Firefighter Death Quotes

I became a firefighter because I wanted to save people. But I should have been more specific. I should have named names.

The two great constants of life. Food and death.

To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil—everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self—your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.

A year after the event, the Office of Chief Medical Examiner had issued 2,733 death certificates for the victims of the World Trade Center bombings—1,344 by judicial decree and 1,389 based on identified remains. The count of Members of the Service confirmed dead was 343 firefighters, 23 NYPD officers, and 48 others, most of these Port Authority police. The dead left more than 3,000 orphans. It was the largest mass murder in United States history.

In four separate fires in the 1990s, twenty-three elite wildland firefighters refused orders to drop their tools and perished beside them. Even when Rhoades eventually dropped his chainsaw, he felt like he was doing something unnatural. Weick found similar phenomena in Navy seamen who ignored orders to remove steel-toed shoes when abandoning a ship, and drowned or punched holes in life rafts; fighter pilots in disabled planes refusing orders to eject; and Karl Wallenda, the world-famous high-wire performer, who fell 120 feet to his death when he teetered and grabbed first at his balance pole rather than the wire beneath him. He momentarily lost the pole while falling, and grabbed it again in the air. “Dropping one’s tools is a proxy for unlearning, for adaptation, for flexibility,” Weick wrote. “It is the very unwillingness of people to drop their tools that turns some of these dramas into tragedies.

For a long minute he gazed at her, his eyes searching the features of that face he'd grown to love so deeply over the years, his memory bringing up images of the past as he did so. The young determination in her face as, in the middle of a blazing firefight, she'd grabbed Luke's blaster rifle away from him and shot them an escape route into the Death Star's detention-level garbage chute. The sound of her voice in the middle of deadly danger at Jabba's, helping him through the blindness and tremor and disorientation of hibernation sickness. The wiser, more mature determination visible through the pain in her eyes as, lying wounded outside the Endor bunker, she had nevertheless summoned the skill and control to coolly shoot two stormtroopers off Han's back. And he remembered, too, the wrenching realization he'd had at that same time: that no matter how much he tried, he would never be able to totally protect her from the dangers and risks of the universe. Because no matter how much he might love her--no matter how much he might give of himself to her--she could never be content with that alone. Her vision extended beyond him, just as it extended beyond herself, to all the beings of the galaxy. And to take that away from her, whether by force or even by persuasion, would be to diminish her soul. And to take away part of what he'd fallen in love with in the first place.

Even a woman in labor will not be admitted into a hospital without her guardian or at least a mahram. Police cannot enter a home during a robbery, and firefighters are forbidden from entering a home during a fire or medical emergency if a woman is inside but does not have a mahram present. In 2014, Amna Bawazeer died on the campus of King Saud University when school officials refused to allow male paramedics to enter the female-only school after Amna collapsed from a heart ailment. The same story repeated itself in 2016 at Qaseem University when male paramedics were not allowed on campus to treat a female student, Dhuha Almane, who subsequently died. It is not a stretch to say that death is preferable to violating the strict code of guardianship and mahrams.

There is an art to navigating London during the Blitz. Certain guides are obvious: Bethnal Green and Balham Undergrounds are no-goes, as is most of Wapping, Silvertown and the Isle of Dogs. The further west you go, the more you can move around late at night in reasonable confidence of not being hit, but should you pass an area which you feel sure was a council estate when you last checked in the 1970s, that is usually a sign that you should steer clear. There are also three practical ways in which the Blitz impacts on the general functioning of life in the city. The first is mundane: streets blocked, services suspended, hospitals overwhelmed, firefighters exhausted, policemen belligerent and bread difficult to find. Queuing becomes a tedious essential, and if you are a young nun not in uniform, sooner or later you will find yourself in the line for your weekly portion of meat, to be eaten very slowly one mouthful at a time, while non-judgemental ladies quietly judge you Secondly there is the slow erosion-a rather more subtle but perhaps more potent assault on the spirit It begins perhaps subtly, the half-seen glance down a shattered street where the survivors of a night which killed their kin sit dull and numb on the crooked remnants of their bed. Perhaps it need not even be a human stimulus: perhaps the sight of a child's nightdress hanging off a chimney pot, after it was thrown up only to float straight back down from the blast, is enough to stir something in your soul that has no rare. Perhaps the mother who cannot find her daughter, or the evacuees' faces pressed up against the window of a passing train. It is a death of the soul by a thousand cuts, and the falling skies are merely the laughter of the executioner going about his business. And then, inevitably, there is the moment of shock It is the day your neighbour died because he went to fix a bicycle in the wrong place, at the wrong time. It is the desk which is no longer filled, or the fire that ate your place of work entirely so now you stand on the street and wonder, what shall I do? There are a lot of lies told about the Blitz spirit: legends are made of singing in the tunnels, of those who kept going for friends, family and Britain. It is far simpler than that People kept going because that was all that they could really do. Which is no less an achievement, in its way.

