From 1985: How the MOVE fire spread

This story was originally published on May 26, 1985.

5:27 p.m., Monday, May 13:

The makeshift bomb in the canvas satchel lands near a front corner of the rear bunker of the MOVE house.

A wisp of white smoke from the bomb’s 15-inch fuse drifts aloft as the explosive sits on the planked roof, near a crumpled piece of carpet, a rolled- up cloth hammock, a skylight covered with plywood and a blue five-gallon kerosene can.

Forty-two seconds after the drop, the bomb explodes, taking the can with it and hurling flame and debris upward and forward toward Osage Avenue.

The blast has a shock wave of close to 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

A half-second after that, a red gasoline can, about 12 feet away, tucked against a makeshift wooden fence and surrounded by rubble, explodes in a secondary blast and sends flames 15 feet into the sky.

Nearby, another blue five-gallon metal can, lying on its side, also takes the impact of the blast.

The worst residential fire in the history of Philadelphia has begun. And no one realizes how bad it will be. No one will, for hours.

Worse, the mayor did not know before he approved the detonation that the city was about to bomb not an ordinary rowhouse roof, but an expanse of planked flooring littered with lumber, cloth, paper and the three gasoline or kerosene cans. And, apparently, neither did the police command, nor the fire command.

That reconstruction of the two distinct blasts that preceded the inferno that killed 11 MOVE members and destroyed or gutted 61 houses was pieced together from magnification of Inquirer photographs of the MOVE roof, taken an hour and a half before the explosion, and a frame-by-frame study of uncut videotape of the explosion recorded by WCAU-TV (Channel 10).

It is part of a larger Inquirer reconstruction of the fire and the circumstances surrounding it that shows:

* The bomb threw off a wave of heat three times as hot as a gasoline fire and up to twice as hot as the flames that gutted the houses on Osage Avenue and melted asphalt streets.

* Despite the 640,000 gallons of water sprayed at the roof before noon, photographs taken 90 minutes before the bombing show a dry roof. Most of the water apparently overshot or bounced off the littered 12-by-12 foot area, enclosed by two bunkers and two fences, into which the bomb fell. In addition, the plank flooring MOVE had installed on the roof facilitated drainage.

* The fire blazed unchecked for so long that an alarmed Mayor Goode, watching on television in his office, at one point telephoned Managing Director Leo A. Brooks and urged that firefighting begin. It didn’t, until 6:32 p.m., when the water cannons opened up.

* Even after the fire had spread to five rooftops, it was fought almost exclusively with two water cannons, which were too far away to be effective and which are considered inadequate to stop a fire by themselves even when they are close up.

* Again and again, police officers complained that firefighters were creating too much smoke by pouring water on the fire, making it almost impossible to shoot at the MOVE house or even determine whether people were escaping.

* Even when gunfire faded and firefighters observed police officers becoming more relaxed, no one ordered them in to fight the fire, they say. Finally, some firefighters moved in on their own.

* Once three alarms were sounded and firefighters began attacking the fire in full force, after 8 p.m., they were hindered by chronic decreases in water

pressure and the lack of any large water mains in the neighborhood.

* The wood-and-glass porches on Osage Avenue, with no fire walls, and the wood front and back walls of the houses allowed the fire to spread much faster than it would have in an all-brick rowhouse row.

* Because of all this, heroic action by many firefighters came too late for the 61 homes destroyed or gutted and the 250 or so people left homeless.

Firefighters are bitter that their efforts late in the night have gone largely unrecognized by the public. They say the fire could have done twice as much damage were it not for what one officer calls “a great and courageous effort.”

Instead, one 23-year veteran of the force, a battalion chief who helped fight the MOVE fire, has since been booed in the streets of Philadelphia.

Many are also bitter that, since Monday, they have been silenced on the advice of city solicitor Barbara Mather. Among those silenced was Fire Commissioner William C. Richmond.

The best view of the detonation was captured by a TV camera that Channel 10 had attached to a portable microwave antenna used to beam TV signals back to its studio. Early in the day, technician Jim Barger had raised the hydraulic mast of the antenna above the rooftops at 62d and Pine Streets, about 265 feet from the MOVE bunkers. Throughout the confrontation, the camera provided Channel 10 viewers - and Philadelphia police - with a periscope view of MOVE’s ramparts.

About 20 minutes before the bombing, a police sergeant who had been scrutinizing the rooftop on the Channel 10 monitor all afternoon asked Barger to lower the camera and reset the lens for a closer look. The technician considered the request a giveaway that something significant was about to happen. He complied, and was careful to keep his videotape recorder rolling.

The scene captured by the camera, replayed frame by frame, provides a vivid record of the progress of the explosions. Viewed in conjunction with The Inquirer’s photographs of the rooftop, taken 90 minutes earlier, it shows the precise origins of the fire that traumatized Philadelphia and shocked the nation.

One second of tape can be broken into 30 frames on the videocassette recorder The Inquirer used to analyze the explosion.

