The Pang Fire: What Went Wrong -- A Disaster Marked By Bad Preparation, Poor Communication And Many Other Mistakes
Copyright, 1995, The Seattle Times Company
The morning after four of his firefighters perished in the smoke and flames of a burning warehouse, Seattle Fire Chief Claude Harris offered a grieving city some comfort in this assessment:
The tragedy at the Mary Pang Food Products warehouse could not have been prevented. All the department's safety procedures had been followed on the night of Jan. 5.
"Everything went as it was supposed to," he said.
But a Seattle Times investigation - based on review of Fire Department records and scores of interviews with firefighters, witnesses and other experts - points to a different conclusion:
Everything did not go as it was supposed to.
In fact, there is good reason to wonder whether James Brown, Walter Kilgore, Gregory Shoemaker and Randy Terlicker would be alive today if not for human error, official disregard, malfunctioning systems and misguided policy.
Repeatedly, fire officials violated or ignored policies and standard procedures. And the wisdom of many of the policies they did follow is being questioned from outside and within the department.
The problems began early on, with the handling of an informant's tip that the son of the building's owners planned to torch it. They continued through the weeks until the fire was set, through the firefighting effort, and through the attempt to rescue the four trapped firefighters.
At each stage, motivations and intentions were good. But, in retrospect, many of the decisions and actions were not.
The most disturbing revelation: Despite detailed, credible information that a fire was to be set in the basement of the Pang warehouse, the man in charge of the firefighting effort on Jan. 5 didn't even know the building had a basement.
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The first time the firefighters inside the building realized the fire was originating below them was when the floor they were standing on fell in, dropping four of them to die in 1,400-degree heat.
That was after crews had been battling the fire for more than half an hour. Other firefighters who were burned but escaped wrote a two-sentence explanation of the tragedy on their injury reports: "The floor fell in. The basement was on fire and we did not know it."
Chief Harris and the arson investigators under his command refuse to discuss much of what went wrong. More than five months after the fire, they say they're still waiting for the conclusion of four separate official investigations.
"Once I get the facts, I can draw some conclusions," Harris said.
Gauging the precise impact of these mistakes is impossible. To some friends and colleagues of the fallen firefighters, it's more comforting to say these things happen, rather than that mistakes were made.
"You can't second-guess what went on in there," said Fire Capt. Carter Hoffman. "It's like fighting a war."
But John Shoemaker, a retired 26-year Seattle firefighter whose son died in the fire, holds Harris and department leadership accountable.
"Why wasn't the fire found underneath them? Somebody should have known," he said. "How come somebody at that fire didn't know there was a basement there? Anyone could look at that building and see it had two stories.
"Why was this not done? Incompetence. Somewhere along the line, somebody screwed up badly."
Shoemaker said he hasn't had a good night's sleep since the 5th of January.
"I wake up at night," he said, "and I just sit there and think it shouldn't have happened."
-- -- --
The tip could hardly have been more specific: who, what, when, where, how and why.
Thirty-nine-year-old Martin Pang, a failed businessman and struggling actor who lived in Southern California, was planning to burn down his parents' frozen-food business in Seattle's International District. He wanted insurance money and the ability to redevelop the property. The arson would occur the weekend of Dec. 16-18.
Pang had allegedly told his ex-wife and confidante, Rise Liv Pang of Seattle, that someone would enter the basement of the building from the west side. The arsonist would either have a key or pry off a piece of sheet-metal siding to make it look as though transients had broken in.
The arson would take place shortly after 6 p.m. Martin Pang allegedly asked Rise Pang, who worked in the building, to make sure his parents were gone. Martin Pang raced cars as a hobby, and there was racing fuel stored in the basement. It figured to go up in a flash.
All this was reported to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in Seattle. Rise Pang had confided in a Farmers Insurance Co. agent, Tom Graves. Graves talked to ATF agents Dec. 13, and Rise Pang talked to an ATF agent the next day, even drawing a map to show how and where the fire would be set.
The federal agents, in turn, went to the Seattle Fire Department's Fire Investigation Unit. Together, the investigators made a plan.
Some details of that plan are still secret, with Lt. Randy Litchfield of the arson squad saying, "If we talk about it, it will raise a lot of questions, and we don't want to answer those questions now."
Seattle police and King County prosecutors assert that releasing records pertaining to the Pang fire will jeopardize efforts to extradite and prosecute Martin Pang, who fled the country seven weeks after the fire and is in a Brazilian jail, charged with arson and murder in the case.
The Times filed a lawsuit May 5 under the state Public Records Act to obtain portions of the arson-response plan, the tape recordings of the Fire Department's radio communications during the fire, and the post-fire statements of firefighters. King County Superior Court Judge Jim Bates ordered city officials to release that information immediately and fined the city $18,000 for improperly withholding them.
The city is appealing that decision, and the records remain under seal.
This much is known, though: The Fire Department and the ATF had a secret surveillance of the Pang warehouse. The department had a written plan to get equipment to the scene as the arsonist was being nabbed.
And both were dropped.
-- -- --
The surveillance began Thursday, Dec. 15, a day before the weekend Rise Pang's tip said the fire would occur.
At one point during the operation, ATF Special Agent Sheryl Bishop telephoned Rise Pang, asking about a long-haired young man entering the back of the building. Rise Pang told her the man was a rock musician who rented space there. Bishop said she was calling from her car phone and would continue watching the building.
Meanwhile, a small number of fire officials were told about the tip and the surveillance, and about the quick-response plan developed by the Fire Investigation Unit. The plan called for fire units to respond "code yellow" - without sirens and lights - to Fifth Avenue South near South Jackson Street, seven blocks from the Pang building, once the word came that the arson was under way.
Under the plan, the stakeout would catch the arsonist and the firefighters would race to the scene to extinguish the fire.
Battalion Chief Kem Hunter was briefed on the plan when he reported to work Dec. 17 as acting head of the headquarters division. He said Lt. Litchfield and Capt. Ray Risdon, the two officers in charge of the arson squad, emphasized they had extremely reliable information but the source of the information had to be kept a secret.