The sky was so blue. It’s only been five years. My skyline was never marked with an absence. Remember that wine school? Windows on the World? I had been underneath them, on the F train coming from Brooklyn just one hour before. I was late for high school but glued to the TV. I had taught a class there - on Rioja - on the night of September tenth. Chef made soup. So I heard something and looked out my window - you know I’m on the East Side. It was too low. But it was steady and went by almost in slow motion. The Owner set up a soup kitchen on the sidewalk. No, I haven’t been down there. The smoke. The dust. But the sky was so blue. My buddy was the somm at the restaurant - we came up at Tavern on the Green together. You guys never talk about it. I was going into a class called, I’m not joking, Meanings of Death. I always wondered: If I had been here, would I have stayed? And I thought, New York is so far away. My cousin was a firefighter, second-wave responder. Nothing on television is real. But am I safe? Because what else is there to do but make soup? But I really can’t imagine it. I was pouring milk into my cereal, I looked down for one second… I was asleep, I didn’t even feel the impact. A tide of people moving up the avenues on foot. Blackness. Sometimes it still feels too soon. It’s our shared map of the city. Then the sirens, for days. We never forget, really. A map we make by the absences. No one left the city. If you were here, you were temporarily cured of fear.

The first time he’d cut off ears because he was there and it was being done, but that was it. He wasn’t one of those who once they were in all that lawlessness couldn’t wait to get going, the ones who weren’t too well put together or were pretty aggressive to start off with and only needed the slightest opportunity to go ape-shit. One guy in his unit, guy they called Big Man, he wasn’t there one or two days when he’d slashed some pregnant woman’s belly open. Farley was himself only beginning to get good at it at the end of his first tour. But the second time, in this unit where there are a lot of other guys who’d also come back and who hadn’t come back just to kill time or to make a couple extra bucks, this second time, in with these guys who are always looking to be put out in front, ape-shit guys who recognize the horror but know it is the very best moment of their lives, he is ape-shit too. In a firefight, running from danger, blasting with guns, you can’t not be frightened, but you can go berserk and get the rush, and so the second time he goes berserk. The second time he fucking wreaks havoc. Living right out there on the edge, full throttle, the excitement and the fear, and there’s nothing in civilian life that can match it. Door gunning. They’re losing helicopters and they need door gunners. They ask at some point for door gunners and he jumps at it, he volunteers. Up there above the action, and everything looks small from above, and he just guns down huge. Whatever moves. Death and destruction, that is what door gunning is all about. With the added attraction that you don’t have to be down in the jungle the whole time. But then he comes home and it’s not better than the first time, it’s worse. Not like the guys in World War II: they had the ship, they got to relax, someone took care of them, asked them how they were. There’s no transition. One day he’s door gunning in Vietnam, seeing choppers explode, in midair seeing his buddies explode, down so low he smells skin cooking, hears the cries, sees whole villages going up in flames, and the next day he’s back in the Berkshires. And now he really doesn’t belong, and, besides, he’s got fears now about things going over his head. He doesn’t want to be around other people, he can’t laugh or joke, he feels that he is no longer a part of their world, that he has seen and done things so outside what these people know about that he cannot connect to them and they cannot connect to him. They told him he could go home? How could he go home?