As the chilling slow-motion sequence unfolds, a brilliant white flash erupts in front of the rear bunker, within a foot or two of where the Inquirer photographs show a blue five-gallon kerosene can. The sudden illumination, like a flashbulb, momentarily bathes the front bunker with light.

The bunker, frozen in a single frame of the videotape, appears caught by the first rays of a rising sun - one side in dark shadows and another awash in a warm red glow.

In the next several frames, the spherical fireball of the explosion expands concentrically, until it reaches the front bunker. The spreading shock wave rips a yellow tarpaulin from the top of the bunker, lifting it across the sky.

Miscellaneous debris, mostly pieces of lumber, sprays outward from the center of the blast.

The temperature of this blast was up to 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit, according to Du Pont Co., which manufactures Tovex TR-2, the explosive used. A normal gasoline fire burns at 2,000 degrees. A fire like the Osage Avenue inferno, which consumed everything but brick and metal, reaches 3,500 to 4,000 degrees, according to Jim Kolson, a fire-protection engineer for the insurance industry.

In several more frames of the videotape, the fireball expands beyond the view of the television camera. Then, just as quickly, the force of the blast dissipates and the debris begins to rain down.

Next, a smaller, secondary explosion erupts just behind the front bunker, where The Inquirer’s photographs show a gasoline can. Bright orange and red flames shoot skyward from the site of the second flash - about 12 feet from the point where the bomb detonated.

In subsequent frames, the tongues of flame flare above the bunker - distinct and apart from the earlier fireball of the Police Department’s high-explosive device.

At normal speed, the blast appears to be a single burst. But replayed slowly in increments of 30 frames per second, it unfolds as two separate events, the first initiating the second.

In The Inquirer’s photographs, the junk scattered around the MOVE roof includes at least three gasoline or kerosene cans and two other metal containers that cannot be positively identified. The roof appears dry, despite five hours of hosing that morning.

MOVE neighbors had repeatedly told police that the militants had been stockpiling gasoline in their compound, and an Associated Press photographer had snapped a picture of a MOVE member hoisting a gasoline can to the roof 11 days before the confrontation.

On the Saturday before the fire, according to Mayor Goode, police received a letter from Ramona Africa warning that MOVE would burn the house at 6221 Osage Ave., if attacked. The letter was passed to Police Commissioner Gregore J. Sambor late Monday afternoon, the day of the bombing and fire. The mayor said he did not see the letter until the following Wednesday or Thursday.

But, from Lt. Frank Powell, head of the police Bomb Disposal Unit and the man who actually dropped the bomb, on up the chain of command to Mayor Goode, officials are resolute in insisting that they did not know there were gasoline cans or containers for other flammable liquids on the roof.

Powell made four passes over the house in a helicopter before he bombed it on a fifth pass, without noticing any gas cans, he told The Inquirer the Wednesday after the fire. “I probably know that roof better than my own neighborhood,” Powell said.

Indeed, Powell insisted that when his helicopter flew back over the house two minutes after the bomb drop, “there was no fire on that roof and no fire in that hole. . . . We did not start that fire.”

Other police officers also went aloft on that Monday to peer at the fortified rooftop and, apparently, none reported the presence of gasoline cans.

Sambor has said that only after the explosion and subsequent fire did he become “convinced” that MOVE had doused roofs on Osage Avenue with flammable liquids.

Fire Commissioner Richmond hasn’t said if he got a look at the roof before the bombing, but last Tuesday, Richmond and Fire Marshal Roger Ulshafer came to The Inquirer at the newspaper’s invitation to review the WCAU-TV videotape and The Inquirer’s photographs. They took notes on each, and at the conclusion of the meeting Richmond jokingly made a move to take the photographs with him.

Ulshafer said, however, that it was not possible to draw immediate conclusions from the pictures or the videotape.

Fire department investigators are currently performing their own detailed frame-by-frame analysis of the TV station’s original, unedited videotapes, he said.

Mayor Goode has said that, before the fire, he thought it was possible there were flammables or explosives on the first floor or in the basement of the house, but he had no clue that the roof contained either gasoline cans or piles of flammable debris and lumber.

The day after the fire, he said, “That morning we had . . . put thousands and thousands of gallons of water on that roof. No one would have expected . . . that anything could burn with all that water on top.”

Between 10 and 11 Monday morning, Richard Mealey, a police stakeout officer, flew over the MOVE house in a helicopter several times, in the company of a pilot and a friend, Bruce Johnson, a 30-year-old student helicopter pilot.

Mealey says he too doesn’t recall seeing any gas cans. But Johnson spotted one and possibly two five-gallon gasoline cans on the MOVE rooftop as the helicopter made several counterclockwise orbits. One was “a very bright blue,” he said.

“The cans, I felt, were pretty visible,” Johnson said. “They were almost obvious” - so much so that he didn’t point them out to Mealey.

“I just assumed that whatever I saw, anybody else who was flying would have seen them also.”

