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KELLEY BENHAMResidents of a condominium complex watched a fire burn up their lives when there wasn't enough water to stop it. Firefighters who had watched helplessly decided to do what they could to retrieve their memories. Their money. And one almanac.
ST. PETERSBURG - It has been 21 years since she saw her daughter's face.
Yet, she still pictures Eileen so clearly. Seventeen. Red hair. Always smiling. Always telling her mother to relax.
When Mary Cunningham ran out of her apartment into what she thought was fog, she assumed that she would be right back. She left her eyeglasses on a living room table.
Then she stood outside with her neighbors and watched the building burn and burn, watched the third floor collapse into the second and parts of the second collapse into the first, where she had lived.
She remembered her daughter's picture in the frame in the Florida room. Eileen is at a birthday party, and someone has tossed her a football. She holds it high in one hand. She is smiling. In a week, she would die in a car crash.
Mrs. Cunningham is 66 now. Every picture of the daughter she lost was inside the apartment when it burned.
Helpless
Elderly residents missing their glasses, their medicine, their wallets, ran to the firefighters and tugged at their sleeves.
"Do something!"
But there were too few hydrants, and the few hydrants were too far away. Each truck held about a minute's worth of water, and when it was gone, the firefighters could only watch and wait for more trucks and hoses.
Ron Neuberger stood amid falling pieces of the building.
I am a firefighter, he thought. I am not supposed to stand here while the building is burning.
It started to rain, but then wind rolled in and whipped the flames and spread the black smoke.
"Do something. Please."
He had been a firefighter for 17 years, and he was helpless in the heat from the most devastating fire he had seen.
In the end, everyone was safe, but the 54 homes in the Nautilus building were wrecked. Lealman firefighters serve 11 square miles and 50,000 people. They know the senior community at Town Apartments North because they do so many medical calls to the complex.
On the drive back to the station that night - Saturday, June 21 - the firefighters talked about how they wished they could have salvaged something more.
The red X
The next morning, they told the residents to make a list.
The shaken seniors tried to remember what their homes had looked like inside, where they had kept the things that mattered.
Gold watch, in the bedroom, can't remember where I left it . . .
Bedroom. Dresser. Second drawer down. Under a blue pair of underwear. A ring box.
The firefighters had painted marks on the doors showing how bad the damage was. Red marks meant that even firefighters could not enter. If the residents saw red, they knew that they had probably lost everything. Some could see, where their apartment used to be, only sky.
Lillian Duryea never made a list. She just stared at her burned-out third floor apartment with a red X on the wall.
The day of the fire, she had lost a grandson in the morning and everything else in the afternoon.
Her daughter had told her about Jeffrey, who had a brain tumor, then took her to lunch. When they got back, flames were shooting out of the building. They watched the fire burn for five hours. Mrs. Duryea, 87, did not cry much. She did not say much of anything.
She later tried to make a list for the insurance company. She thought of the pendant that her husband had given her. She had been tucking away a dollar a day for Jeffrey's medical bills. He was 39. She had wanted to leave jewelry to her grandchildren.
"I'm too old to rebuild," she told her family.
Mary Cunningham wanted her medicine. She had just spent $400 on five prescriptions, and without pills, she couldn't sleep. She tossed all Saturday night.
She told the firefighters where to find Eileen's pictures. One was by the television in the Florida room. Another stood on a bedroom table next to a picture of her husband, Kevin, who died eight years ago. In the picture, Kevin is smiling. He almost never smiled.
She got ready for the possibility that the firefighters would return shaking their heads.
Sometimes when she loses things and gets flustered, she sees Eileen, still 17, telling her, "Don't be so hyper."
I know, she'll say to herself. Don't be hyper.
A card for Grandma
Inside the wreckage, Ron Neuberger felt strange picking through the scraps of other people's lives.
Usually, insurance people do this. But the helpless feeling gnawed at him. The desperate faces. Do something. This was all he could think of to do.
He felt like a burglar, opening their drawers. Inside one drawer he found a greeting card. To Grandma, I love you. It meant enough to someone that they had tucked it away where it would be safe.
It wasn't on the list. He put it in the box.
After that, he knew what he was really looking for. The lists were not enough.
He asked himself: What would I want?
He noticed how the people had taken care of their homes. Beds were neatly made. Wood floors gleamed under the flowing water. So many china cabinets, figurines and collectibles. So late in life to start over.
In Apartment 110, vacuum marks still showed on the carpet. The firefighters had left it streaked with sooty boot prints.
A picture of a picture
Firefighters are used to thinking of buildings as structures. They evaluate things such as damage and stability. It would be hard to think too long about the people who lived in the burned buildings.
Now they will remember a girl in a blue dress. The woman who asked them to find the picture of the girl wanted nothing else.
It was supposed to be hanging on a wall, but water was streaming down the walls, and the picture was gone. They offered the woman paintings and other photographs. No, she said. She described the picture that she wanted. It was her daughter, she said. She died when she was a toddler.
Neuberger went back in to tell his partner, Henry Fultz. Fultz dug through a collapsed bedroom closet, ankle deep in water. Under wet clothes he found a family portrait. In it, one of the people was holding something. A picture. Of a girl in a blue dress.