He then made the connection between Jim’s death and the compulsion he felt to commit the robberies. Once he became aware of his feelings and the role the original event had played in driving his compulsion, the man was able to stop re-enacting this tragic incident. What was the connection between the robberies and the Vietnam experience? By staging the robberies, the man was re-creating the fire-fight that had resulted in the death of his friend (as well as the rest of his platoon). By provoking the police to join in the re-enactment, the vet had orchestrated the cast of characters needed to play the role of the Viet Cong. He did not want to hurt anyone, so he used his fingers instead of a gun. He then brought the situation to a climax and was able to elicit the help he needed to heal his psychic wounds. That act enabled him to resolve his anguish, grief, and guilt about his buddy’s violent death and the horrors of war.

We walk the razor’s edge between communal worth and social numbing, essentially, and what we lean more toward will determine the memory of us as a collective. For our children. For theirs.

I wish my head could forget what my eyes have seen”.

That is where we live - in that place - between life and death. It is a dark arena, where a game is played against a malicious enemy who never stops seeking victims. And sometimes, we have to make the trade. We have to trade ourselves for those we’ve sworn to serve.

What the do-gooders label “de-sensitization” has a value as well as a price. Some of us can’t afford to be shocked by catastrophe. The surgeon, the burn ward nurse, emergency room attendants, paramedics, firefighters and cops, all those who scrape the still-screaming remains out of car wrecks, must cultivate their off-switch. Those who can’t learn to crack wise and discuss baseball over a corpse must find a gentler line of work. The rumor is that city cops get strange from what they see, their eyes flattening or sinking into sockets as deep and hollow as rat holes.

About thirty minutes later, Dan Dan the Death Man comes back on, saying that thanks to the excellent work of the firefighters on the crew, the fire is out. We will be able to return to our cabins as soon as the rest of the ship has been checked. He says the heat from the fire set off every fire alarm on the ship and so every chamber must be checked before we can go back inside. Most people take this as good news. But I’m too smart for that. I know that extreme heat plus a burst fuel pipe means that the ship is going to explode now. While people around me start to relax, I keep my eyes on the sea, waiting to be rocketed into it on a wave of fire. I’ll be ready for it to happen and that way it won’t happen. It’s a burden, being able to control situations with my hyper-vigilance, but it’s my lot in

There wasn’t anything to say to that. Tox should have carried out the man. Given the girl to Mazanti to carry. The Angel of Death had struck again.

One Saturday afternoon in the cafe, all the talk was about a dreadful fire in a Scottish whisky factory that resulted in the deaths of twenty firefighters.

Create a positive environment that enables healthy conversation around the dinner table, a chance for all of us to say how we feel. Help lift those who are hurting and learn from those who have pulled themselves out of the darkness. No first responder is spared from post-traumatic stress. I hope we can remove the stigma once and for all and stop any more of our brothers and sisters from feeling they have nowhere to turn. Remember, if you bury the seeds, they will keep growing in the dark until they can’t be contained any more.

Unplanned work has another side effect. When you spend all your time firefighting, there’s little time or energy left for planning. When all you do is react, there’s not enough time to do the hard mental work of figuring out whether you can accept new work. So, more projects are crammed onto the plate, with fewer cycles available to each one, which means more bad multitasking, more escalations from poor code, which mean more shortcuts. As Bill said, ‘around and around we go.’ It’s the it capacity death spiral.

Had I spent the previous twenty years on a couch, the chances of being able to protect my son and his friends would have been slim to none. As a lifelong martial artist, first responder and athlete, those chances were significantly higher.

They tried to bury us. They didn’t know that we were seeds. – Mexican proverb

This was the night the insane asylum burned down. Heinrich and I got in the car and went to watch. There were other men at the scene with their adolescent boys. Evidently fathers and sons seek fellowship at such events. Fires help draw them closer, provide a conversational wedge. There is equipment to appraise, the technique of firemen to discuss and criticize. The manliness of firefighting—the virility of fires, one might say—suits the kind of laconic dialogue that fathers and sons can undertake without awkwardness or embarrassment. “Most of these fires in old buildings start in the electrical wiring,” Heinrich said. “Faulty wiring. That’s one phrase you can’t hang around for long without hearing.” “Most people don’t burn to death,” I said. “They die of smoke inhalation.” “That’s the other phrase,” he said.

In the midst of chaos and death, a new family had been forged. One that as chosen as opposed to an accident of biology—and for that reason, more abiding and enduring.