But a few days later, Johnson ran into Mealey, mentioned the gas cans and learned that Mealey had not noticed them.

Brooks and Sambor have said that from their vantage point the fire appeared to die out for about 10 minutes after the bombing before flaring up again. This has led Sambor to speculate that the ultimate inferno was caused not by the bomb but by a subsequent fire, one set by MOVE.

However, two technicians at WCAU-TV who were monitoring the signal from the camera trained on the roof, even though it wasn’t being broadcast at the time, said Friday that they saw flames on the roof continuously from the time the device exploded until the fire spread and became generally visible, according to Ted Faraone, a WCAU-TV spokesman.

“I talked to two of the technicians who were right there, monitoring the video from that camera and who later saw much of the available tape, and they said there were always flames visible, from the explosion right through to the later, easily visible fire,” Faraone said.

Once it did become obvious to Brooks and Sambor that the roof was indeed burning, they decided to let it burn, in the hope the bunker would fall into the attic and smoke out MOVE.

Because of city solicitor Mather’s recommendation to officials on Monday that those involved stop talking to reporters, there are gaps in The Inquirer’s reconstruction of the first hour at the command post after the bomb dropped.

But much is known.

Sambor said at a news conference on the Thursday after the fire that the decision not to fight the fire was his, and that Richmond concurred. Richmond at first declined to confirm that, saying that only a thorough investigation would establish what actually took place at the command center. Richmond is indeed now running his own inquiry into the circumstances surrounding the fire. However, last Tuesday Richmond finally confirmed that he concurred with Sambor’s decision.

“We were hoping in all truthfulness that that would work,” Richmond said Tuesday. “In 25 years of firefighting, I have never seen a situation where people who had the opportunity to flee a fire did not do so.”

Goode, watching TV in his office, was unaware of the decision to let the fire burn. He has given two differing accounts of when he first became alarmed enough to call Brooks. At first, the day after the fire, he said he called Brooks and said, “This fire looks serious on television.” At that time, he recalled, “water then started to pour in onto the roof.”

That would place the phone call at 6:32 p.m., the precise time water was first applied to the fire, according to television footage - and more than an hour after the bombing.

Then, last Wednesday, Goode told The Inquirer he actually called Brooks ‘’about 6 p.m." and “asked him to put the fire out. He (Brooks) said he gave the order two minutes ago.” If Goode is correct in his second version, it took a long time for that order to be implemented - about half an hour.

The equipment to fight the fire had been there since before dawn.

The initial strategy included the use of two of the fire department’s three ‘’Squrt" machines - trucks that carry 54-foot-tall hydraulic cranes topped with powerful nozzles capable of shooting 1,000 gallons of water a minute. The plan was to use the Squrts to demolish the bunkers.

But as the day wore on, the two Squrts, poised above the rooftops like giant praying mantises, took on a symbolic aura.

For five solid hours that morning, when they had failed to so much as dent the rooftop bunkers with 1,000-gallon-a minute streams of water, they had seemed to sum up the futility of the city’s initial strategies.

Then, when the water cannons stayed silent while the fire burned in the crucial hour that followed the bombing, they seemed to sum up the incomprehensible.

It appeared to a world audience that a city was letting a part of itself incinerate.

At 5:53 p.m., 26 minutes after the bomb, Richmond summoned Engine 57, stationed nearby, which arrived about 6 p.m. to set up a street-level deluge gun on the southwest corner of 62d and Osage. Then, firefighters waited for a go-ahead from police. And waited.

By 6:28, most of the front of the MOVE house was consumed by flames.

At 6:32, the deluge gun was still inactive, but the Squrts finally began to pump 2,000 gallons a minute onto the MOVE rooftop. Their operators had no idea where the water was going - from where they were standing, they could not see the fire or even the MOVE house.

Battalion Chief Carlo Allodoli, who was monitoring the rooftop from a perch atop a ladder on Addison Street near 62d, had a clear view of the smoke and fire behind the front bunker. At first, the fire appeared to burn an area about 10 feet square, “small flames, no big deal,” he said. He saw no people on the roof, no cans.

He got on the walkie-talkie and asked for water. But before the Squrts could get gunned up and aimed at the MOVE rooftop, Allodoli saw something that astonished him. The “small flames” had suddenly jumped to the rowhouses on either side.

“It was raging amazingly,” said Allodoli, a Florence-born, 23-year veteran, who speaks in a rich Italian accent. “I don’t know, to me it was almost like there was something helping the fire burn.”

It might have been a flammable liquid, Allodoli said. It might have been the properties of the bomb itself. Allodoli said he could not say.

Allodoli and other firefighters spoke to The Inquirer before they were instructed to decline comment.

For the first few moments, the Squrts missed their target completely. ‘’When they opened up and we originally got water, he (a Squrt operator) was washing everything but the fires. . . . I’m talking to a man who is shooting on the blind. When I am saying, ‘Move the stream 20 feet to the left or to the right,’ he doesn’t know, that doesn’t mean anything. He doesn’t have a calibration by feet, so I say, ‘No, you’re way over, now come back about 10 feet. . . .’ So that’s how it goes."

