Dennis Smith (1) (1940–2022)

Disappointing. Dennis Smith is an ex-firefighter and highly regarded author; his books Report From Engine Co. 82 and Report From Ground Zero were best-sellers and received critical praise However, San Francisco Is Burning doesn’t do much for me. At almost the very beginning, Smith gets way out of his depth with his description of the physics of earthquake ground shaking:


“Consider a weight on a string, swinging back and forth like a pendulum. If the weight is hit by a force at the lowest show more point in its path to the earth, that action will create another pendulum going in the direction opposite the force, due to the simple Newtonian explanation that for every action there is an equal reaction. If the force, however, hits the weight at anywhere other than at the lowest point in its path it will not create another pendulum but a circular motion. This circular action combined with both the pendulum motion and an up-and-down motion are the three most fundamental movements in nature. If oscillation and waving are added to these three motions, the net affect will approximate the movement of the ground that might be felt by a person during an earthquake. It can be beyond Newtonian in relation to the original point of the quake, and if one is inside a house, one will move the way the house moves, and the house will move according to its construction and the soil it sits on.”


Well, alright then. If anybody understands that, I invite you to explain it to me. Smith is on firmer ground when recounting the post-quake fires, but even here he seems awfully derivative. He recounts many of the same anecdotes related by Fradkin – the tavern owner trampled to death by an escaped herd of longhorn cattle panicked by the quake, for example. His most interesting contribution is his discussion of the efforts of the US Navy and the US Army in fighting the fires.


Smith makes General Frederick Funston the villain. Funston took control of the city after the quake and brought in troops from nearby military bases to enforce his authority. The problem, according to Smith, is that Funston’s actions were almost all incorrect. Funston had his soldiers patrol for looters and evacuate threatened areas rather than actually fight fires – with the exception of blowing up buildings to create firebreaks.


Smith claims that the anti-looting patrols were overenthusiastic, sometimes resulting in the summary execution of innocent citizens. His evidence is all anecdotal: well after the disaster, various people reported seeing soldiers shoot looters – or just ordinary people. The issue is complicated as there were several armed official or quasi-official groups operating in San Francisco simultaneously; the Regular Army, the California National Guard, the San Francisco Police Department, the Special Police civilian auxiliaries, miscellaneous police forces and security guards belonging to railroads and other private entities, and ordinary citizens who picked up guns and stood guard over their homes or businesses. Fradkin and Smith agree that some looters or suspected looters were shot, but neither provides any sort of documentary evidence. (To be fair, the huge historical collection made just after the disaster – including hundreds of eyewitness stories, was apparently lost sometime in the 1920s. Both Fradkin and Smith hint that the loss might have been deliberate, to encourage investment – but there’s no evidence for that either).


Smith’s second contention is that the military evacuated people unnecessarily; he cites a couple of examples where workers and homeowners were prepared to defend their houses or industries, but were forced away at bayonet point. Smith is able to cite a couple of cases where defense measures were successful – people patrolled their roofs and extinguished burning embers; office workers threw all flammable building contents out the windows and saved the building shell – and another case where a building probably could have been save if the army had left people alone (a mostly sheet-iron and steel-frame flour mill where the only burnable material was grain in the bins). I tend to agree with Smith but it’s not fully clear. Although the fires were not moving very fast, there was still the possibility that a large number of civilians could have been trapped if evacuation had been delayed or not attempted.


Could the troops have served better if they directly assisted the firefighters? Perhaps. Smith doesn’t give a coherent analysis of what the Army should have done, other than dropping hints here and there in the text. My general impression is that Smith thinks the Army should have acted the same way as civilians who successfully defended their property: patrolled roofs for embers, moved furniture and flammables out of exposed buildings, and perhaps recruited civilians to help rather than simply forcing them out. The problem is that the Incident Commander system was decades in the future. For the Army to have acted this way, it would have been necessary to have somebody on the scene that Brigadier General Funston recognized as more expert than himself; this is almost impossible to imagine.


Fradkin and Smith both agree that the large-scale dynamiting was worse than useless. Once again, this was on Funston’s initiative; he was apparently aware that dynamite had been used successfully in fighting other large urban fires. There were two problems; although everybody talked about “dynamiting”, both during and after the fire, what was actually used most often was black powder. Further, there were no explosive expert available, so the buildings tended to by blasted to bits rather than collapsed, which either just left a heap of flammable rubble, or worse, dropped little bits of flaming debris all over. What Smith said should have been done is pick a defense line well ahead of the fire, clear all the burnable contents – furniture, merchandise, etc. – out of the building, then used just enough explosive to drop it in place. There were enough troops to get this done, but no one with sufficient authority or understanding to get them to do.


