Under Fire 

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The NIOSH report may reveal more about whether the recent changes in the department contributed to issues at the Revere Avenue fire. But more importantly, it will offer a series of recommendations for how the department can avoid making similar mistakes in the future.

Hanley says the department should have distributed such recommendations from the start: "Put it in a pamphlet," he said. Then "every officer goes over it with his men and women at 8:30 every morning for a week until everybody fully transcribes in their brain what mistakes were made and how to make it better."

Gardner says he's writing new safety policy for the department and updating its instruction manual to incorporate lessons learned from the Felton Street and Revere Avenue fires. The policy will lay out formal safety criteria to follow after a firefighter injury. Gardner is authoring those standards mostly based on recommendations from the union and nationally recognized safety protocols used in other departments around the country. He said that although those procedures may have been common practice for years, they hadn't previously been written down in any formal manner.

Boston fire department spokesman Steve MacDonald said that in his department, a life-threatening firefighter injury would probably be referred to a safety committee, but that there is no standard protocol following firefighter injuries unless they are fatal. Typically, he said, an informal team will go over unique incidents that can be used as teachable moments and then incorporate them into training. "You constantly train and train and train," he said. "That's just what it is — it's training."

When asked whether he thought the newly promoted higher ranks of San Francisco's fire department could use more training, Gardner echoed MacDonald's sentiments: "We all can use more training in incident command," he said. "The more we can learn, the better."

When the results of the NIOSH report are released next year, the department will have a clear direction. NIOSH recommendations following a similar situation in 1998 — in which a 35-year fire department veteran in Vermont was killed when a wall facade fell on him — recommended that a collapse zone be established in any defensive approach to a fire. The report on the Revere Avenue fire will probably say something similar, and suggest ways the department can improve training to target this issue. Estrada says he's eager to see the results of the report — especially if those results could save another firefighter from the five months of pain he has endured and the lifetime of physical therapy he faces.

Estrada may need one final surgery, a knee replacement, depending on how well it heals over the next few months. Only one doctor so far has told him the last words he ever wanted to hear: that he would never fight fires again. But Estrada plans to prove that doctor wrong. He says that ideally, he will wind up in the Division of Training, teaching new recruits the lessons he has learned from the fire.

Even after reading incident reports and noting that mistakes were made that could have prevented his injuries, Estrada still wouldn't comment on the performance of his colleagues at the fire, except to say that he thought his immediate superiors did an excellent job. If he is angry at anyone, it's the warehouse's pot-growing occupants; he recently learned they would be immune from liability, thanks to the state's "firefighter's rule" that prevents emergency service workers from suing when they sustain on-duty injuries.

Mostly, Estrada is just grateful to be alive. When asked whether he knew he was in the collapse zone when the wall fell and crushed him, he answered yes at first, and then after some thought, changed his answer to no. The truth, he says, is that when you're staring into the maw of a burning building in the dark of morning after being yanked out of bed, when you're already exhausted from fighting a fire not four hours before, all you can do is hope that your training and your instincts will kick in fast — and if something goes amiss, that your peers and superiors will be there to get you in the right spot. Or, if you end up under a pile of burning debris, they'll pull you out and help put you back together again.