BY CLARK GLASS
I MADE MY WAY up the ladder with mixed emotions. Glad to be given the assignment and simply do the work I craved each day, I knew nothing of significance would be saved in this house. We had been dispatched to this fire as a second-alarm unit, responding to a large house on the east side of the city. This was a two-story balloon-frame house with a slate roof.
Initial arriving units had declared interior fire and heavy smoke throughout. After an aggressive initial attack, the operation was changed to a defensive mode. After a little while, the IC decided to transition back to an offensive mode and extinguish the remaining fire.
The Lullwater Incident: Managing the Mayday
Our assignment at what would come to be known as the Lullwater incident was simple:
- Use a ladder to access the second floor.
- Open up the ceiling.
- Knock down the remaining fire in the attic.
As I climbed to the window, I cursed inwardly, noting the construction type. It was a steel-frame casement window, popular in homes of this style and age. I should have observed this before I climbed the ladder. I also should have brought a metal-cutting saw with me, to cut the frame.
I can’t accurately remember the size of the panes, but they were small enough to give me pause before I entered. I knew that if things went badly while I was inside, rapid egress would be difficult. I observed conditions inside and briefly considered not masking up before I went in. Visibility was good. I could see clearly with the help of my flashlight. Falling back on habit and instinct, I masked up anyway and went on air. I cleared the remaining glass in the window with my ceiling hook.
I entered the window headfirst, then got to my feet. I went to the far side of the room, where I knew the bulk of the fire above me would be. Opening up the ceiling proved difficult. (The ceiling was constructed of plaster and metal mesh, a common characteristic of large Atlanta homes built in the early 1900s. It is similar to plaster and lath, with metal mesh used in place of wooden laths, which are more common.) As I worked to open up the ceiling, I could hear another member of my crew entering with the nozzle behind me.
As he moved toward me, there was little reason to speak. We both understood the task. I worked in silence as he waited patiently for me to open up enough ceiling to extinguish the remaining fire above us. My technique for pulling plaster and lath or, in this case, plaster and metal mesh, was to work a small area until I had a hole large enough to allow the head of my hook through. Next, I focused on pulling the material away from the ceiling joists. I paused briefly to rest as my shoulders started burning. At that time, I saw a third member of our crew entering the window.
Looking back up at the small hole that was beginning to form, I noticed a glow from the remaining fire in the attic and started to work some more. I was using a New York hook and soon the hole was large enough to accept the working end. It was possible to start pulling the material away now and access the fire.
Hearing radio traffic through the collar mic draped over the top of my turnout jacket caused me to pause briefly so I could understand what I was listening to. Our incident commander (IC) was ordering us to back out of the house and return to a defensive posture. From my position, nothing indicated the need to pull out, so I was confused. However, the voice on the radio had an urgency that demanded immediate compliance with the order.
Trapped
Incident command that evening was one of our most experienced and respected battalion chiefs. We also had two other chiefs on scene who were equally well respected. Collectively, the number of fires the three of them had been on would number many thousands. Always calm under pressure and constantly demonstrating the same professionalism they demanded from the crews working under them, they gave me the confidence that there was a good reason for the decision. Frustrated, Seargeant Tyler Mallory and I turned and walked back toward the window we had entered.
After I took four or five steps toward the window, what is believed to be a pancake collapse of the attic onto the second floor occurred. This happened without warning. The event was so sudden and violent that I have no memory of being struck by falling debris.
The next memory I have is lying on my back with my self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) cylinder forcing me into a left lateral recumbent position. I do remember hearing and feeling the vibration of the structure following the collapse. I’m unable to describe the sound but I remember being surprised that the floor under me did not collapse as well. Panic started to take over as I realized what had happened. I was completely buried and unable to move with the exception of my right leg from the knee down.
I could hear Tyler calling for me and I started yelling back. The action of yelling back seemed to compound the panic I felt. This had an immediate negative effect on my respiratory rate, from the panic I was feeling, my effort to yell through my face piece, and the debris on top of me.