I don’t know how many remains from the World Trade Center attacks I personally processed. It’s impossible to know. I had 598 DM01 cases officially assigned to me. That makes arithmetic sense: the individual pieces of recovered remains numbered 19,956, and there were 30 medical examiners. Around 600 each. We would try to make sense of it by thinking of the victims as numbers, remains, specimens. A year after the event, the Office of Chief Medical Examiner had issued 2,733 death certificates for the victims of the World Trade Center bombings—1,344 by judicial decree and 1,389 based on identified remains. The count of Members of the Service confirmed dead was 343 firefighters, 23 NYPD officers, and 48 others, most of these Port Authority police. The dead left more than 3,000 orphans. It was the largest mass murder in United States history.

the boy had killed only eight. The presence of a lone FBI agent only complicated the situation more. What had he been doing there? Eyewitness reports of a brief firefight outside before the massacre only piqued his curiosity. A frenzy of reporters and news cameras had flooded the scene outside, held at bay by tight-lipped crowd control officers. Detective Harper noticed that Darion had failed to upload his video in time. After recovering the busted-up GoPro, he viewed the recording and was met with gruesome scenes of the carnage—death captured in real time. Harper placed it in a sealed evidence bag to be transported to the evidence room with everything else. The detective did a Hail Mary and then tried to get some ID on the shooter. Nothing on the scene directly linked him to a terrorist network. He had no identification on him. Suddenly, Harper heard on his radio that another man, who resembled the diner gunman, had been hit by a truck, not far from the diner. *** Craig tried his best to maintain control of the crash site. He called Patterson repeatedly but only got voicemail instead. A sick feeling brewed in his stomach as he heard sirens blare from a few blocks over. Police were everywhere on the street around him. Paramedics had the driver of the truck—an unconscious white-haired man—on a wheeled stretcher and fitted into a neck-and-shoulder brace. As they pushed him to the ambulance, one EMT held an oxygen pump over the man’s face and pumped intermittently. Rasheed lay in the road unconscious among broken pieces of the truck’s front end and a backpack full of pipe bombs. It was a surreal scene, the second time Craig found himself in the middle of the street amid destruction and chaos in a matter of days. The tide seemed to be turning against him. He forbade investigators to touch the pipe bombs and demanded that the paramedics handle Rasheed with the utmost care.

Halfway around the world, Marines were walking into an ambush, in a firefight, or fighting hand-to-hand in a desperate life-and-death struggle. Here we were, laughing and drinking as if none of that was happening, but I knew it was, and I knew what it felt like. I felt ashamed!

Doctors experience death more than any other professionals do—more than firefighters, policemen, or soldiers—yet we always think about death as a very concrete construct. It’s a box on a checklist, a red bar on a chart, or an outcome in a clinical trial. Death is secular, sterile, and singular—and, unlike many other things in medicine, incredibly binary. So it was interesting to think of death more as a concept and a process than as a fact and an endpoint.

On July 1, everyone wakes up to the news that nineteen firefighters have been killed in the Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona. The Granite Mountain Hotshots are one of the most storied and highly trained groups of firefighting professionals in the world, and yet a fast-growing fire started by lightning overran nineteen of its members. When they realized the fire was upon them, the firefighters deployed their safety shelters, but the shelters were not protective enough to withstand the intense heat of the blaze. The Yarnell Hill Fire has the highest death toll of any U.S. wildfire since the 1991 East Bay Hills fire killed twenty-five people. It is the sixth deadliest American wildfire and the deadliest wildfire ever in the state of Arizona. Starting today, the Colorado Rockies baseball team will wear 19 on all of their jerseys to honor the fallen firefighters.

About thirty minutes later, Dan Dan the Death Man comes back on, saying that thanks to the excellent work of the firefighters on the crew, the fire is out. We will be able to return to our cabins as soon as the rest of the ship has been checked. He says the heat from the fire set off every fire alarm on the ship and so every chamber must be checked before we can go back inside. Most people take this as good news. But I’m too smart for that. I know that extreme heat plus a burst fuel pipe means that the ship is going to explode now. While people around me start to relax, I keep my eyes on the sea, waiting to be rocketed into it on a wave of fire. I’ll be ready for it to happen and that way it won’t happen. It’s a burden, being able to control situations with my hyper-vigilance, but it’s my lot in life.