"On Dec. 17, this was a very hot item," Hunter recalls. "This was something we really focused on, and I carefully studied the information."
Four shift commanders and some officers and firefighters were told about the arson threat. But most firefighters, even those stationed in the neighborhood of the fire, knew nothing about the tip.
One person close to the investigation says the lack of communication was a glaring mistake. "If they knew a building was targeted for a hit, why didn't they tell the firemen about it?" he asks.
The day after the Jan. 5 fire, Chief Harris claimed that everyone in his department had known about the arson threat.
Twelve days later, he drafted a memo to his troops apologizing for that errant claim. In the draft memo, he also promised to notify firefighters of all arson threats in the future. That part was deleted, though, at the request of the city attorney's office. The final memo is titled "Surveillance at Fire Scenes," but doesn't deal with notification.
In fact, Risdon said, there is nothing in writing telling Fire Department personnel how to respond to arson tips. He said the arson squad's general operating instructions are outdated and never used.
Nonetheless, there are standard, practiced procedures for responding to arson threats here and around the country.
Seattle's arson squad gets tips on about six "legitimate threats" a year, Risdon said. Typically, here and elsewhere, fire officials focus on deterring a threatened arson by performing a highly visible building inspection and patrolling the area with marked cars.
After such an inspection, the department typically writes a detailed plan on how it will fight the fire should one occur.
The building owner is notified of the threat, and might even be asked to hire private security.
None of that was done in the Pang fire.
"It's very rare where we have to deviate from the guidelines and cannot follow normal protocol," Risdon said. "It's certainly not our intention to jeopardize anybody for an apprehension. We'd rather deter them in the first place and let them know we know they're up to something."
But in this case, the focus was on catching the arsonist - something that hasn't been done in a Seattle fire surveillance in more than 15 years.
-- -- --
The weekend of Dec. 16-18 passed, and the Pang warehouse stood untouched.
At some point after that - fire officials won't say when - the ATF pulled its people out and left it to the Seattle Fire Department's arson squad to continue the surveillance if it so chose.
The arson squad has 11 people: seven investigators, two detectives, a lieutenant and a captain, responsible for covering the city 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year.
On a per-capita basis, the Seattle squad has one staff member per 47,000 residents, better than Los Angeles (1 per 166,000), Miami (1 per 92,000), Minneapolis (1 per 91,000) or Chicago (1 per 66,000), but not as good as Houston (1 per 34,000), which is held up as a national model in staffing.
Surveillance is no more than 1 percent of the Seattle arson squad's work, Risdon said.
"To try to use the number of personnel I have and conduct long-term surveillance operations, it just isn't practical, isn't feasible," Risdon said. "You have to re-evaluate the situation on a day-by-day basis, and you have to make your best educated guess about when the proper time has passed."
Sometime in the last two weeks of December - again, officials won't say when - the arson squad decided the proper time had passed. The Pang warehouse surveillance was called off.
Asked why the department didn't make a show of inspecting the building and patrolling the area to warn off a potential arsonist, Harris said only: "That's a fair question."
Another option might have been to watch the warehouse with a hidden camera, saving on manpower and at least creating a video record of what was happening in the area.
The arson squad has two cameras for such surveillance. Both have night vision and the capacity to send an image back to headquarters. And ATF has other cameras.
But Risdon said the city's cameras can't be left anywhere except public buildings because they might be stolen.
Just west of the warehouse is a tall, privately owned building with a clear vantage of the loading dock where Martin Pang told his ex-wife the arsonist would sneak inside. Apparently, the arson squad did not believe that was a good place to mount a camera.
The warehouse was left unmonitored.
A third option, suggested to the ATF by insurance agent Graves, was to confront Martin Pang. Graves says an agent told him "they would see what they could do."
There are no indications they did anything.
In late December - Hunter can't remember exactly when - the few commanders who had known about the threat were given an update.
"I saw the same information I'd looked at," Hunter said, "together with a note which indicated that the arson threat was passed and the surveillance was called off."
A single telephone call would have told investigators the arsonist's plan was still very much alive.
Rise Pang says she was called by Martin Pang a day or two after the designated weekend. He told her he was still planning to burn the building, she says. He asked her to light the fire, she says, and she declined.
She didn't call arson investigators because she assumed they were still working on the case.
And they didn't call her.
"I don't understand why they didn't keep up the surveillance," Rise Pang says.
-- -- --
What, if anything, the arson squad did on the Pang warehouse threat after the surveillance was dropped is unclear because of the city's refusal to release records.
What is clear, though, is what was not done: Despite the early response plan, there was no further preparation for how they would actually fight an arson.
The department didn't write what is known as a "prefire plan," which is required by department regulations on every building considered a fire risk. Nobody looked in the basement. Nobody even looked up the floor plans on the Pang warehouse, which were on file in a city office five blocks from Fire Department headquarters.
"It'd take just 45 minutes to look up the inspection records," a source said.
The Pang building housed Mary Pang Food Products Inc., which produced frozen Chinese dishes; La Panzanella, a wholesale bakery; and a space where the rock band Dr. Unknown practiced. It also was used by Martin Pang to store car-racing supplies and personal belongings.
-- -- --
The building was not inspected in 1994, the first year without annual inspections under a city cost-saving plan.
The Fire Department has detailed prefire plans on about 1,000 of the more than 250,000 buildings in Seattle. The Pang warehouse wasn't among them because it didn't present water-supply or access problems or other difficulties that would require special tactics, said Battalion Chief Gary Strand.
It was never placed on the list of sites considered fire risks, despite the fact it was built in 1908, had flammable liquids and 3,000 to 4,000 pounds of cardboard stored inside, had a low building value compared to insurance value, and had been the target of an arson threat.
Strand acknowledges it might have been a good idea to do a prefire plan once the threat was known.
J. Gordon Routley, who is reviewing the Pang fire for the U.S. Fire Administration, said, "There were factors about that building that would be hard to know unless you had some specific information from having prefire-planned it or inspected it." The USFA, a branch of the Federal Emergency Management Administration, analyzes fire-safety data.
Risdon concedes that a strategy that doesn't include prefire inspection - and doesn't include notifying all nearby fire companies of an arson threat - is "very rarely used."
