In the absence of alarms and firefighters to lead workers in a Cook County building to safety, they led each other, fighting for their own survival.
Official warning signals failed. No sprinklers existed to extinguish the flames. Workers say Chicago firefighters turned them around in a locked and smoky stairwell without telling them how to get out.
A loudspeaker called for an evacuation but never said why. And workers were never told to avoid the east staircase, filling with deadly black smoke.
In this vacuum of official guidance, they screamed for each other to get out, checked every inch of their offices to ensure no one would be left behind and directed each other down stairs.
One week after a fire killed six people in a county building in the Loop, officials say firefighters followed procedures while working an extremely hot and smoky high-rise fire–a fire with “attitude,” as one fire official put it Friday.
Fire officials also said Friday that even before the second alarm was raised at the fire, a deputy district chief determined that the east stairwell was being used by firefighters battling the blaze and that the west stairwell should be used for evacuations. But workers in the building trying to get out apparently never learned that, and six died climbing up that east stairwell.
The accounts given by those who escaped the fire reveal the degree to which people were on their own that evening, trying to find their way out through the gathering smoke with little or no direction or guidance.
Mike Cafferty, 33, a Cook County public guardian attorney and a quadriplegic who suffered a spinal cord injury in a car accident when he was 18, had been told in the event of a fire to get into a stairwell and wait for firefighters to save him.
“The evacuation drill called for me to wait upstairs and go into the stairwell, and then there would be a firefighter to help me,” Cafferty said. “That was the plan. I’m glad we didn’t stick to the plan.”
When the fire broke out, Cafferty was working on the 18th floor with his assistant, preparing envelopes to mail. In the hall, several co-workers mentioned that they smelled smoke coming from the east side of the office.
Just then the intercom called for everyone on the 12th floor to evacuate. Some co-workers urged Cafferty to get into the elevator, he recalled. When he hesitated, they began yelling, “Come on, let’s go.”
Sherry Fox, 58, an attorney for 10 years with the Cook County public guardian’s office, pushed Cafferty to get in the elevator and rode down with him.
“We just didn’t want to take the chance,” she said. “We did what we thought we had to do to take care of each other.”
When the doors opened to the lobby, Fox still thought it was a “little fire.” She walked outside and looked up in shock at the debris, the windows blowing out and the orange flames.
But Tom Brennan, an attorney with the disabled adult division of the Cook County public guardian’s office on the 18th floor, stayed behind.
From a hallway window, he could see four fire engines rolling around the Daley Center, heading toward him. He then noticed the peculiar smell of burning electrical wiring.
Brennan and a fellow attorney, the floor wardens, urged everyone to evacuate. Still, they had no sense that they were six floors above a killer fire.
The two attorneys took off in opposite directions in a circuit of offices, telling people to leave. Most of their colleagues had no idea what was going on. One woman on the phone had mistaken the intercom announcement for the squawk of a passing security guard’s walkie-talkie.
Brennan pulled people away from their desks where they appeared to continue working amid the announcements.
Once moving down the stairs, the attorneys bumped into people evacuating the higher floors. They asked Brennan, “Are you using the stairs? What’s going on? We don’t know anything.”
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Brennan replied, “You should come down.”
When they arrived in the lobby, a faint scrim of smoke hung in the air.
Still, Brennan told himself it might be nothing more than a wastebasket fire clouding the vents. Then he walked toward the glass doors facing the street.
“What struck me was, there were thousands of people standing on the corner facing Dearborn and Washington [Streets] and Daley Plaza,” he said. “And all their mouths were open.”
After the order to evacuate, a group of about 10 people headed into the east stairwell from the public guardian’s office on the 19th floor.
The group was approaching the 12th floor when a firefighter appeared, according to two members of the group.
Carol Melton said she was within a few steps of one firefighter wearing a mask, who talked to her through his face shield. “Go back up!” she could hear him say.
Jill Runk, a public guardian attorney, was with Melton and others and says she heard the firefighter say, “You can’t pass right now.”
The firefighter pumped his arm, motioning for them to go back up the stairs, Runk said.
Melton said that John Slater, who was at the front of the group, took a few steps and quickly spoke to the firefighter and then Slater turned around and yelled at the group, “They’re working on the door,” and that everyone needed to turn around.
