fire was part of a trend — 50 fires so far this year started by what's officially designated "careless disposal of smoking materials."

That, plus hot, dry summer weather, is a perilous combination.

"It doesn't take much for a cigarette, a little wind, a little anything to get that going," Finn said, speaking outside of Charlestown's Engine Company 32.

Less than a half-mile away, the homes from 282 to 286 Bunker Hill St. stand eerily vacant in an otherwise tidy line of Charlestown row houses. The backs are charred, but the fronts could pass for normal, if you squint hard enough.

A light breeze is enough to waft the noxious smell of burnt wood and plastic from inside 284. The building's brick facade appears almost intact, save the boarded-over windows, until you see the black burn mark spreading like a scar across its side.

Next door, at 282, a heavy padlock hangs next to a bright wreath on the front door. The blinds are askew on one of the ground-level windows, revealing an assortment of toppled toys. That was Whiteley's step-daughter's bedroom.

The family didn't visit until three days after the fire, waiting for Bunker Hill Street to reopen to traffic and for the news crews to disperse. On the way there, Whiteley said, she and her husband tried to prepare the two 9-year-olds for what they would see.

"We’re here as a family together, and that’s really important," she said they stressed. "It’s OK to feel sad, to feel angry, to cry, to have questions."

And they did cry, she said — "a lot of tears and a lot of hugging," as they looked first at the relatively intact front from Bunker Hill Street, then walked to Wall Street, where they gazed on the ravaged back half of their home.

They peered through the blinds of Whiteley's step-daughter's bedroom, where they could see her stuffed cat, Yoyo, "drowned in water, and dirty and smoky, covered in soot."

The adage goes "things are only things, and they can be replaced." But some things are more than that, Whiteley said — they're memories.

They're the kids' drawings, or the special mementos she carefully stashed away on the top shelf of her son's closet. That closet's contents were largely unsalvageable from the water and the smoke.

“To lose so many of those things can make it really hard to internalize the losses that you experience," she said.

There's also the day-to-day steps to take: filing insurance claims, finding temporary housing, securing a new lease on short notice. But it hurt the most to show the children what remained of their home.

Whiteley read about the loose cigarette that caused her family so much misery. She cares, but she doesn't.

“It’s just heartbreaking. Whatever caused the fire doesn’t change the outcome," she said. "The result is the same; 15 units—15 homes—were destroyed, and people are displaced."

She hopes such a preventable tragedy can be a reminder to take care with smoking materials, and she hopes it prompts homeowners and renters to triple-check their insurance.

But Whiteley doesn't see the point in getting mad or casting blame.

She credits the Boston Fire Department with saving her home, and the neighborhood. She's grateful nobody was injured and her family is safe. She's imagining a year from now, by which time the family hopes they'll be close to moving back into the repaired and restored home on Bunker Hill Street.

She's taking it day by day.

"I guess the only way forward is to do the best you can to try to rebuild your life," Whiteley said. "It’s not going to be an easy process; it’s going to be a long process. But I'm looking forward to the times we can all be back in our homes and start building new memories."

>> Top photo, courtesy Boston Fire Department, shows gap between 282 and 284 Bunker Hill St.