At that point, I realized that the low-air alarm had begun to vibrate on my face piece, and I was instantly aware of a critical mistake I had made. During the defensive mode of operation, after our initial offensive attack. I never took the time to get a fresh air cylinder. Instead, I foolishly chose to stay close to the house with the hope of being in a position for an assignment if the operation went offensive again. I didn’t want to be down the street at the air truck and miss the opportunity for more work.
We were wearing 30-minute cylinders. I knew any chance I had to survive depended on conserving what little air I had left. I began the mental process of calming myself down and focused on the two things I could control: my breathing and my emotions. I was unable to reach my personal alert safety system (PASS) device or key up my radio to transmit a Mayday. I was completely immobilized with the exception of my right leg, so I began to concentrate on my two tasks.
I began to feel the heat from the burning debris on top of me working its way through my turnout gear and face piece. Although it was uncomfortable, I didn’t feel like it was burning me. The sensation underneath me, however, was different. I could feel my left ankle, leg, and hips starting to burn intensely from the coals beneath me when I was pinned.
The Rescue
Time moved very slowly at this point. After what seemed like an eternity, I could hear someone with a circular saw working to remove the window frame we had come through. I now know it took only a few minutes. The familiar noise of the saw and the knowledge that the saw was making progress helped me stay positive.
However, almost immediately, I heard the saw choke out. The next few minutes of listening to the saw start, run, and then stop was an emotional rollercoaster of highs and lows. During this time, I attempted to focus on other things. I could feel cold water running over me as someone used a nozzle to cool the burning debris that had pinned me to the floor. I switched my focus to that. I remember feeling it run down my head and neck, filling my right ear and making its way around the seal of my mask.
Mind Over Matter
My focus on my air had an unexpected effect on my circumstance. This has since served as my own reminder to myself about how much power the mind has over the body. I no longer felt the pain of burning. The vibration of the low-air alarm on my mask became the overwhelming sensation I was experiencing.
As my air supply began to run out, the vibrations stopped when I inhaled. Then, when I exhaled, they returned. This let me know how close I was to empty. I remember thinking how quiet it was during this pause in the alarm despite the noises of the rescue attempt and PASS alarm.
I knew by the change in the vibration of my low-air alarm that my air supply was close to empty. Thoughts and images of my family started to pop up in my head as I began to have serious doubts about whether I would be rescued before my air ran out. I pictured my son, but as he looked when he was around the age of 3 and not his current age of 14. I pictured my parents, brother, and sisters sitting around my parents’ kitchen table. I remember picturing my girlfriend, Ashley, sitting in the passenger seat of my 4Runner. I planned on marrying her and remember feeling regret that I had not proposed to her yet. I remember praying, but I don’t remember what about. Common sense tells me it would have been about getting out, but I don’t specifically remember that.
I took a breath in and exhaled. This time, the vibration of my low-air alarm did not return. It seemed very quiet now. I knew from training that at this point I had 35 to 45 breaths (working using moderate effort) left before I was completely out of air. However, now I was simply lying on my back and not winded, so I knew I should be able to make it last longer. Gradually, my mask started sucking to my face when I took a breath, and I tried moving my head to create a crack in the seal that would allow me to get more air.
I didn’t even care if I inhaled smoke. I just wanted to be able to breathe. The weight of the debris on me had my mask firmly sealed against my face. I was unable to break the seal. Looking back now, I know this may have saved me from drowning when water from the hose stream was running around the seal of my mask. If my face piece had not been sealed to my face so tightly, it would have filled up with water.
Trucks 15 and 12 were the crews sent to rescue me. Truck 12 was assigned as the rapid intervention team (RIT) and Truck 15 was assigned to assist with the effort. These crews included some of the biggest and strongest firefighters in our department, including former athletes and professional football players.
To this day, I firmly believe that the assignment for these crews to get me out is one of the main reasons I survived. They started by trying, unsuccessfully, to lift the debris off me. If these guys were unable to lift the debris, then no one in our department could have done it. After the initial attempts at moving the material were unsuccessful, they sawed the debris into smaller, more manageable pieces.
As my air supply ran out and my mask was sucking to my face, the weight that had me trapped was lifted. I was rescued seconds before I would have become asphyxiated. Unhooking my regulator and scrambling to my feet, I returned to the window. I remember feeling angry for allowing myself to be in that situation, lashing out and pushing away the hands attempting to help me down the ladder.
