Station #9 has one of the department's newest ladder trucks, which reaches a full 75 feet in the air when fully extended. It'll reach up about five stories, one fire fighter said. So the reporter in me had to ask, "but what happens if there's a fire higher than that in a downtown Akron building?"
"They're on their own," I was told.
Seriously? Wow!
It's not to say that AFD's finest wouldn't be working their hoses off to knock down a fire like that, in fact the department recently held high-rise fire training to practice for just such a crisis. Yet, as it was explained to me, the protocol for fighting a fire higher than five stories would be to attack it from inside the building (two floors below) and hope to put it out fast enough so that people trapped above it could then be saved. (Akron's tallest building is the First National Tower -- photo courtesy Wikepedia)
In other words, if you work on the sixth floor or higher, you need to know that in case of a fire, AFD may have no way of getting you out, but rest assured they'll do everything they can to put out the fire before you cook.
I'll admit that it's not that I have some crazy notion that there are super-giant-huge-monster ladders out there that reach 20 floors up. But I can't help but think about the number of people I know who work in the First National Tower or the National City Bank Building .. and college students living in the Quaker hotel ... and the hundreds on the upper floors of Akron's municipal courts. I can't help but worry that their only hope for surviving a high-rise fire may be to climb the building's staircases and hope fire fighters can contain the blaze before it burns the folks above.
It's just scary to think about ..
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