His explanation: "Telegraph, telephone and tell a firefighter. They can't keep a secret to save their souls."
One reason for that secrecy, fire officials say, was to protect Rise Pang, who was afraid Martin Pang would harm her if he found out she'd informed on him. Martin Pang has a history of physical violence against women.
Fire officials never let Martin Pang know they knew about the arson threat, nor did they warn his parents, Harry and Mary Pang of Mercer Island, who had owned the building for more than 30 years.
Patrick McGuinness, retired head of the Los Angeles Fire Department's bomb and arson squad, said there are times it doesn't make sense to make a public showing of arson deterrence.
"If there's some way to stop them from doing it, then we'll do that," McGuinness said. "But there are times that you're not going to stop them by letting them know that you're on to them. So then what you have to do is try to catch them in the act."
And if the arson didn't happen when it was supposed to?
"If it didn't come off and we didn't have the time or the manpower to continue to watch it, I'd do something to let the guy know we were looking close at it," McGuinness said. "Not to give away the person who had given us the tip, but to investigate the hell out of the building, you know, bring in half a dozen fire engines and let the word out to everybody in the block we're targeting these particular areas."
And if there's neither surveillance nor deterrence?
"In my opinion, you're jeopardizing firemen's lives then," McGuinness said. "If they don't have a thorough knowledge of the interior of that structure, then you're putting them in jeopardy."
-- -- --
In the early evening of Thursday, Jan. 5, William Ward felt a pain in his left arm. His wife called 911, thinking her 75-year-old husband might be having a heart attack.
The 911 dispatcher called Engine 6 of the Seattle Fire Department at 6:52 p.m.
Engine 6 was just 12 blocks away from the Ward home on East Alder Street. The crew scrambled out and sped east to help the retired radio broadcaster.
As fate would have it, Engine 6, stationed at 23rd Avenue South and Yesler Way, was also the only crew in Seattle that had performed an inspection on the Mary Pang Food Products warehouse in recent years.
It was probably the only crew that knew the Pang building had a basement. But the Engine 6 crew hadn't been told about the arson threat and now, 10 minutes before the Pang fire was called in at 7:02, they were heading the opposite direction.
Ward said he didn't notice anything unusual about the firefighters' response. There was no alarm about the Pang fire.
"They stayed awhile and we talked and they decided I would just stay home, shouldn't go to the hospital, and that was all right with me," Ward said.
"They were here quite a while. I was kind of surprised because I figured they'd be here and gone. They were more like half an hour."
Engine 6 got back to its station at 7:20 p.m., the logbook shows. Twelve minutes later, it was dispatched to the Pang fire. It arrived at 7:36 p.m., three minutes before the worst disaster in Seattle Fire Department history.
-- -- --
When Matthew Fox arrived at the rehearsal area his band rented in the basement of the Pang warehouse, he noticed an interior brick wall was extremely hot, and there was smoke in the air. He grabbed some guitars, and ran to call 911 from a nearby pay phone.
When the alarm clanged at fire headquarters in Pioneer Square at 7:03 p.m., Kem Hunter was nearing the end of his final evening as acting chief of Battalion 1. Hunter, who normally was assigned to West Seattle, was in charge at headquarters because the regular officer in charge there was on disability leave.
Dashing from his third-floor office, the 22-year veteran snatched a dispatcher's note from a computer printer. As usual, the sheet gave little information: It said smoke was visible at 811 Seventh Ave. S., but didn't mention the building's name or the arson threat.
Since the Pang fire, suggestions have been made by Hunter and others in the department that clerks enter data about arson threats, hazardous materials and building layouts into the dispatcher's computer on every commercial structure. The information could then be included on the dispatch sheet or relayed by radio.
Officers like Kem Hunter wouldn't have to be expected to remember every detail about every building.
Chief Harris said an internal committee is studying the idea, as well as other changes that might be made if they are "practical and logical."
Hunter remains devastated by what happened to his colleagues and friends that January night. But he was willing to extensively discuss the fire and his role in it, hopeful that an autopsy of the operation will save lives in the future.
-- -- --
Hunter climbed into his command car, and driver John Bazik headed east.
Engine 10 had already rumbled from the station with Hunter's longtime colleague Lt. Walter Kilgore in the front seat, prepared to take charge until Hunter arrived. As incident commander, Hunter would orchestrate the firefight, coordinating the decisions of tactical leaders on each side of the building.
The industrial district east of the Kingdome was clamorous with sirens as 32 people in seven fire companies rumbled in from downtown and Beacon Hill. The dark sky was made even darker by smoke billowing from the warehouse.
Hunter asked his driver to move slowly as the warehouse came into view. Staring out of the car window, he began a standard procedure known as "size-up" - looking at three sides of a building to determine the degree and location of fire, the size of the building, the type of construction, the danger to other buildings and whether anyone is inside.
Hunter then remembered this was the building he'd been briefed on in December. But though he is a bright, Stanford-educated man who studies Japanese in his spare time, he could find little in his memory about this building. He vaguely recalled seeing a diagram at the December briefing, but if he had been told such details as the number of floors or the place where the arsonist planned to set the fire, he didn't remember them.
Once he'd received the follow-up memo saying the arson threat had passed, Hunter had pushed the Pang building out of his mind.
From the car, through the smoke and darkness, Hunter decided the fire was originating on an outer wall on the west side of the building. Though he was wrong, he didn't take a closer look because, he says, he was pressed with other duties.
Hunter established a command post on South Charles Street, south of the building. Although thick bushes blocked his view there, he figured he could easily walk to the west and east ends of the building to see better if he needed to.
From the command post, he couldn't see the basement windows.
He walked to the corner of South Charles Street and Seventh Avenue South. There, even in daylight, the building - which is built on a slope - looks to be a one-story structure sitting on ground level.
At the corner, Hunter met with Kilgore, a 24-year department veteran. The lieutenant's assessment of the fire and building was identical to his, Hunter says. Kilgore said he would douse the flames on the west wall by attacking through an east entrance on Seventh Avenue South.
"I said, `It sounds like a good plan, let's go with it,' " Hunter recalls.