By the time the water had finally narrowed in on the MOVE roof, Allodoli had to change its direction. He aimed it at the fires starting on 6219 and 6223 Osage.

At 6:34, two minutes after the Squrts started, the deluge gun at the southwest corner of 62d and Osage at last began shooting water at the MOVE house, according to TV footage.

A few minutes later, firefighters were ordered to shut off the deluge gun. The reason: The water was causing so much smoke that it was hurting police visibility.

“We were knocking down fire,” a fire lieutenant said, “but the visibility became nil.”

Richmond defended that decision in an interview the following week. “With visibility obscured,” he said, “we’d be putting men in jeopardy.”

On the MOVE roof, all hell was breaking loose.

Ten-foot flames shot into the air, producing heavy clouds of smoke that rose toward the north. The bunkers began to falter in the flames, and then they suddenly collapsed, into the roof. Flames shot straight up like a volcano erupting, rising 20 feet, some as high as 30 feet.

It was amazing to Allodoli.

A week later, he still could not believe what he had watched from the facing rooftop. A man who has watched thousands of fires in his lifetime, Allodoli had seen roofs collapse after 20 minutes of fire. He had seen roofs collapse after half an hour.

Now, he had seen the MOVE roof collapse minutes after he had gotten to the top of the ladder.

He did not realize the fire had been burning for an hour and he was bewildered.

“Let me put it this way,” he said, “the building collapsed, I mean, the roof collapsed . . . two bunkers collapsed . . . five minutes after the fire really got going like that. I mean, for the fire to collapse a roof like that, that fast, I mean, it’s unbelievable. To me, I don’t know why - there is no way in hell. . . . Like I say, in 23 years of experience, I have never seen it. I guess it can happen, it did happen. Why, I don’t know.”

Everything seemed to happen at once.

“I can see the roof,” Allodoli recalled, “and then I can see just two to three feet below the roof line. But now I start seeing flames coming from below. Which means now, I got fire on the second floor, definitely, maybe the first floor. I don’t know, I can’t tell, but now the fire is spreading below my eye level.

“And the next thing you know, again, even though we’re directing the stream on each side, I then reported to the commissioner that we now have five houses. Two on each side burning.”

Allodoli said it was possible from what he observed that MOVE members started a separate fire inside the house.

Allodoli continued to direct water on the Osage Avenue rowhouses two houses over from MOVE, following the traditional firefighting strategy to douse the next houses that might be endangered by fire, not the one that is already consumed and probably lost.

Squrts by themselves do not put out a fire, Allodoli said. They look impressive, but the real firefighting, he said, the “down and dirty of inside firefighting,” takes place when the men are working to control the blaze from inside the burning structure.

In fact, according to fire Lt. Charles Crusemire, Squrts are not designed to fight a fire from a distance. Beyond 100 feet, he said, “the stream will look effective, but it breaks up.” The Squrts that evening were at least 140 feet away.

Richmond ordered the first alarm. It sounded at 6:54 p.m., summoning four more engines and two ladders.

7:10 - WPVI-TV, Channel 6, shows a live helicopter view. Six or seven homes with roofs afire on Osage. Dark smoke rising thick and high above the skyline. The wind is pushing the smoke north toward Pine Street. Both Squrts on Pine are on, though the one to the east is faltering, sometimes barely shooting water. A water gun at the corner of 62d and Osage is spraying water, but the stream does not reach the MOVE house. Fire has moved down the row toward the west, away from the deluge gun. The fronts of six houses are burned out. From the front it looks as though only the side walls remain.

7:18 - Pete Kane, a Channel 10 cameraman reporting from 62d and Osage: “It is spreading. There are balls of flame shooting out to the 6200 block of Osage. A tree’s on fire. Electrical wires are on fire.”

7:20 - Kane: “Half the block seems to be fully engulfed right now.”

Firefighters had trouble following the course of the fire. It kept them from knowing how many other homes were in immediate danger.

“You could not put yourself in a position to even see where the fire was going,” Richmond said the next day. “So it was even difficult to determine where the fire was going. . . . I will not jeopardize my people, civilians or anyone else. That’s the bottom line.”

Lt. Thomas Brennan and the other men of Ladder 24, at 61st and Thompson Streets, arrived at the scene in answer to the first alarm.

From the ground, things didn’t look nearly as alarming to them as it did to aerial observers. Brennan didn’t think the fire was that big a problem - nothing more, he said, than a couple of porches on fire, a couple more under threat.

“People were setting up hoses,” Brennan said. “This was something that could have been easily handled with the (first) alarm and the equipment that was already there. All we needed to do was to make a frontal approach.”

