On blackboard stands, beyond Mrs. Sanders, three men kept writing and erasing. Henry, just by looking up, could tell where his main crews were working. The Fire Department companies, after a two-hour fumble and an effort to run things their own way, were in direct liaison with him now, and some of the phone company linesmen were already making emergency connections on standing, usable lines that crisscrossed the sector.
Henry felt lucky, fantastically lucky.
Only a small arc of the area of very severe damage intruded his sector. And the fires were being handled. He had plenty of casualties—glass, mainly—burns, next—shock—and miscellaneous. He also had approximately nine thousand very badly hurt people from the area closer in. There had been some panics, at first. They had blockaded Dumond, Arkansas, River, Sedmon, Ames, VanNess, Bigelow and Cold Spring avenues. That had stopped the cars mostly, though an undetermined number of people—“thousands” they said out along Decatur, exaggerating, no doubt—had got beyond the city limits, during the long span of Condition Yellow and later, before they’d set up the blockades.
Where traffic piled up, the loud-speaker trucks had sailed in. Many fugitives, of course, had trudged ahead on foot. But the speakers had brought most of the panicky groups back toward town, toward the high flame, the radioactivity, the horror—by argument, cajolery and threat.
There was no guarantee of a way to live in the countryside; but in the city, the loud-speakers bellowed ceaselessly—there was food, shelter, clothing, medical aid, all that people required.
A great many of the doctors and nurses in Henry’s sector had followed the plan for Condition Yellow, but many had not. The ones who had packed the prescribed medical and surgical equipment in cars, and driven with their families to outlying areas, were now back in town at work. The doctors and nurses and other “key personnel” who had refused to respond properly to Condition Yellow were now dead, or among the casualties themselves, or trapped behind the irregular rim of fire that circled the fire storm proper.
Thousands of people had been rescued from homes, stores, apartments, factories, lofts, buses, trolleys, other spots suddenly rendered perilous. Thousands remained, even in Henry’s area, in distress and danger. But the trained hundreds in his groups, with growing numbers of volunteer helpers from the unhurt, were tearing into every problem as they came to it, dousing fires, removing the injured, streaking them to Crystal Lake. They were carting bulldozers and cranes on fiat truckbeds around the perimeter of ruin, smashing fire lanes, crumpling fire hazards, sweeping debris from trunk thoroughfares. They were performing prodigies shoulder to shoulder with the regular firemen. They were standing fire watch on the rickety tops of once-handsome buildings. They were pacing, armed and alert, in every street, looking out for looters.
They were sweating with the Water Supply people over emergency means to divert Crystal Lake down its overflow to a hastily dammed gulley above Broad, where the lire hoses could feed.
They were commandeering the contents of damaged stores, especially food stores and clothing stores, and bringing truckloads to Hobart Park where a vast “dump” of supplies was accumulating. They were—the women—tending the hurt, the shocked, the frightened, helping the surgeons, assisting the nurses, corralling the hundreds of lost children, making out tickets of identification, making out cards for withdrawals of food, clothes, shoes, whatever was required.
All that and more was happening when the food came for Henry. He took a big bite of a hot corned beef sandwich. He swigged coffee and picked up a plate of beans. “Why don’t you come over to the other side,” one of his assistants said, “and take a look.”