After I reached the ground, I became even more furious as I was ordered into a Stokes basket. I noticed it was the guys from my own firehouse who were lashing me in. As pieces of burning soffit started to fall down around us, they quickly picked me up and started carrying me down the hill to an ambulance. They began joking with me about the situation, as only firefighters can, which quickly mitigated the unfounded anger I was feeling.
At the Burn Center
I was loaded into a waiting ambulance. Paramedics began to cut off my bunker pants. Now that the shock of what happened was wearing off, I started feeling the pain from being burned on my legs, hips, and left ankle. As an IV was threaded into my arm, someone handed me my phone so I could call Ashley and let her know what had happened. We had been together a little over a year at that point, and this would be the second time she received a phone call from me in the middle of the night to tell her I was taking an ambulance ride to the Grady Burn Center.
I spent the next three weeks in the Grady Burn Center, after receiving nine skin grafts. I had sustained third-degree burns, which covered much of my left leg, ankle, and hips.
Meaningful Takeaways
I learned so much from this experience. Looking back, one thing that consistently sticks out to me is that I experienced the brotherhood in a way I never had before. This includes my brothers getting me out alive and the support I received in my weeks and months of recovery. From the minute I was admitted to the emergency room until the day I was discharged, I was constantly surrounded by brothers who took the same oath I did.
Hospital policy allowed only two visitors at a time in my burn unit room, but my people ignored that and I had a crowd most hours of the day. A rotation was set up and each day a crew would cook meals for us. Neither my family nor I ate one meal of hospital food during the entire stay. Unbeknownst to me at the time, a brother at a neighboring station was taking care of my yard for me. It was years before I found out who it was.
My best friend, Jon Oliver, who worked at a neighboring firehouse, took off from station duty and remained in the hospital the entire time to make sure my family and I were taken care of.
As with many near LODDs and near-miss incidents, there is rarely one individual catastrophic event that can be pointed out. Instead, we often see a sequence of events that result in a singular catastrophic event. This near miss was no exception. While some near miss incidents are the result of a chain of physical events, this one was the culmination of a complacency mindset on my part, dated equipment, and timing.
Avoid Complacency
An enemy that hides beneath many masks, complacency is, from my perspective, the biggest contributor to the events of the Lull- water incident. On this night, she hid behind the mask of experience.
As they are nearing the end of recruit academy, I tell recruits to be wary of two dangerous time periods in their career. The first is immediately after they exit the fire academy, when they have no experience to rely on. They do not even have a complete understanding of their own ignorance and are completely reliant on their company officer or senior crew members for survival.
The second—and more dangerous-period comes at different times for different people. This will depend on individual personality and call volume. When you have been to enough fires to think you have it “figured out,” overconfidence is born. It grows and starts to affect critical decisions. I had 17 years on the job at the time, and I fell prey to this mindset. It almost cost me my life.
In 2014, we were using 30-minute SCBA cylinders. After an initial offensive attack where we performed fairly labor-intensive work for 10 to 15 minutes, we were pulled out as the operation went defensive. The department air truck, dispatched to every working fire in the city, was on scene. During the hour we were defensive, I never took the time to walk down the street to get my bottle refilled. This ultimately resulted in me making entry a second time with 20 minutes of air left in my air cylinder. After entering the second time, I was opening up plaster and wire mesh ceiling for approximately five minutes, leaving me with half of my air supply left.
Trust Your Gut
The second mistake I made was ignoring my intuition. As I made entry through the second-floor metal casement window, I had an uneasy feeling that I had missed something. When I went through that window, I realized that if something went wrong, anyone inside would not get out quickly. In the end, rather than preventing us from getting out, this delayed others from getting in to help me. If I had paid attention to the feeling in my gut and cut the metal frames before making entry, it probably would have saved 10 minutes getting crews inside to extricate me.