But porch fires in rowhouses like those on Osage Avenue can move quickly, even when roofs aren’t also afire, “because the fire wall on those buildings only goes up to the porches,” said John Farrell, 42, a firefighter with Engine 41. “They don’t go beyond. So the fire has a pretty free path.”

And finding a way to make the frontal approach was a problem. In a normal situation, four engines would take positions facing the four corners of a building, in the street and the alley, forming a box around it.

It was considered too dangerous to do that with MOVE in the house. Engines had to be left on Cobbs Creek Parkway, at the far end of the block. Men with hoses had to make their way east on Pine Street or up the alley between Osage and Addison. They entered houses through the rear, hoping to get to the second stories and aim their hoses through the windows toward the row of burning houses on the north side of Osage.

The object, said John Farrell, a Ladder 24 firefighter, was to set up a water curtain that would cut down the chance of the fire jumping across the street or spreading to adjacent houses.

A ladder went up at the corner of Osage and Cobbs Creek Parkway. Firefighters sprayed water onto the roofs of eight or nine houses on Osage nearest Cobbs Creek, houses not yet ablaze.

Three stakeout police went with four firefighters who took a hose through the alley south of Osage. At a house several doors west and across the street from the MOVE house, the firefighters broke the back door with axes. They did the same at a house directly across the street from the flaming MOVE compound.

SWAT police bearing guns and flak jackets would stand aside as firefighters opened doors. Then, firefighters waited while the SWAT members went in, checking under beds, checking the cellars to see if it was safe.

Nerves were taut. A rooftop SWAT team came running up to firefighters in the alley, their guns poised and pointed. “Then they saw who we were,” said firefighter Robert Perry, “and backed off.”

Behind the MOVE house, the problem was the same.

As the fire spread, firefighters from Engine 43 broke into the house at 6226 Pine St. and dragged in hoses to train upon the fire across the alley on Osage. They moved into a second-floor rear bedroom, where sandbags left by stakeout police were still in the window.

Then, before they could spray the fire, they heard gunfire and retreated.

“The chief was yelling for us to come out,” said Ed Schwartz, lieutenant for Engine 43, “and we needed no encouragement. We saw a rush of stakeout officers, and they told us to get out.

“The scariest part was to walk out of the house and find all those police officers with rifles pointing in our direction.”

Lt. Brennan and his men of Ladder 24, over on the alley south of Osage, heard gunfire, too.

First a few shots. Then more. Then a radio report of activity in the alley. Then a confirmed sighting of at least one MOVE member and possibly more.

It was about that time that police found Ramona Africa and Birdie Africa behind the MOVE house.

Brennan and his men retreated to Cobbs Creek Park. Even that offered little haven. “It’s like a jungle back there. It’s just woods with all these paths running through it,” said Perry, “so there was some concern that some MOVE sympathizers could even be back there.”

“We were prevented from going into the backs of those houses and fighting that fire,” Brennan said. “We wanted to put that fire out.”

Officially, the firefighters were playing a supporting role to the police. An assist-police, they call it. Usually it involves nothing more exceptional than helping catch a burglar on a roof or assisting with first aid.

The MOVE action was a police show because of the possibility of gunfire. No one had decreed it so, Richmond said. No one had to. “It was understood,” he said.

The firefighters also have standing orders to take cover if gunfire erupts on a fire scene, according to Richmond. The orders were a legacy of the Watts and Newark riots, said Fire Marshal Ulshafer. They were “clearly understood,” Richmond said, by every firefighter on the scene.

Moments before the sound of shooting, Carlo Allodoli was still on the ladder, still contending with problems directing the water streams.

“I am having a lot of troubles,” he recalled, “because there is so much smoke. I am having trouble seeing if they are hitting the fire on Number 6223. It’s coming from the back. Meanwhile, now this is getting complicated because I did not see it, I am hearing reports on the radio, the firemen are moving in on Pine Street through the houses, to break out and extinguish the fire.

“That’s when the shooting started.

“I’m reporting heavy fire. I’m reporting fire spreading, and I’m trying to knock the fire off. Right then . . . from the police walkie-talkie: ‘People up on the roof.’ Heavy shots, a lot of firepower, shooting.

“I now have fire spreading on the rear of Osage over to Pine, and I hear the officer in charge of Engine 57 saying, ‘I’m moving in with the line, I can handle it.’

“Then, additional, a lot of heavy shooting is now coming, and the guy in 57 said the SWAT team wanted them out.

“Then the police start telling me that they cannot see the MOVE people

because the water is putting the fire out, and we start getting heavy smoke coming down and we lost visibility."

Firefighters dived for cover under cars. SWAT officers grabbed other firefighters and pulled them to cover.

It was 7:26 p.m. One minute earlier, Richmond had ordered the second alarm, 31 minutes after the first alarm. The second alarm almost instantly became

useless when firefighters heard gunfire ringing off the walls of houses.

They couldn’t tell where it was coming from. They couldn’t tell if it was exploding ammunition, or shots from MOVE, or shots from police.

They didn’t much care which it was.