At 7:10 p.m., Hunter radioed his size-up report to the dispatcher, saying there was a fire on the west end of a one-story, ground-level building about 60 feet wide by 80 feet long.
It would be 29 more minutes before Hunter would find out - in the most painful moment of his life - how wrong he was.
The flames he saw on the west wall were but an extension of an intense fire burning in the basement - a basement he and Kilgore didn't realize existed.
Down below, the fire was consuming a thin wall that was barely holding up the main floor.
Walking on that floor were firefighters from Engine 10 and Engine 13, many of whom had never heard about the arson threat.
Battalion Chief Strand said he's unsure the firefighters would have approached the building differently had they known, but it helps to alert them, even at the risk of tipping off the arsonist.
In the Pang fire aftermath, he said, "I think the Fire Department is aware that it is probably more important to alert the firefighters than it is to not alert the arsonist that we are aware of his threat."
-- -- --
One thing Hunter thought he remembered from the December briefing was that the building was usually occupied until 11 p.m.
In fact, the last person other than the guitarist had left around 6:30. Within minutes, firefighters felt they'd determined there was no one inside.
But that didn't change the firefighting tactics. The Seattle Fire Department has a tradition of aggressively attacking a fire at its source, regardless of whether a building is occupied.
"We have to fight the fire; we can't just sit back and say we are going to surround and drown," is the way Harris explains the policy.
Seattle's department is known nationally as being particularly aggressive in its approach to firefighting.
"We try to get to the seat of the fire," Harris said. "That's what separates us from a lot of other fire departments around the country."
A former Seattle fire chief, Gordon Vickery, thinks the department may be too aggressive, unnecessarily putting firefighters at risk. There comes a point in fighting fires in vacant buildings - especially old, low-value buildings such as the Pang warehouse - where "it's usually a wise idea to get the hell out of there," Vickery said.
Harris said the department is "damned if we do and damned if we don't" go inside burning, unoccupied buildings.
The national standard for firefighters, a consensus agreed upon by oversight groups, says: "Activities that present a significant risk to the safety of members shall be limited to situations where there is a potential to save endangered lives."
In some other places, firefighters regularly hose down vacant buildings from the outside.
For Hunter, that would have been the exception. And there were only a couple of reasons for that exception.
He might have kept firefighters out of the building had there been signs that the arsonist had used a high-temperature accelerant, a cocktail of highly flammable fuels designed to explode after a fire gets under way. Hunter ruled that out because he didn't see telltale signs such as smoke shooting out of the building under pressure, or blowtorch-like flames.
He might also have held back his people had he thought there was a danger of structural collapse. His training told him, though, that the greatest danger of collapse came with buildings constructed after the late 1960s, when government regulators allowed contractors to use thin wooden roof frames that can collapse in a fire.
Hunter believed the Pang warehouse, built in 1908, was made of stout timbers and would hold up while the crews put out the fire routinely.
He was unaware it had a hidden structural flaw, an illegal wall made of flimsy 2-by-4s. This so-called "pony wall" was holding up the warehouse floor, and was as dangerous as a lightly constructed roof.
The Pang building had been inspected annually by the Fire Department until a money-saving program reduced the frequency of examinations to once every two years. Even so, there is no evidence that inspectors ever looked closely at the building's architecture.
Harris said it's unlikely his people could ever address hidden construction problems without help from Seattle's Department of Construction and Land Use.
And there is no evidence DCLU had ever detected the illegal wall. DCLU supervisory engineer Steve Pfeiffer says the wall doesn't show up anywhere in the approved plans for remodeling the building. DCLU only inspects when major work is done on a building; its most recent inspection of the Pang warehouse was made during a boiler installation in 1987.
Though Hunter suspected this fire might be arson, possibly involving an accelerant such as gasoline, that didn't affect his tactics, either. Nothing in department policy calls for different strategy for arson.
"The fire you fight is the fire you see . . . regardless of how a fire is started," said Hunter.
In the months since the fire, Hunter has wondered whether Seattle should change its approach.
He suggests a nationwide study of risk factors, looking for reasons other than accelerants or roof construction to abandon a building and fight a fire from the outside.
"This sort of risk-assessment strategy would enable us to make sound decisions to write off buildings that appear to be salvageable, because the bottom line is no building is worth a firefighter's life," Hunter said.
The last time the Pang warehouse was assessed by King County for tax purposes, in 1994, the land it sits on was valued at $433,000. But the building itself was judged to be worth a mere $1,000.
-- -- --
As Hunter watched his firefighters attack the flames, the unnoticed fire in the basement was consuming the feeble floor supports. And the fire had been burning for more than 20 minutes before the alarm was even sounded.
As the firefight progressed, Hunter said, he and other commanders lost track of the time, a common occurrence at fire scenes. Radio dispatchers were announcing the time occasionally, and firefighters' air bottle have timers, but veterans say those are not good enough ways for them to keep track of how much time has elapsed in a fire.
Since the Pang fire, Harris said department officials are considering placing an illuminated clock at a fire scene.
-- -- --
At 7:11 p.m., Hunter requested reinforcements: two additional engine companies and a ladder company, with eleven people in total.
Five minutes later, he asked for a second alarm, which automatically provided an additional ladder company and two engine companies.
"I had nothing specific in mind, except I wanted to have enough resources there so that I could utilize them appropriately," Hunter said. "It's always better to have too many resources than not enough."
Seattle makes it easier than many other cities to summon reinforcements. After a firefighter was killed in a fire at the Blackstock Lumber Co. on Seattle's waterfront in 1989 - and the city fined $102,000 for safety violations - the department started requiring commanders to keep an extra backup team and a rescue team ready in case someone got in trouble.
Four members of Ladder 7 entered the main floor of the Pang warehouse, joining the other crews from Engines 10 and 13.
Lt. James Scragg, who led the Ladder 7 crew, did not know the building had been under arson threat. But he did feel the intensity of the heat. Scragg told his team - Michelle Williams, Gary Overall and James Brown - to get their collars up, ear flaps down, and to turn their PASS devices on.
