MARGO SULLIVAN
Courtesy Telegram & Gazette

WORCESTER-- Lt. Fred Endrikat knows how it feels to lose one of the men he led into a burning building.

This is why it was still hard for him yesterday to say something good came out of the fire in the Rising Sun Baptist Church in Philadelphia Jan. 28, 1994.

That church fire injured 13 and killed two firefighters, including the man in Lt. Endrikat's Rescue 1 company who was killed when a ceiling rattled down on him in the cellar. Yet, even under the extreme conditions in that blaze, some good lessons were gleaned when “a couple of other guys” came out alive because they had a safety rope tied to their belts, he said.

Lt. Endrikat teaches other firefighters how to get themselves out of trouble inside a burning building, and how to help out an injured buddy. As the final speaker at the Worcester Firefighters Memorial Safety and Training Seminar yesterday, he talked about fires that have humbled him, and said he has learned not to repeat mistakes.

"In the fire service, we learn by a couple of different methods," he said, naming "painful mistakes" as one of the harshest teachers.

In his 26 years with the fire department, 35 Philadelphia firefighters have died, some literally while he held them in his arms, and he feels the most responsibility for the death of the man in his company.

"It's a feeling I wake up with every morning," he said, adding that Worcester District Fire Chief Michael O. McNamee, the incident commander Dec. 3, also knows that the pain of losing six firefighters in the former Worcester Cold Storage and Warehouse Co. is never going to go away.

Meanwhile, firefighters owe it to each other to improve in search and rescue techniques, Lt. Endrikat said. Everybody in a fire department should know the drill, and they all must know how to use the safety equipment, he said. He asked for a show of hands by people whose departments had written procedures.

Few hands went up.

He shook his head and complained they all should have the rules in writing. Only five firefighters raised their hands a moment later when asked how many carried a personal safety rope with them into a fire, and he shook his head again.

The rope was the most important piece of equipment they could carry into a burning building, Lt. Endrikat said, showing for proof a film of an apartment building fire set when someone poured gasoline in a hallway and lighted it. Two firefighters had been trapped on the roof. They lived only because they had their ropes and they could lower themselves down, he said, as the fire scene turned almost black with smoke that roiled up on the roof as the fire flashed over.

The danger of a firefighter dying or being injured in a building fire such as the church, the apartment building or the warehouse is 50 times as great as in a house fire, he said. Yet because firefighters typically extinguish house fires, they walk into an office fire, an apartment building fire or a warehouse fire the same way they fight a blaze in someone's home, he said.

The same techniques do not work in a big building, he said. Firefighters die in buildings because they get lost and cannot state their location when they radio for help. The ceilings are higher in big buildings and the firefighters do not get any warning if the fire is about to flash over -- because in offices, even ones with rooms divided by cubicles, the layout is like a maze, Lt. Endrikat said. The firefighters will become disoriented when they are dealing with smoke and heat -- because the big buildings sometimes lack a second way out and the firefighters are going to be trapped if they cannot go back the same way they entered.

Lt. Endrikat said the key to the team search is the "tether line," the rope the firefighters can use to retrace their steps and get back outside, if the conditions in the building suddenly change. In cases of a sudden building collapse, rescue workers work from the top down and simultaneously tunnel under the debris; they must use the ropes to rescue trapped firefighters, he said.

In another fire, dubbed the "Miracle on 42nd Street," Lt. Endrikat had to dig out a firefighter buried up to his neck in rubble while the man cried out that the fire was burning his feet.

"It took me a half an hour to get him out," he said. "He was saying, 'It's getting hot. My feet are burning.' "

The rescuers could have worked faster had they known a better technique, he said. He urged firefighters to keep up with new methods and pass the word when they find a better way to do the job.

This past weekend some 1,000 firefighters, hailing from more than 35 states and Canada, came to the Worcester Centrum Centre for two days of information that ideally will help them avert another tragedy such as the Cold Storage fire.

On Saturday, they heard experts tell how to assess potential hazards, such as a building ready to collapse, while yesterday's program tackled the issue of rescuing men from the vantage point of the firefighter going inside a building.

The event had a dual purpose, according to Lt. John Daly, one of the organizers. He said it was held to raise money for the fallen firefighters fund and to share some of the new ideas in search and rescue with the people who supported Worcester after the Dec. 3 tragedy. Lt. Daly did not know the total amount that had been collected and will not have the final figure until next week, but he was pleased with the attendance and the reaction to the program.

"These are common sense things we can do to help ourselves when we get trapped," he said.

William Powers, a firefighter from Hingham, said he found the presentations very informative and had in the past made some tools, adapting things he learned at similar seminars. For instance, he made his own rescue rope and also built a personal power handlight for searching.

This is basically how advances in firefighters' equipment have been made, Lt. Endrikat said.