Neither did Richmond, who joined in the orders to back off. “Maybe it was shell casings,” he said in an interview a week later. “But you don’t differentiate when you hear gunfire.”

Three times police ordered firefighters to clear out. They ordered Frank Squadrito, the Engine 43 Squrt operator, away from his post.

Many of the men backed away reluctantly. Richmond said he was sure some defied orders and continued to fight the fire.

Police used fire equipment as shields. One took cover in Engine 43, his gun pointed out a window.

Firefighters ducked behind fire engines or took refuge in wheel wells, remembering that in the 1978 MOVE confrontation in the Powelton Village section of Philadelphia, four firefighters were shot and others were hurt trying to flee gunfire.

“We remembered,” said Lt. Charles Crusemire of Engine 72. “I don’t know which house was worth a man’s life.”

Norman Stabinski of Engine 72 poked his head around a corner of a Pine Street house to see what was going on. First he took off his bright yellow firefighter’s helmet.

A police sharpshooter, wearing layers of bulletproof gear, caught the move and chuckled. “That’s not going to do you any good,” he said.

There was nothing to do that was any good. There was nothing to do at all.

“A house is going to go before one of my men gets shot,” Richmond told a news conference later that night. “I don’t care whose house it is.”

Sambor added: “I did not ask them or anyone else to sacrifice their life . . . to put out a fire when they are getting shot at.”

The fire burned. The firefighters watched.

Watching the raging fire, just watching it, Philadelphia’s firefighters felt impatient and impotent.

“You always think you can put it out. When you’re ordered out, it’s frustrating - you can’t do what you’re trained to do,” said Lt. Schwartz of Engine 43.

“It was a feeling of helplessness. . . . We’re trained to go in, we’re aggressive,” said Stabinski of Engine 72.

Schwartz especially remembered the faces.

“You could see the looks on the faces of the people across the street as they were watching us,” he said. “As we were opening up some of the houses (on Pine Street), breaking in with axes, a lady across the street yelled, ‘Please don’t break down my door.’ She sent a kid over with the key. So we opened the door with the key.

“And then the house burns down.”

Several men cried, said John McMenamin, president of Firefighters Local 22.

Standing by is “not our nature,” he said.

“We’re a very aggressive fire department. We don’t lose. We win. But we don’t dodge bullets.”

McMenamin predicted that the experience would leave a long-lasting psychological scar on the men and the department.

“I still don’t believe it,” he said. “Two hundred and fifty-eight firefighters gave their lives” in the city’s history. “We’re not a laid- back firefighting operation. We aggressively counterattack.

“It was really hard on guys who were in houses and then pulled out. They’d say: This is like my house, the pictures, the trophies, the family mementos.

“And they’re just burning up.”

Some firefighters thought the caution made sense.

“Police become police for whatever reasons they may have,” Lt. Brennan said. “They are used to guns. They have a gun. They know about ammunition, weapons and things like that. Fire scares police, but bullets scare us.

“We were as brave, as courageous as we could be in a fire situation, but when bullets start flying by, we’re not prepared for that. . . .

“In the ‘60s, during the time when there were all those riots, we had the slogan, ‘Firefighters fight fires, not people.’ That’s just the way it is.”

Brennan was involved with MOVE in 1978. He heard threats against him and his family, and that left him with no doubts that the radical group’s members would “like to kill us - and there we are in our yellow jackets, perfect moving targets.”

“When I saw police carrying weapons that I had never even seen before . . . I knew that this was for real,” he said. “And the result was that we were prevented from dealing with the elements (fire) as we know how.”

The firefighters’ retreat lasted at least 20 minutes. And the fire spread wildly.

7:46. Pete Kane: “There’s white smoke coming from several of the roofs on the other side of Osage. . . . The water is being aimed at the homes on the MOVE side. . . . I cannot see any fire trucks at all.”

7:48. Pete Kane: “It’s spreading toward the west side of MOVE right now. I see some of those homes are fully involved. It seems like . . . the whole side of Osage with MOVE’s compound is in flames.”

7:50. A Channel 10 camera shows flames on the front of houses on Pine, though the announcers don’t notice them.

7:58. Harvey Clark, Channel 10 reporter: “You’re starting to see white smoke coming from some of the rooftops on the Pine Street side.”

Firefighters from Engine 41 and Ladder 24 watched from Cobbs Creek Parkway, an uneasy haven.

“A SWAT-team member came over and told us that there was a male in 6235 (Osage) with a rifle,” said firefighter John Farrell. The house was the sixth from the Cobbs Creek intersection.

From where they stood, Farrell said, “we never thought we were going to lose the whole block or the other side.”

Yet the fire marched toward them on Osage Avenue, leaping from porch to porch.

“These porches on the front formed almost a tunnel-like effect,” fire Capt. Anthony Roman said, “and it really added to the spread of the fire dramatically.”

Roman and the others noted that MOVE members easily could have broken the glass of the porches and obtained access up and down Osage Avenue. Breaking the glass also would have created easy openings for the fire to spread.

