Sierra Street

Daniel Fitzgerald was eating lunch at the station on Island Avenue when the call came in at three minutes past one on a Tuesday afternoon in February, and by the time the engine turned onto Sierra Street he could see the smoke already rising from two blocks away, thick and black, not a house fire, something bigger, something wrong.

He was twenty-nine. He had been with the department four years, hired out of the army in fifty-three, his father\u2019s son and his grandfather\u2019s grandson, public servants all of them, cops and construction men and cooks, Fitzgeralds on the city payroll since Patrick walked a beat in 1905. Daniel had chosen fire over police because he had seen his grandfather Michael build things with his hands his whole life, the Riverside Hotel and the WPA walls at Wingfield Park, and something in that drew him toward the work of saving structures rather than the work of watching people. He had not yet, in four years, seen a building he could not save.

The intersection of Sierra and First Streets was chaos when they arrived. The Elks Lodge at 50 North Sierra was burning, the three-story brick building that had stood there since 1904 already engulfed on the south side, flames pushing through the windows on the upper floors, and the buildings on either side were catching, Spina\u2019s shoe store and Paterson\u2019s Men\u2019s Store both showing smoke. People were in the street, dozens of them, some walking, some being carried, some sitting on the curb with blood on their faces, and the sound was wrong, not just the fire but a ringing quality in the air, the aftermath of something percussive, and Daniel understood then that this had not started as a fire. Something had exploded.

The captain was already on the radio. Two explosions, they were told, gas, natural gas that had leaked into the old utility tunnels under the street, the maze of pipes and ditches that ran beneath the whole downtown, built decades ago, unmapped in places, and something had sparked and it had gone up with a force that blew out the walls of the Elks building from underneath and sent fire into every structure sharing those underground runs.

Daniel pulled his gear and went to work. The first thing was the people. A man named Kumle, the lodge manager, had gotten seventy-four men out of the lunch and card rooms, Daniel would learn later, an act of fast thinking that had likely saved dozens of lives. But the buildings south of the lodge were still occupied. Paterson\u2019s had people inside. Spina\u2019s had people inside. The fire was spreading through the underground connections faster than it was spreading above ground, coming up through the floors of buildings that did not yet show flame on their exteriors.

Daniel went into Spina\u2019s with Kowalski and they found two women in the back, a clerk and a customer, both on the floor from the concussion, both conscious, both able to walk once you got them on their feet. The building was filling with smoke from below, from the basement, from the old tunnel system, and the floor was hot through Daniel\u2019s boots. They got the women to the street and went back in for a check and the floor in the back room was buckling, the joists burning from underneath, and Kowalski pulled Daniel back by the coat and said no, and Daniel did not argue because Kowalski was right.

By two o\u2019clock five buildings were fully involved. The Elks Lodge was gone, the interior collapsed, and they were fighting to keep the fire from jumping Sierra Street to the east side. The river was right there, the Truckee, running behind the buildings on the west side of Sierra, and the wind off the water pushed the smoke east across the street and up into the cold February sky. Daniel worked a line on the south exposure, keeping water on the face of the next building down, the one that had not caught yet, holding the edge.

He thought about his grandfather Michael, who had built the retaining walls along this same river twenty years ago, WPA work, federal work, honest work with his hands. Michael had put the walls in that kept the river from flooding the very streets that were burning now. A different kind of saving. A different kind of losing. The underground tunnels that had betrayed these buildings were older than Michael\u2019s walls, older than the Elks Lodge itself, laid in the first years of the town when no one thought about what would happen if gas found its way into a passage built for water or steam.

By evening the fire was out. Five buildings were destroyed or damaged beyond repair. Two people were dead. Forty-nine were injured. Daniel sat on the running board of the engine on Sierra Street with his coat open and his helmet off and watched the smoke rise from the ruin of the Elks Lodge in the last light. The building was fifty-three years old. It had stood there since 1904, since his grandfather Patrick was a young officer on these streets, and now it was partial walls and twisted steel and a smell that would hang over this block for weeks.

A man from the gas company was already on scene, and Daniel could hear him talking to the captain, something about unmapped laterals, about old infrastructure, about how the town had been built on top of itself for ninety years and no one had a complete picture of what ran under the streets. Daniel did not know enough to be angry yet. He was tired. He had done what he could do. The two dead were not people he could have reached, he would learn later; they had been in the basement of the lodge when the gas went, and there had been nothing between them and the explosion.

His father had told him once that the Fitzgeralds were people who stayed, who showed up, who did the work the town needed. Patrick had walked the beat. Michael had riveted the hotel and poured the walls. Daniel fought the fires. It was not complicated and it was not romantic and most days it was waiting, and then a day like today came and it was everything at once and you did what you could and some of it you could not do and you lived with that.

He pulled his boots off on the running board and looked at the soles. They were cracked from the heat of the floor in Spina\u2019s, both of them, the rubber split. He would need new ones. He set them side by side on the pavement and looked down Sierra Street, where the water from the hoses was still running in the gutters toward the river, carrying ash.

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