Turning Point(10)

The news broadcasts said it was the worst fire in the history of the city since the 1906 earthquake, and by eight o’clock that night, the uninjured guests, who were now homeless, had been sent to other hotels in the city. Those who took them in were using their ballrooms and conference centers to set up food and cots for them, once they ran out of rooms. Everyone was rallying to help and do what they could. And the Emergency Operations Center, directed by the Department of Emergency Management, were working closely with the police and fire department.

It was two in the morning when the fire stopped growing, and was considered contained within the hotel, although it wasn’t under full control yet. Every hospital had patients on gurneys in the halls, and additional nursing staff had been brought in to help. It was a disaster of major proportions. The mayor and governor were surveying the scene together, and planned to visit victims in the hospitals later that day.

    By eight A.M., thirty-seven hotel guests had died from burns and smoke inhalation, as well as nine firemen who had been trapped. Another forty firemen and more than a hundred hotel guests had been injured. The evacuation had been properly handled, but panic had taken a heavy toll. Market Street looked like a bomb had hit it, and the fire had spread to a department store next door before it was brought under control.

Stephanie didn’t make it home until two P.M. the day after the fire. Her white coat was black with ash and soot, and she looked exhausted when Andy saw her. He had watched the progress of the fire on TV all night, and Stephanie had sent him a text at two A.M. that their ER was being overrun. Every hospital in the city had been receiving victims of the fire, and even doctors not on call and from other departments had gone to help.

“How bad is it at UCSF?” Andy asked with interest, as she sat bone-tired in a chair, grateful that the boys were down for their naps. She was filthy and drained and hadn’t slept all night.

“It’s like a war.” The hotel had virtually been destroyed, gutted by the fire. “It was like the terrorist drills they’ve been describing to us, only worse. The firefighters took the hardest hit.” Firefighters had battled the blaze for fifteen hours, and many more would be on the scene in the coming days, making sure it was out, and they still didn’t know if it had been arson or not. Stephanie hoped it wasn’t, knowing that someone had set the fire intentionally would have been infinitely worse. She went to take a bath a few minutes later, and crawled into bed afterward, as Andy walked into their room and sat down on the bed. It reminded her of the dinner the night before. “How was your mom? With the fire, I would have had to go in anyway.”

    “She was upset, but she understands it’s the nature of what you do. She just doesn’t understand why you have to work on holidays,” he said quietly.

“Because people get hurt even on Christmas,” Stephanie said simply. “They called in everyone last night. We even delivered two babies in the ER. We couldn’t get the women to labor and delivery in time.” But the worst of it had been the burns, and she knew that several of those patients wouldn’t survive. The firefighters had been incredibly brave.

Stephanie looked peaceful as she drifted off to sleep. The entire trauma unit and emergency room team had done a good job, and she was proud of them, and to have been a part of it.

Tom Wylie felt the same way at Alta Bates, and Bill Browning was still in the thick of it. He hadn’t had time to call Pip and Alex at midnight as he’d meant to. They were still doing triage at General, and had gotten some homeless patients too. They had been asleep in doorways too close to the fire and been injured by falling debris. At Stanford, Wendy had her hands full as well. Jeff had come in at midnight to lend a hand, but all the cardiac patients had gone to SF General and UCSF to save time, and he left fairly quickly after talking to Wendy for a few minutes.

Tom Wylie got home at three P.M. His six-year-old patient who had had surgery the night before, after the car accident, was awake and doing well. And fresh teams had come in to deal with the victims of the fire, so he had finally gone back to his apartment. It was a depressing place, and looked better at night, lit with candles, than in broad daylight, which showed the threadbare furniture and the peeling paint. He had never spent much on rent and didn’t really care about where he lived as long as the place had a comfortable king-size bed. He grabbed the remote and turned on the TV mostly out of habit. He liked hearing a voice in the apartment, and he expected to see more coverage of the fire. The DEM had done an amazing job on the scene and overseeing dispatch to the various hospitals, and were being highly praised by all. But instead of Market Street, Tom saw images of the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-élysées in Paris. It was midnight on December 26 there, and a band that ran across the television screen read “Terrorism in Paris,” as an American reporter described a scene of carnage on the Champs-élysées. Four major luxury stores and two movie complexes that showed mostly American films in the original version had been taken over, with moviegoers and shoppers held hostage and gunned down, including children. A suicide bomber had blown up one of the stores, and another had entered the elevator at the Eiffel Tower, intending to blow it up, but had been killed before he could detonate the belt he wore and turn himself into a human bomb.

    In all, one hundred and two people had been killed, and another fifty-three injured. It was the worst attack of its kind since the November attacks four years before. It was another massive assault on people going about their business, shopping the day after Christmas, taking advantage of sales, going to movies and having dinner on the famous Champs-élysées. The motives were political, but however they justified it, innocents had been slaughtered, even young children. The attacks had occurred at six P.M., before the stores closed in Paris, and tears rolled down Tom’s cheeks as he watched the scenes of destruction and mass murder, and the numbers of people injured as sirens screamed in the night. The ravages of the hotel fire seemed small compared to what Paris had just been through, again.