Although hard on the Army, Smith has nothing but praise for the Navy, specifically the destroyer Preble under the command of Lieutenant Frederick Freeman. The Navy, of course, had a salient advantage over the Army; they had the Pacific Ocean to draw water from. Freeman hooked up SFFD hoses to Navy pumps – took a while, the connections weren’t compatible – and successfully defended the waterfront (he reportedly didn’t sleep for 36 hours). Smith notes that Freeman’s contribution was ignored when Funston made his report. (Freeman’s subsequent career was rather sad; he was dismissed from the Navy during WWI for being drunk on duty and eked out a small living renting his house. A loyal subordinate eventually got his dismissal changed to an honorable discharge, which made him eligible for a pension – just in time for Freeman to die of cancer).


The writing’s well done, although Smith breaks up the book into numerous small chapters – some only a paragraph long, but each with a large heading. There are good maps showing the fire’s progress, and a photograph section. The references are a little strange; some of the works don’t seem to have much relevance (The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake; The Path Between the Seas; the Origin of Continents and Oceans, for example). I think if I had to choose I’d probably recommend Fradkins book, although both have flaws. show less

Dennis Smith asks the question everyone can answer even nine years later, "where were you on September 11, 2001?" In Report From Ground Zero Smith asks key rescue personnel to recount the moments directly after seeing, hearing, or learning of the attack on the World Trade Center towers in Lower Manhattan. He calls each story a testimony. Smith starts by giving his own account which amounts to a litany of questions surrounding logistics and survival. As a retired New York City firefighter he show more anticipates the magnitude of destruction and ponders the challenges surrounding survival with great concern. As each rescue worker recounts that fateful, awful day a pattern starts to emerge. Initial disbelief turns into a sense of determination as the magnitude of destruction is fully realized. Every single response was to roll up the shirts sleeves, harden the jaw and with single minded pure grit get to work. After the dust has literally and figuratively settled other shared memories come to mind - how deathly quiet and dark everything became after the towers fell; how surreal the landscape. Like nothing they had even seen before or since. show less

Dennis Smith was a firefighter for eighteen years. He wrote a famous book, [Report from Engine Co. 82], which made him a successful writer (2 million copies sold), but he kept his firefighter heart. Even in official retirement from the job, he carried the badge and title of an honorary chief in FDNY and served on the boards of several firefighter-related charities.

On Sept. 11, 2001, he showed up at Ground Zero, where the help of this retired but experienced firefighter (along with many other show more retired firefighters who volunteered their skills) was accepted in the rescue and recovery efforts. Early on, he determined to write a book, dedicated to the first responders who died that day -- and whose names are all listed in the dedication. While the book recognizes the fact of the civilian deaths, it is about the uniformed personnel, especially firefighters, who perished and their brothers (and a few sisters) in service who sought to bring them home.

The first section of the book (exactly half of the book) deals with the actual day September 11. It is comprised primarily of first-person accounts collected from those who responded to the alarms on that fateful day. There are a few exceptions: a few accounts from famly members of first responders; some accounts by Smith providing background about responders who perished and whose fate is recounted in subsequent stories by rescue personnel. These accounts are amazingly straightforward. While aware of the magnitude of the disaster, the danger to themselves, and the losses which were taking place around them, they remained, in large part, focused on the job they had to do. There is no melodrama in the telling of these stories, and not an ounce of self-pity -- but, then, there is plenty of drama in the straight facts. Some of these folks survived being buried alive -- and then, freed from the rubble, eventually went on to search for others.

The second half of the book details. day by day, the rescue and recovery efforts which followed the initial disaster. While the first half of the book had a goodly representation of police voices (NYPD and Port Authority), this half is almost exclusively a firefighter's story. We see the family nature of firefighting in New York City; many of the elder firefighters searching so faithfully at Ground Zero are searching for their missing sons. Public service, you see, seems to run in the blood; several families lost multiple members -- in one case two brothers, a firefighter and a police officer.

The book also chronicles the growing tension as operations morphed from rescue to recovery to clean-up. Firefighters have a strong ethic that none of their own shall ever be left behind at the scene of a tragedy. But the painstaking sifting of rubble for remains was a slow process; there were great pressures, economic and psychological, to get things cleaned up faster than a thorough recovery of remains allowed.

And through it all, the funerals and memorial services continued, as firefighters honored their fallen comrades -- facing the painful decisions regarding whose funerals to attend in the wake of so much death.

It is impossible for anyone who wasn't there to really, really grasp the reality of Ground Zero on 9/11 and the days that followed. But this book gave me a clearer glimpse than I've ever had before. It takes us into the heart and soul of the disaster at Ground Zero through the experiences of those on its front lines. It is a painful story, yet strangely uplifting as we witness the courage and integrity that these brave souls bring to their life's work. Recommended. show less

The anthropologist in me loved that this 1) was a collection of firefighter narratives rather than just capturing a single person's experience and perspective, and 2) that it told these stories in the informants' own words. These qualities are what, I think, gives this particular book an edge over attempts to capture the lives and culture of firefighters.

I would have liked the different passages to be more clearly cited; that is, I would have liked them to be better identified with the show more informants they had come from, the places where they served, and maybe even other details. But other than that, it was an informative window into a distinctive and admirable community. show less