A PASS device - for personal alert safety system - is a 6-ounce box a little larger than a pager. It's worn on a firefighter's jacket and equipped with a motion detector that sets off a screeching alarm when it senses no movement for 20 seconds - indicating a firefighter is down and helping guide rescuers to his or her location.
A consensus industry standard requires that firefighters wear them, and turn them on, whenever they enter a burning building.
But because of a series of false alarms, many Seattle firefighters had stopped using them. And then-Chief of Safety Rodney Jones had noticed that their superiors were routinely looking the other way.
Jones says he orally warned the commanders and repeatedly urged the department to buy a new, better-functioning model, one that wouldn't produce false alarms and would presumably be more widely used by the firefighters.
Two days before the Pang fire, Jones wrote a memo to Chief Harris urging him to buy new PASS devices, saying that the old devices "just plain do not work" the way they should and that firefighters were entering fires without turning them on.
But as the members of Engines 10 and 13 entered the warehouse, many had their PASS devices turned off.
-- -- --
Within minutes of the firefighters' entry, it appeared the fire was coming under control.
"I frankly was not seeing any more fire from my command post, nor any glow," Hunter recalls.
He walked west to look again at the place where he thought the flames were originating, the exterior wall he had seen from the car. Hunter stopped 40 feet down the alley on the west side, where he could clearly see the portion of the warehouse basement that contains a bakery. The lot drops in elevation there and the basement is on ground level.
To Hunter, though, the bakery appeared to be in a separate building, jutting out below and slightly separated from the Pang warehouse. He treated it as what firefighters call an "exposure": an adjacent building threatened by fire but not part of it.
He was wrong. But when Hunter talked with Capt. William Hepburn, the man in charge of the west side, he heard nothing that would change his mind.
Hepburn's crew had entered the bakery to protect it from the fire, but had not gone further into the building. Standard tactics say you do not attack a fire from opposing sides. One team can push hot gasses and expanding steam onto the other.
"Can you imagine what it would be like to be shot in the face with a 12-gauge shotgun? When someone opens up a hoseline and pushes the fire onto you, that's about what it feels like," said Assistant Fire Chief David Campbell.
Chief Harris arrived on the scene at 7:18. He had finished his nightly exercise workout at a nearby fire station and stopped by the Pang fire on his way home to see how things were going.
Harris chatted with Hunter, walked around the building and decided everything was under control.
"I saw a (television) camera crew picking up their equipment and felt it was a nothing fire," Harris said. "I was getting ready to go back home."
In the basement, though, the undetected fire was crawling along the ceiling. The hot gasses crept to a ceiling joint where the basement bakery juts out from the upper warehouse, and the flames licked up the outside wall.
Hunter could not see the base of the flames, how they were gushing horizontally out of the burning basement. They were shrouded in the tar smoke from a fire on the bakery roof.
-- -- --
Stewart Rose, the department's chief of training and safety, arrived at the fire scene about the same time as Harris. His presence was routine: One part of his job is to look for problems at significant fires before they lead to disaster.
He went straight to Hunter, asked for his plan of attack, and liked what he heard. That was a mistake, Rose recognizes now. He says he should have examined the building first and then talked to Hunter, so they could "challenge each other rather than group-think."
Rose walked to the west side of the building and noticed electrical wires hanging at chest height on the roof. He warned firefighters to stay away from that area until the power was shut off.
Then he saw the basement. He peered into the windows along the south wall - windows Hunter hadn't seen - to see if he could detect any fire inside.
"I didn't see any signs of fire," he said. ". . . I didn't see any signs of any distortion of the walls, no cracks, no smoke coming out of any windows."
Satisfied that the fire was confined to the upper floor, Rose returned to Hunter and told him about the electrical wires but not the basement, which "didn't seem significant to me."
"Next time I'll maybe walk into a space rather than look at it from a distance," Rose said. "I didn't see a basement fire. I've got 30 years' experience; I shouldn't have missed it. I'm not the only one, but I missed it."
At 7:27, Rose walked to the east side of the building and entered from Seventh Avenue, as Kilgore and the others had.
He immediately sensed something was wrong. There was too much heat and smoke in the room for the amount of fire he could see at the back.
Kilgore told Rose to make sure Hunter knew this was the building with the arson threat, and wondered aloud whether the fire had been set in several places.
Rose returned to Hunter to remind him of the arson threat, and the incident commander said he already knew about it.
By then, the hidden fire in the basement had been gnawing at the underpinnings of the warehouse floor for more than three-quarters of an hour. The floor was a trap door ready to spring.
-- -- --
Assistant Fire Chief Campbell, the department's second-in-command, arrived at the Pang warehouse at about 7:30.
Scanning the building, the 34-year veteran thought the situation manageable.
"The smoke was not really what I would call threatening," he recalled. "It was light gray, air was moving into the space. It didn't set off any significant alarms in my mind."
Like the others, Campbell didn't see the basement.
The Pang building was added onto over the years in a jerry-built manner that hid the room where the fire was set from outside view, Campbell said.
Rise Pang said that had been Martin Pang's plan, as she relayed it to authorities: to light the fire in an interior space so it would be able to grow before firefighters responded.
The basement area was constructed at ground level around the turn of the century, and the upper floor was added two decades later after the east end of the lot was raised.
Holding up three fingers, Campbell suggested that Hunter call a third alarm because the fire was persisting. The dispatchers summoned four additional engines, two ladder companies and a battalion chief.
Meanwhile, Battalion Chief Steve Brown assumed command of the the west side of the building. When he arrived, firefighters were inside the bakery and on the bakery roof, trying to protect it from advancing flames.
A firefighter showed Brown the blaze inside the basement.
"There's a division wall between the bakery and the inner area. The fire was just on the other side of that wall," Brown recalled.
Brown did not report his finding to Hunter, though, because he assumed he was on the same floor level as Kilgore and the other firefighters. He thought he was looking at the same fire they were attacking. He had never been to the other side of the building, so he didn't know he was looking at an unreported fire in an unreported basement.
Brown said he assumes the two previous commanders on the west side - Lt. Clarence Williams and Capt. William Hepburn - also had seen the basement fire. Williams and Hepburn were unwilling to comment, and the city refuses to release their statements written shortly after the fire.