They kept going. Then there she was. She was 3. Blond hair, staring at something in the distance. Fultz thought of his daughter's face. Neuberger's younger son is 2.
"I would have wanted that picture," Neuberger said. "I would have wanted that more than anything."
When they gave it to her, tears blurred their vision. Got to do another apartment, Neuberger said.
The four men worked by flashlight, bumping their heads on sagging fans. They hacked through wet walls. The ceiling dripped something black and inky. Chunks of ceiling fell on them. Rain made the building heavy, unsteady. They worked between lightning storms. Where the floor was gone, they walked across burned beams.
They worked in pairs, to be safe. They were supposed to stay out of the rooms marked with red, but the anxious waiting faces made it hard. In the worst apartments, some of them marked red, they sent one man in while three stayed at the doorway in case he got trapped. These are the things they don't tell their wives.
The nickel
Some lists seemed like the products of muddled minds. Some were detailed and precise.
One woman wanted her hair dryer. They got it for her but warned her not to plug it in.
Another woman gave elaborate directions to a hiding spot for a piece of plastic pipe. They didn't know why she wanted it, but it was where she said it would be. They could see cash sticking out of it, and when they handed it to her, she explained. There was $40,000 inside.
She asked them to go back inside for one more thing: a coffee can. People stashed things all over these condos, so they asked her: What was hidden in the can?
"Coffee," she said.
Richard Schlesinger, 84, had a meager list. Fultz picked through suit pockets in the old man's closet until he found a wad of cash. He looked for pictures and mementos, but the man didn't seem to have any. Fultz grabbed a dictionary. He looked under cushions and found a nickel. He threw it in the box. Outside, the man looked at the dictionary. He asked Fultz to go back inside for the almanac.
A familiar place
The firefighters worked for three days. In their memories, one day runs into the next. One apartment feels like another. They remember the funny way things fell. It didn't make sense, a bathtub in a living room. The apartment with two refrigerators. Missing closets. Missing rooms.
They remember the burned furniture and hanging drywall that surrounded an untouched buffet table. On the buffet table was an urn. Above the urn was a picture of Jesus holding a small child surrounded by clouds.
Fultz stared at the picture. For a moment he imagined what it meant to whoever lived there.
He snatched the picture off the wall.
One woman wanted a wedding picture. She didn't need to describe her apartment because Neuberger knew it. He had been there a few years before, trying to restart her husband's heart. He recognized the recliner where he had found the man unconscious before dragging him into the living room. The man had died at the hospital.
As he searched, Neuberger saw the man's clothes in the closet, his watch on the table. The wedding picture was in his dresser drawer, underneath his folded shirts, safe.
Outside, people waiting for word could hear ceilings falling inside the building.
Mary Cunningham put her arm around a woman who was crying. "It's only material things," she said.
The way he remembers it, it was as if Eileen's picture was the only thing in the room not touched by water. Neuberger can still picture her face. Red hair. A casual smile.
When he saw her picture in the bedroom, his skin tingled. He sucked in his breath. She was chatting on the telephone, glancing at her mother behind the camera.
In the Florida room, Neuberger saw Eileen again, holding a football high in the air.
He did not toss Eileen's pictures in the Tupperware bin with the other items. He carried them out of the building in his hands.
As soon as she saw him, Mrs. Cunningham started to cry.
Mother's first Christmas
Mrs. Duryea's granddaughters returned to the apartment building more than a week after the fire. They knew that her unit had been marked as hopeless, but they had to bring back something.
By chance, Neuberger, Fultz and Joseph Neal were at the building, too. When they checked again, they found that Mrs. Duryea's floor, full of holes, was steady enough to walk on.
They found a lockbox. Inside was some of the heirloom jewelry. Mrs. Duryea's granddaughters asked if there was anything else, so they went back in.
Sharon Smith Holley, one of the granddaughters, watched from below with her hands over her heart.
Neuberger started digging at a pile of rubble. He found a drawer handle but no drawer. Then he found a family portrait and some boys' school pictures. He touched a boy's face, and it rubbed away under his glove.
Fultz blew soot off a picture in a heart-shaped frame. He pulled photo albums out of the sludge and looked at some of the faces in the pictures. He kept digging and found glass Christmas ornaments, still shiny and whole.
Downstairs, they handed Mrs. Duryea's granddaughters a cardboard box.
"Oh my god," Holley said, fingering a silver ornament shaped like a bell. Every year she and her sisters helped Mrs. Duryea decorate her tree. This ornament was from her mother's first Christmas, in 1936. "You don't know how much this means."
They held the smudged, stained pictures of children and grandchildren. They saw themselves.
They showed Neuberger the family portrait he had pulled from the soot.
It was Jeffrey, who died the morning of the fire, with his sons.
"She had nothing," Holley said. "This is everything."
Neuberger was in the apartments so long in the days after the fire that he can't remember leaving.
In his memory, one face runs into another. But he remembers how grateful they were after losing so much.
He knows that he grabbed his children when he got home, grabbed his wife.
He knows that even after he showered, the smell of the fire stayed with him, in his skin.