On Friday, fire officials questioned the witness accounts of meeting firefighters in the east stairwell. Cortez Trotter, director of the city’s office of emergency management, said that in interviews with firefighters, none said they turned people around on the east stairwell. And Fire Commissioner James Joyce questioned whether anyone could have heard a firefighter through his mask.
After the group turned around, Runk lost contact with the others but then heard people yelling, “We’re in on 27.”
When she got up to the 27th floor, Runk crossed through the office and down another set of stairs on the west side of the building, which were far less smoky. When she got out of the building, she told firefighters that attorneys Slater Maureen McDonald and Sara White Chapman were still inside.
A fire official told her everyone had gotten out of the building.
“Your friends are fine,” he told her. Paramedics treated her in an ambulance for minor injuries. The official told her to go home and once again assured her that her friends were fine. But Slater, McDonald and Chapman were dead.
The evacuation from the 32nd floor began with a frantic, pleading voice over the intercom saying to evacuate the building.
Adrienne Mebane, chief of staff for Cook County State’s Atty. Richard Devine, and colleagues looked out windows to see what the problem was, and they spotted fire engines racing toward them.
“People began scurrying and picking up personal items,” Mebane said. “I knew that Randy Roberts is always there late, the last person to leave. So I went to his office and told him that we needed to get going now.”
As the eight people made their way to the stairs, Devine walked back through the office and called out to make sure no one was left behind.
While people rushed down the steps, the smoke thickened and blackened around the 26th or 27th floor. At the 20th floor, a group of people was heading up toward them–it was the group from the public guardian’s office.
“They said they had been told to go back up and we asked them repeatedly, `Who said that?'” Mebane recalled. “They said firemen had told them that. I am thinking, you know, all these doors behind us are locked. And I am thinking that we are only going to walk to our deaths with all those locked doors behind us. But I turned around because they said the fireman had given those orders.
“The smoke started getting heavier and people started banging on doors and screaming, `Let me in! Let me in!’ I started to get angry, very angry. I was angry that people were becoming hysterical and people were screaming. I was angry that there hadn’t been some sort of communication so that we could get out of there. There were people on the first floor whose responsibility was to get us out of there, and they obviously were not communicating with everyone. The woman on the intercom had no plan. Nobody had a plan.”
Mebane said she saw a cleaning lady standing at one door frantically going through all of her keys to try to find one that opened the door.
“People were just hounding this poor lady,” said Sandy Lewis, Devine’s director of community affairs, who was with the group. “Here we are, all of us gasping for air and trying to get our wits about us, and these people are hounding this woman. It was total chaos.”
Teresa Zajac, a Polish housekeeper, perished in the fire. Mebane and Lewis said they believed Zajac to be the woman with the keys they passed on the stairwell.
Said Mebane, “Our group is just marching upward, marching up to our deaths, it seemed like.”
The smoke began to grow so thick that people could barely see each other and Mebane recalled that Roberts slowed down to make what appeared to be a cell phone call–either to authorities or to a loved one, she surmised.
Shortly after that, she heard someone say, “27 is open! 27 is open! The door is broken and open. Come up! Come up!”
Although she had become disoriented, she knew to keep climbing. When the group reached the door to the 27th floor, they stepped into the offices and everyone dispersed to find water because they each had a burning sensation in their throats from inhaling smoke.
Someone called 911 to say that they were now on the 27th floor and needed assistance, Mebane said.
That was the first time she ran across a firefighter who told the group to head down the west stairwell because it was clear.
When they reached the bottom, Mebane said she realized that Roberts was not with them, and she had not seen him on the 27th floor.
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So she asked someone to call his cell phone, and there was no answer. She then said to call Roberts’ wife at home to see if she had heard from him. His wife, Margy, answered and said she had not heard from her husband in quite a while, since about 5 p.m., when he called to tell her that he was about to head home. It was now after 6 p.m., Mebane said.
So Devine told a group of firefighters that someone was unaccounted for. A few minutes later, firefighters responded.
Some time later, they started to bring people out and Mebane saw Roberts. He was propped against a wall, with soot and smoke stains covering his suit and paramedics giving him oxygen. He waved at Mebane, “as if to say that he was OK.”
Margy Roberts said the Fire Department mishandled the rescue operations.
“They are good people and they work hard, I know, but I am afraid to say it, they messed up,” she said. “It seemed to be just a lack of communication. My husband just remembers them pulling him out and saving him, and he is grateful to them for that. But it should never have come to that.”