"You want me to clear things up," said Williams. "I don't want to clear up anything right now."
Hunter said Brown is a competent chief who would have told him about the basement fire had he known it was significant.
"I received no information which would lead me to believe there was a basement, or that there was a fire burning underneath the main floor," Hunter said. "This was key information I would have liked to have had."
Since the Pang fire, Hunter and other commanders have reminded their colleagues to speak up if they see something significant.
Hunter said information doesn't flow as easily up the chain of command as it flows down.
"We are a paramilitary organization. I call the shots and people do what I tell them to do," he said. "If you are indiscriminate about what comes up the chain of command, you'll flood the radio channels."
But there are times, such as the Pang fire, when "communication up the chain of command is just as important as communications down the chain of command," he added.
"It at no time occurred to me that anybody inside the building could possibly be in imminent danger," Hunter said.
-- -- --
On the main floor of the warehouse, a dozen firefighters trained water on the west wall, their hoses trailing out the Seventh Avenue door behind them.
It was hot inside, very hot for the amount of fire the 11 men and one woman could see at the end of the room. Fearing a flashover, they sprayed water on the ceiling, cooling the room.
The floor itself was covered with a layer of concrete for waterproofing. Survivors who were on that floor say that because of the concrete, they assumed they were on the lowest level.
One firefighter saw flame below him through a breach in a corner of the floor. Another saw smoke rising through the sidewalk east of the building.
Gregory Shoemaker, a 22-year veteran, must have realized the floor was shifting. He yelled at his crew to get out of there.
Michelle Williams, one of the crew, recalls that it suddenly got much hotter as flames flashed around them. Parts of the floor began to give way, and the fire surged violently, as though someone had stirred it with a fireplace poker.
Shoemaker's oxygen mask and helmet were ripped off as he fell. Buried in rubble, the 43-year-old survived for no more than two minutes.
Randy Terlicker turned to David Churchill and said through his mask, "Come on, let's go!" As the floor collapsed, Terlicker fell through.
Churchill, Williams and others scrambled toward whatever doors and windows they could find. James Scragg paused on his way out and turned his hose on his retreating colleagues to hold back the flames that were chasing them.
Scragg, Churchill, Williams and five others made it out.
Kilgore and James Brown fell into the basement as the rest of the floor collapsed.
-- -- --
Outside the building a few minutes earlier, Chiefs Rose and Campbell had walked back to the east side of the building. They climbed a ladder to the roof to check for signs of the fire entering the loft.
Campbell radioed Hunter to suggest he send up another chief to take command of the roof operation. Rose checked to see there were backup and rescue teams ready.
Something still didn't feel right, Rose recalls.
"The smoke and the heat didn't feel consistent with what I was seeing," he said. It was too intense.
Then, he says, he recognized the possibility that the fire could be in the basement. Before he could say anything to Campbell, though, they heard a roar and saw flames gushing out the Seventh Avenue door.
"Stewart, we've got problems," Campbell said to Rose.
At his command post, Hunter heard a sudden cacophony of emergency radio calls.
"What appeared to be a very smooth operation that was continuing to progress as planned changed into a terrible tragedy in the wink of an eye," he recalled.
As fire spewed out the east door, Battalion Chief Jim Morton requested an order to abandon the building. After a short delay, Hunter agreed and relayed the signal.
"When you believe you still have people inside and you have doubts as to whether you are going to be able to get them out or not, that's my worst nightmare," Hunter said.
That's when Hunter discovered, for the first time, that the structure had a basement.
"I was shocked," he said. "I'd been standing south of this building for a substantial amount of time, and looked at it very close from three sides.
"I just couldn't believe it. I was just totally shocked that this building had a basement."
-- -- --
Of the eight firefighters who made their way out of the room where the floor collapsed, five suffered burns, mostly to unprotected cheeks and ears.
The firefighters were not wearing fire-resistant cloth hoods under their helmets, a protection called for in national standards.
Some chiefs and firefighters here have resisted using them, asserting that firefighters need some skin exposed to heat so they can feel when they have gone too deeply into a fire.
Phoenix Fire Chief Alan Brunacini, who wrote the industry standards, said his department has worn hoods for the past 15 years, and that "it's pretty dumb" not to.
Days before the Pang fire, responding to an anonymous complaint, safety officer Rodney Jones recommended buying the hoods. After the fire, the Fire Department ordered $19,000 worth of them, and Harris said he is requiring they be worn from now on.
-- -- --
The main purpose of the personal-alarm devices is to help find downed firefighters. Unfortunately, they were of little or no help in the Pang fire.
Perhaps because he had been bothered by false alarms, Shoemaker, 43, had turned his PASS device off. It made no noise from beneath the rubble.
Terlicker, 35, lost his PASS device when he fell. That was a recurring problem with the old models, firefighters say: The attachment clip was weak. Terlicker's was found later with the switch in the "off" position. He had stumbled, crawled or run 30 to 40 feet across the basement floor, moving away from a possible exit.
Brown, 25, had switched his PASS device on when he entered the building, having been reminded to do so by Scragg. Rescuers later heard the buzzer near the north wall but were unable to reach him in the fire and rubble.
Kilgore, 45, somehow found the strength to switch his PASS device on after he hit the basement, but he, too, was unreachable.
Terlicker, Kilgore and Brown died of asphyxiation after they passed out from heat and their oxygen tanks ran out of air, according to the county medical examiner.
Department officials and many firefighters say it is highly doubtful the fallen men would have lived long enough for rescuers to find them, even with the help of PASS devices.
Jones, chief of safety at the time, says, "Their chances of being found would have been greatly improved."
"I don't know if they'd have been alive," he said, "but the chances of them being rescued would have been better."
Notably, Jones, who initially played a key role in the department's internal investigation into how it handled the Pang fire, was removed from that duty. And late last month, he was moved against his will from his safety-officer position.
A firefighter who requested anonymity said Jones was "being crucified" by Harris for his public criticisms of the department.
Jones, a 23-year veteran of the Fire Department, has filed a complaint with the state Department of Labor and Industries.
