Fire Trap

6 - Fire and competition

Morning sunshine streamed across the blackened wreckage of the labs which now opened upward like the nave of a church.

I was sitting on a chair, borrowed from a surviving office down the hall, waiting for Paul Maxwell and the local fire department investigator who would tour Paul and me around.

We wouldn't be visiting the second floor for safety reasons, but most of that level was on the first floor anyway. The mess had had since Sunday night to dry out, but it looked wet and smelled wet. It wasn't. I'd pressed my finger into a few places, just matted ash.

The first items I checked were some burnt but recognizable benches and equipment from the first floor. They looked in better shape than their cousins that burnt on the second floor and fell when the floor collapsed.

Above, at the far end of the second floor, a slim piece of Simon's lab was intact. A remnant of floor held a row of metal cabinets whose doors swung open above the abyss. They wouldn't be easy to examine as the stairway, at that end of the building, was gutted.

A large slab of charred joists and flooring canted down, almost vertically, from the base of the metal cabinets. I was contemplating the impossibility of climbing up it when a noise behind me announced Paul Maxwell and the local fire inspector.

The local inspector was a big man with an enormous gut. Red suspenders succeeded in holding up his pants—a job now beyond the capability of a belt. A serious frown was directed at me from under his handlebar moustache. For a fire inspector, he had a lot of flammable tinder on his face. Since they both wore hard hats, I deduced the frown was caused by my bare head.

By magic, another yellow helmet appeared in the inspector's hand. He thrust it toward me. "Let's not have any more claims on this one," he said, without introducing himself.

"This is Inspector Roberts," Paul filled in. "He wrote the initial report."

"How come all the building wasn't destroyed?"

Roberts' frown evaporated and a little twinkle came into his eye. "This structure is really two buildings."

He'd probably already crossed swords with Paul in one of those expert-meets-expert battles. The goal of these clashes isn't so much to declare a victor, but to impress each other with your special knowledge. He'd probably expected to be challenged by both of us, but the 'lack of a hard hat' let him label me a 'dunce' for openers. He could afford to display some plumage.

"The lab wing we're standing in was the original building. When they made it an 'L' about five years ago, the architect incorporated the old exterior wall into the combined building and put card key access on both floors. Fortunately, those doors were closed during the explosion and they held."

"And the fire didn't spread that way?"

He smiled condescendingly. "The explosion blew out the other doors and windows. With the first floor maintenance door gone, there was a perfect source of air at the center of this building wing to feed the fire. The broken second floor windows took care of the rest."

"Draft plus fuel equals inferno," I summed up.

"Exactly," he said, complimenting me, "and the direction of air flow kept the flames away from the other wing."

"But the second story got most of the damage?"

"The heat and flames rose," Paul interjected, having kept silent as long as any expert could while listening to a competitor expound. "Once there were open flames, the smoke-filled air pouring out the broken second-floor windows sucked the fire across the ceiling to the stairwell at the end of the building. The fire worked against the rafters until the lab floors collapsed.