“This is conjecture based on experience, lots of experience,” Roman said. ‘’We tend to notice the path of a fire, and through experience you know it’s going to go this way for a while, and then it’s going to go that way.

“But when we got to the fire area, it seemed like it just spread too quick and too fast.”

Watching as they did, firefighters became convinced that MOVE members had taken advantage of their access through the porches and had started a second fire to cover their escape from police.

As it would turn out, all of the bodies and the weapons found in the aftermath of the fire were discovered in or immediately outside the MOVE house.

It was a bad moment for firefighters to be standing on the sidelines.

“Throwing water on the roofs really does nothing at all,” Roman said. ‘’Especially if you are fighting a tunnel effect. The only way to stop it is to get in on the porches and then stop the spread there."

They noticed another curious thing.

The fire was “behaving naturally” as it spread west on Osage, they said, until it reached the seventh or eighth house in the row.

Suddenly, flames shot high into the air.

“We watched this fire go suddenly crazy,” Brennan said.

He added: “It seemed like there must have been flammable liquid or something inside. The fire just didn’t behave naturally there.”

An outside expert on fire protection, however, said there are other possible explanations that are not at all sinister.

It is “not uncommon for a fire to accelerate at some point,” said Jim Kolson, fire-protection engineer for the Insurance Services Office, a nonprofit group that evaluates fire-protection facilities and procedures for major insurance companies.

“The units being so close together, you’ve got a tremendous amount of combustible material there,” he said. “Don’t forget that while those (first) houses were burning, the others were cooking.

“It would be very logical that that (acceleration) would happen, that it would be cooking all that time and - boom! - it ignites all at once.”

Brennan remembered standing at the end of Osage for a while, unable to move into the street because of the heat.

“Suddenly,” he said, “we have fire spreading to the south side.”

With firefighting suspended, police drafted firefighters to help them search for MOVE gunmen reported on the loose.

Television viewers watched a firefighter with an ax being escorted by police to houses on Pine Street. The police, in helmets and bulletproof gear, stood behind the firefighter.

“They were kicking the door and hitting it with their guns, and that wasn’t going to do it,” said the firefighter, Lt. Ed Schwartz. “So I went up with the ax and opened it up.”

Another firefighter, Bob Iannucci, a muscular 34-year-old from Ladder 9, opened a door with a pikelike “haligan” while police stood behind him and pointed their guns at the door.

“There wasn’t anywhere else they could stand, I guess,” he said. “But it was a weird feeling, knowing that if that million-to-one chance happened and there was a MOVE guy in there, he’d shoot me when I opened the door - and then they’d shoot him.”

When it seemed safe enough - probably sometime nearing 8 p.m. - Engine 57 joined 72 and 43 on Pine Street.

Stabinski, of Engine 72, took the engine’s deluge gun - a smaller, powerful water cannon - to the corner of the north-south alley behind 62d and the east- west alley behind Osage and trained it on the fire on Osage.

Stabinski told Fire Commissioner Richmond that he thought the deluge gun would be more effective than the Squrt, which had been plagued off and on by inadequate water pressure.

But police quickly ordered the deluge gun shut down, because the heavy water spray was obscuring their vision.

“We couldn’t see what we were doing with the gun,” Stabinski said. “If we could have gotten into the houses on Pine, we would have been better off.”

But the firefighters were kept out of the houses on Pine until it was too late.

Now, Frank Squadrito, the operator of the Engine 43 Squrt, trained his overhead cannon on the fronts of the Pine Street houses, trying to stop the spread of that fire.

The shooting and police complaints forced halts to firefighting at least three times.

Eventually - the firefighters are vague about times - they began to fight the fire with full force.

No one gave a specific order, they said, but they knew by their own experience with fires and by the relaxation of police that it was safe to resume.

It was obvious to them that the immolation of the MOVE house had ended the threat of gunfire.

“You didn’t have to worry about being in the line of fire,” said Norman Stabinski of Engine 72. “And working around fires and knowing how long you can last in fires, it was hard to believe they could be alive.”

Richmond ordered the third alarm at 8:02 p.m., summoning engines from as far away as North Philadelphia.

8:03. Harvey Clark: “It looks bigger than a three-alarm fire. . . . Let me tell you, this thing is out of control. . . . What we’re talking about here is possibly 20 houses on either side of Osage and Pine Streets, plus houses on 63d and 62d are being threatened.”

8:19. As Harvey Clark speaks at 61st and Pine, a crowd chants in the background: “BURN, BURN, BURN, BURN.”

8:31. A new chant rises at Harvey Clark’s location: “MURDER, MURDER, MURDER, MURDER.”

Mayor Goode says at a news conference at 8:44 p.m: “We may very well lose 14 to 16 homes.”

The heat from the fire amazed even veteran firefighters.

At the height of the blaze, despite the thousands of gallons of water being used every minute, the 6200 block of Pine Street was dry - dry as a desert.