"I didn't want to leave and they made me go," said Jones. "They removed me because I wrote reports and was doing the job as it was intended to be done."
-- -- --
In a tape recording he made the day after the Pang fire, Jones said the effort to rescue the trapped firefighters was "disorganized" at first, that nobody reported a "mayday" when missing firefighters activated their panic buttons, and that the "abandon building" signal wasn't properly activated.
It took at least eight minutes after the floor collapsed in the Pang building for rescue teams to organize outside the entrances to the basement, according to a partial dispatch tape obtained by The Times.
"People are yelling and firemen are coming out with their bunking gear smoking. Other people are hosing them down. Medic units, personnel rush up to assist them. Some of them are burned around the ears. It was a very traumatic situation," said Harris.
Hunter said the flood of radio communications was incredible; reports of injured firefighters, trapped firefighters, calls for help, conversations among commanders trying to account for their people.
"It was very difficult to get radio time because so many urgent priority communications had to be made at one time," Hunter said.
The department's communications van, specially loaded with radio equipment, was late getting to the Pang fire because crews that normally staff it had been called to the scene to help fight the fire directly. A crew for the van had to come from across town, and they didn't arrive until 7:32 p.m.
In addition, the four dispatchers and one trainee at the main Fire Alarm Center were overwhelmed. In a memo to Harris after the Pang fire, supervisor Lt. Christopher Nastos said he alone tried to monitor three radio channels, to dispatch units and to respond to radio queries.
Nastos said it was "extremely fortunate" another fire didn't occur in the central part of Seattle during the Pang fire. The busy dispatchers were not able to call in units from outlying neighborhoods and suburbs to replenish the emptied stations in the center of the city until 7:58 p.m.
Nastos said it would have taken at least 20 minutes to get water on another fire during that time.
"What will it take before we realize that appropriate staffing of the FAC (Fire Alarm Center) should not be discretionary, but should be a top priority?" Nastos wrote in a post-Pang-fire memo.
On the positive side, Hunter said he was quickly given an accurate list of the missing and injured firefighters. Accounting for firefighters had been a major problem in the '89 Blackstock fire, in which one firefighter died and another was severely burned. They had spent 20 minutes calling for help on a radio while no one knew they were missing.
-- -- --
Once the rescue effort was organized, it was clearly courageous.
Immediately after the collapse, Capt. Gerald Childs and another firefighter crawled on their bellies through the Seventh Avenue door. Slithering as far as they could under flames that could have melted their helmets, they arrived at the spot where the broken floor dropped away and reached down in a futile attempt to grab their fallen comrades.
At the command center, Campbell appointed Rose to coordinate the rescue. Rose headed to the west side of the building, where rescuers and hoses could get to the basement where the firefighters had fallen into the seat of the fire.
"My goal was to try to get as much water in the basement as possible, to knock down the fire so that we could search for people," Rose said.
Rescue-team members asked permission to enter the basement with their breathing masks off, so they could more easily hear any PASS devices or cries for help. Rose agreed, knowing it was a risky violation of safety rules.
The unmasked rescuers carried their hoses into the hot and noisy inferno, moving over burning debris that was 4 to 5 feet deep.
"Think of trying to crawl over a burning trash pile," Rose said.
At 7:45 p.m., Campbell called for a fourth alarm.
Officers outside heard the sound of PASS devices at the northeast corner, where Kilgore and Brown had fallen. The rescuers staggered to the east wall, probably climbing over the pile where Shoemaker was silently buried. Still, they couldn't reach the fallen men.
"From our perspective down there in the bottom, it was an inferno," Lt. Larry Green said. "I don't think there was any way we could have reached anybody."
Above them, dangerous remnants of the upper story were threatening to fall.
At 7:58 p.m., Campbell called for a fifth alarm.
Eight minutes later, rescuers tried yet another tactic: silence.
"Everybody turned all the hose lines off, all the radios off, everything in the area off and down - and still, with the fire, we couldn't locate anything," said firefighter Rod Hewitt.
Eventually, someone heard the sound of a low-on-oxygen alarm bell ringing on a firefighter's air bottle. The noise came from deep in the basement, along the east wall.
Battalion Chief Steve Brown, accompanied by Rose, led another team into the cauldron toward the sound of the alarm. With the fire having weakened the structure so much, it was a very risky effort.
"Hell, my heart was pounding out of my chest. I was very apprehensive," said Harris, who was watching.
The firefighters ahead of Brown groped to a spot just 10 or 12 feet from where the alarm had been sounding. But it had stopped ringing, and their path was blocked by a concrete slab.
"We tried to dig, but debris was burning over us. A big chunk came down," said Brown.
Rose saw that material overhead was about to tumble down upon them.
"The floor joists were burnt through, and the floors were sagging. In my opinion we did not have any time," he said.
He ordered everyone out, and "shortly thereafter the rest of the floor collapsed."
They had been within a few steps of Randy Terlicker. But, without his PASS device sounding, they had no way of knowing.
And had they stayed much longer, there probably would have been more fatalities.
-- -- --
At the command post, Campbell called a meeting of grim-faced senior chiefs, including Harris, Rose, Hunter and Brown.
"I asked them the following question: `Have we done everything humanly possible to rescue these firefighters, with all the information we have right now?' " Campbell said. "I got a unanimous `Yes we have.' "
The final "abandon building" signal was sounded at 9:08 p.m.
Rose was stunned to learn after the fire that rescue teams had worked for more than an hour. He said once again he had lost track of elapsed time.
Later that night, firefighters asked again if they could go in to retrieve the bodies. This time, it was the police who said no. The building, and the bodies, were now evidence in an investigation of suspected arson and murder.
Hunter said he was in shock for most of the time after the floor collapsed. Much later - when he realized he had failed to answer a radio call - he relieved himself of duty and headed home to Monroe in what he described as the longest drive of his life.
His wife, Etta, said when he telephoned her she could barely understand him.
"The closest that I can describe it is that it was like a wail. Sheer agony," she said. "The pain of still being alive when somebody that you care about is dead."
Hunter's spouse said in the future, fire officials should accompany an officer home in such circumstances.