It took crews 16 minutes to free me from under the debris. I was in the 31st minute of my air supply when crews got me out. As I was freed, my mask was sucking to my face. If the rescue had taken even two to three minutes longer, I would have been unresponsive. Getting me down the ladder and beginning effective CPR within the next four to six minutes would have been possible, but unlikely. If I had swapped my cylinder for a full one when I had the opportunity, it would have given me a minimum of 30 minutes of air instead of 15. If I had cut the metal casement window prior to making entry, I would have saved the rescue team an additional 10 minutes. This would have given rescuers a full 30 minutes or more to get me out rather than the 16 I chose to give them.
Lessons Learned
Many of the lessons we learn in the fire service are not new ones. Instead, they’re lessons that have been learned and shared by others prior to us. It is incumbent on each of us to learn from others, so we can store and use these lessons when the need arises. The Lullwater incident is no exception.
A 687-page textbook on the rule of air management, Air Management for the Fire Service, by Mike Gagliano, Casey Phillips, Phillip Jose, and Steve Bernocco, was written six years before the Lullwater incident. The book Collapse of Burning Buildings, by Vincent Dunn, was written in 1984. The table of contents contains three separate chapters describing issues this house had. I never took the time to read either of these books until after this incident. Perhaps if I had read them sooner, I would have taken this fire more seriously and gone inside the second time better prepared.
Contributing Factors That Helped Me Survive
Several factors contributed to the fact that I survived this incident.
First and foremost, I must acknowledge the fitness level of those who were assigned to my rescue. My survival was a result of their ability to lift a heavy object off of me. Simply put, if they had not been able to succeed in this task, I would not have survived.
Another reason for my survival was how RIT was assembled that night. Instead of blindly assigning the RIT companies to get me, the IC on scene picked individuals he knew would be physically able to do the job.
I am a firm believer in constantly rediscovering personal physical limitations, embracing pain as a benchmark for effective fitness training, and cultivating a competitive personal mindset. As a 40-year-old firefighter, I found myself consistently serving as the older member of most crews I was assigned to. For this reason, I had become more drawn toward training and workouts that result in suffering and pain than when I was in my 20s and 30s. Since around 2009, I had consistently done gear workouts in addition to my regular workouts. I believe this routine and mindset resulted in a fitness level that allowed me to conserve the air that I had left in my cylinder. It also helped me use less air while I worked, prior to the collapse.
This incident has undoubtedly left its mark on me in many ways. It serves as my constant reminder of how quickly the fireground can change. These changes can sometimes yield painful and even tragic results, so I would like to close with one challenge: We must never allow the obstacles that are put before us on this job, no matter how insurmountable, to change our commitment to the oath each of us took. We must never lose sight of the fact that we are not here for us, we are here for them.
Tragically, not everyone goes home. We are here to make sure the people we serve are given every possible opportunity to live another day, regardless of the risk to us. Each of us swore to never allow personal feelings, nor danger to self, deter us from our responsibilities. If this means we may not come home at the end of the day, I accept that.
We must put the challenges and mistakes that we overcome behind us, learn from them, and move on. We cannot allow them to weaken our aggressive search culture. Instead, we must allow them to make our aggressive culture smarter and stronger by learning from them. We stand on the firefighters who came before us. They built the trust that is so freely given to us by those we protect. They built that trust with blood and sacrifice. We must honor their sacrifice by learning from their experience. We must grow from that knowledge and put the lives of those we serve before our own rather than accepting a culture of risk aversion in the name of “Everyone goes home.”
REFERENCE
Kastros, Anthony and Brian Brush. Mastering Fireground Command: Calm the Chaos! Fire Engineering Books, 2024, bit.Ly/4fq8hXE.
Listen to recordings from the incident here. (Audio recordings provided by Todd Edwards.)
CLARK GLASS began his fire service career in 1997. He is a captain with the Atlanta (GA) Fire Rescue Department, where he is assigned to Company 14. Company 14 is Located in the southwest side of the city, consisting of Truck 14 and Engine 14, and is responsible for trench rescue and structural coLLapse rescue within Atlanta. Glass is an NPQ instructor I and 1403 Live fire instructor in Georgia. He aLso serves as an adjunct fire instructor and speciaL operations instructor with the AtLanta Fire Academy, is a Lead instructor with the Georgia Smoke Diver program, and presents at training events throughout the United States.
