Seven Two: A Firefighter's Story

Warning:  Seven Two is about firefighting like Moby Dick is about whaling. If you want to read a title that is strictly a hose opera, I'd suggest Pipe Nozzle. "The call came in around 6:15 pm, early evening, but already dark in the third week in January, and cold. A pedestrian walking past Mahan's Fine Furniture on Bank Street stopped by headquarters to report that he thought he smelled smoke, although he said he couldn't see anything through the large display window facing the street: 'It looks like the lights are all out inside.' Engines 1 and 7, Truck 2, and the ambulance responded as the usual first alarm assignment with eight people and one duty officer, the shift captain. Sean O'Conner was driving Truck 2, and, on orders from the Captain, tossed an ax through the display window. And the word 'toss' is correct. On orders from the Captain, who suspected the worst, they positioned all apparatus in the middle of Bank Street away from the three story brick facade building, and then everyone stayed at their apparatus ready to react to whatever happened after O'Conner threw the ax from ten feet at the glass just like a Pequot warrior swinging a club at the skull of an Englishman. . . ."
David Mazel--- "Firefighting is an apt metaphor here. It is decidedly unnatural for humans to live in those vast swaths of densely packed, highly flammable materials we call cities; the urban living that modern firefighting makes possible emerges in these stories as something that, if not ultimately foolish, certainly exacts a high cost."