"For a while, I couldn't see how I could ever go back to work," Hunter said. "I took a leave for almost one month, then I was ready to go back," he said.
In all, 30 firefighters took leaves for ailments ranging from stress to burns.
-- -- --
John Shoemaker had never gone to one of his son's fires. "But when I saw that on TV, that four firefighters were missing, I got the bad feeling he might be in that fire."
He called his son's home. His granddaughter said her dad was working.
Shoemaker drove to the Pang fire and arrived to see more than 80 firefighters standing around solemnly.
"I didn't see my son's face. That's when I knew it was him."
An old friend told him Greg was lost inside. John Shoemaker, a former firefighter himself, got angry.
"I wanted to know why. I said, `Why wasn't that fire found underneath those guys there?' . . . That fire was being fed from below. Somebody should have known."
At a ceremony presenting a memorial at the Pang building June 2, Shoemaker refused to shake the hand of Chief Claude Harris.
-- -- --
In the aftermath, theories abound about what might have happened had the fire in the basement been discovered earlier.
Some firefighters and officers say Hunter might have sent more people to the basement, where they might have been trapped. More than four might have died under the collapsed floor, they speculate.
Others say the fire might have been contained sooner, and that Hunter might have withdrawn firefighters from the upper floor and saved them.
Chief Harris is reserving judgment.
"It's a lot to think about, you know," said Harris.
Top Fire Department officials say the bottom line is that the men were killed by the arsonist - suspected to be Martin Pang - and by the building's shoddy architecture.
"If it hadn't been for that little, dinky pony wall, this would have been just another chapter, one of a dozen or so multiple alarms that Seattle had in 1995," said Campbell, the department's second-in-command. "Unfortunately, life will never be the same."
The officials are inclined to write off the disaster to bad luck rather than bad decision-making.
"Any disaster is usually a combination of events that all come together," said Rose, "and I don't think negligence . . . just coincidences."
Others are not so forgiving.
Mike Withey, a Seattle attorney who represented the widow and son of Lt. Matthew Johnson, the firefighter killed in the Blackstock fire, said the department should rein in its aggressive approach to fighting fires in unoccupied buildings. And, he added, the department needs to address the communications problems that contributed to disaster in both fires.
"To me," said Withey, "the story of this tragedy is this: Four more firefighters lost their lives because they never learned the lesson from Blackstock."
Vickery, the former Seattle fire chief and director of the U.S. Fire Administration, said the department just isn't prepared for difficult situations such as this.
"Here, where you lost six people in seven years, you start to ask what's wrong," he said.
Some adjustments are already being made. For example, five days after the Pang fire, Harris ordered 400 new, better-functioning PASS devices. Now he is distributing fire-resistant face hoods.
The man on the force who may be most personally affected by what happened the night of Jan. 5 just hopes the department will take to heart the other lessons learned in the Pang fire.
Kem Hunter wishes he knew then what he knows now.
"You'd always like to go back and fight a fire a second time, wouldn't you?" he said. "You don't get a second chance."
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1. Only a few fire officials and some firefighters were told about the arson threat. Most firefighters, including many of those working in the neighborhood, knew nothing.
2. Normal response to an arson threat is to inspect the building, write a fire attack plan and visibly patrol the area to deter the arsonist. None of that was done.
3. Surveillance was called off before the fire occurred. Arson-squad officials say they didn't have enough manpower to continue it.
4. Although a neighboring building provided a good vantage for a camera that could have been used for continued electronic surveillance, none was used.
5. After the first weekend passed without a fire, no one bothered to check with a key informant to see if she'd heard anything further on the arson threat. In fact, Rise Pang says, she knew the threat was still real.
6. No one even looked up the floor plans of the warehouse, which were on file at the city building department.
7. The only crew that had inspected the warehouse in recent years was never informed of the arson threat, and was not one of the first companies called to the scene.
8. The computerized dispatch sheet sent to the incident commander gave him very little information. It didn't mention the threat to set an arson in a windowless part of the basement.
9. The incident commander thought the fire was originating on an outer wall on the west side of the building. He was wrong.
10. The incident commander didn't know the building had a basement. He couldn't see the basement windows from where he set up his command post, behind bushes on the south end of the building.
11. Neither inspections by the Fire Department nor the city's building department had detected an illegal "pony wall" holding up the main floor.
12. The Seattle Fire Department attacks unoccupied buildings much the same as it attacks occupied ones, and arsons much the same as accidental fires. Some experts say more caution should be used in attacking arsons in unoccupied buildings.
13. The officers on the scene say they lost track of time, and of what structural damage might have occurred. They are looking at ways to make timekeeping easier in the future.
14. National standards call for firefighters to use personal alarm safety systems, known as PASS devices. But many of the firefighters in this fire, including two who were killed, had their PASS devices turned off.
15. The safety officer says he had repeatedly urged the department to buy better PASS devices, so firefighters would use them. New ones were not purchased until five days after the Pang fire.
16. The officer in charge of safety at the Pang scene made his assessment based largely on what he was told by the incident commander, instead of first examining the building himself. He now says that "group-think" approach is a mistake.
17. Although the safety officer saw that the building had a basement, he didn't see the fire there and he didn't mention the basement to the incident commander, who didn't know it existed.
18. The battalion chief in charge of the west side the building saw the fire in the basement but didn't tell the incident commander. He had never been to the other side of the building, so he thought he was on the same level as the firefighters who were actually one floor above.
19. The incident commander said the paramilitary chain of command may have inhibited lower-level officers from speaking up with important information.
20. Although national standards recommend firefighters wear protective, fire-resistant hoods, those in the Pang fire weren't wearing them. As a result, the rescue effort was hampered, and several firefighters suffered burns.
21. It took at least eight minutes to muster a rescue team outside the burning basement. The safety officer said the effort to rescue trapped firefighters was "disorganized" at first.
22. The fire-alarm communications center was overwhelmed during the Pang fire because of inadequate staffing, according to its supervisor.
23. The department's chief of safety was initially involved in investigating the deaths at the Pang fire, but was taken off the case. Last month, he was removed from his position. He says that was because of his aggressiveness on safety issues.