At the west end of Osage, Bob Iannucci was on his knees, holding a hose, and he was sinking inches into molten asphalt. The street was literally melting.

The heat was so intense that along Pine Street tires on several vehicles exploded.

Thirteen lengths of Engine 43’s canvas-and-polyester, 50-foot hose line burned, and the rubber tip of a metal nozzle melted away.

Aluminum-alloy ladders from the Engine 168 firehouse twisted and melted.

Sixty feet across Pine Street, on houses that would be saved from the fire, asphalt shingles melted and bubbled.

At 6225 Pine, the metal brace on the storm door melted into a double loop.

The fire evidently burned at nearly three times the temperature of the average residential fire, which is about 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit.

Fires that consume all combustibles reach temperatures of about 3,500 to 4,000 degrees, according to Kolson of the Insurance Services Office.

“If all you have (left) is brick walls,” he said, “that’s about as hot as you can get.”

The intensity of the heat made the lack of water pressure more serious.

As more pieces of fire equipment arrived on the scene, they tapped into the same aging water mains serving the neighborhood.

Whenever the fire department opens a lot of hydrants at the same time, the result is a drop in pressure and in the volume of water they deliver, according to an engineer who has studied the city’s water system.

To get an idea of the effect, imagine what would happen if everyone in an apartment building tried to take a shower at once. Some buildings - those with adequate plumbing - could accommodate the unusual demand. But others wouldn’t.

Like many older residential communities, the Cobbs Creek area is underlain by 6-inch and 8-inch water mains - relics of an earlier era. These days, the city installs 12-inch mains wherever possible.

“Very few communities in the country would have the ability to put enough water on a fire that size and have it do any good,” said Kolson.

“When you have 6- to 8-inch mains, it’s not an ideal place to fight a six- alarm fire,” said Fire Commissioner Richmond.

To complicate the operation on Osage, a second, unrelated four-alarm fire was reported at 9:25 p.m. at a warehouse at 61st and Woodland Avenue, in Southwest Philadelphia.

“The houses were so nice, so nice,” recalled Bob Iannucci.

The firefighter from Ladder 9 showed up at the fourth alarm, entered at 8:27 p.m., and joined the house-to-house battle at the west end of Osage to try to save houses not yet burning.

Two houses west of the fire, they would take a stand and begin pulling down ceilings, trying to stop the spread of the blaze. And each time, Iannucci said, they were convinced that this house, this time, they would beat it.

So confident were they, and so impressed with the houses they were in, that before tugging down sections of ceiling, Iannucci and the other firefighters picked up televisions and other furniture and carefully moved them out of the way.

The men from Engine 43 handled a curio cabinet with special care, moving it aside slowly so that none of the little pieces inside, obviously lovingly collected, would tip over.

Minutes later, the house - and the curio cabinet - were reduced to ashes.

Richmond calls for the fifth alarm at 8:47.

9:03. Channel 10’s ground-level camera at 62d and Pine shows the south side of Pine fully ablaze.

Houses are gutted - totally gone. Trees along the south side of Pine are ablaze. Squrts have been removed from their midblock positions, and one is out of the picture. The other is clearly visible and has virtually no pressure. It’s emitting barely a dribble.

“It looked like Atlanta burning,” said Battalion Chief Frederick Spitz. ‘’The burning of Atlanta. Or Rome. The burning of Rome."

Richmond calls for the sixth and final alarm at 9:34. That brings the force to at least 219 firefighters and more than 50 pieces of equipment.

“It was,” Richmond said last week, “as fine a piece of firefighting I’ve ever seen.”

The fire could easily have consumed two or three more blocks, Richmond and other fire officials said.

“When we made our stand,” said Capt. Anthony Roman, “when we were allowed back in and operate the way we wanted to operate, we stopped the fire.”

No firefighters were significantly injured in the blaze, but some suffered minor injuries that they ignored to keep fighting the fire - eyes inflamed from tear gas, cut hands, sustained rapid heartbeat, minor burns.

If the effort was “awesome,” as Brennan called it, it went unnoticed.

“These men were willing to go in and . . . fight the fire through interiors while the whole stair was burning,” Allodoli said, “which takes a lot of guts to do, because you never know when the whole house is going to collapse on you.”

To a man, said McMenamin, the Firefighters Local 22 president, the fire department stands behind Richmond in the conduct of the firefighting.

“He did what he had to do, and we share his frustration and we share his sorrow,” McMenamin said.

“We support the position he took - property over lives.”

A few days after the fire, Allodoli was booed as he drove his red battalion chief’s station wagon through a West Philadelphia neighborhood.

“After all we had gone through out there that night,” he said. “You work all of these years and then now, all of a sudden, you’re a bum.”

The fire department declared the fire under control at 11:41 p.m.

A week later, Richmond would say: “It was a heroic effort, and it will be a glorious footnote when the whole story’s written.”

This story was originally published on May 26, 1985.