The crew on James Street encountered another block: the façade of the Shelley Garden Apartments had slid into the highway. Bulldozers began raging at the mountains of bricks. That meant a wait before the next advance. So Ted walked over to the sidewalk and sat down on the curb.
A bank, with white marble walls, shielded him from the burning sky.
He unshipped his walkie-talkie because the straps were cutting into his thin shoulders. He got out a Hershey bar someone had handed him when they had mobilized for this job. It was limp from the heat but he ate it, wishing he had a drink of water to go with it.
The curb on which he sat trembled with the thunder of the fire. The wind that blew was cold and fresh, though, except for occasional surges of smoke from something left behind, burned and practically out, or safely doused down. Up ahead, dozers charged, bricks avalanched, dynamite let go and men yelled orders. When they had cleaned a lane through the cascaded apartment house they’d move on. Until then, he could rest—unless one of the chiefs or the wardens wanted to send a message. Then they’d start hollering, “Signals!” and he’d have to run up.
Ted took a dirty handkerchief from his hip pocket and wiped sweat out of his eyes.
Because of his job, he knew a great many miscellaneous facts that he had passed on to nobody, for lack of time and owing to the concentration everywhere on the struggle at hand.
The diameter of the main fire was just over two miles. He knew that, from Hink Field.
It took in the whole business district, the shopping area, the skyscrapers and stores, the central half-circles of both cities and all of Swan Island on the east, the warehouse district on the west, nine bridges, the railroad yards, and various other “undetermined areas.” For the next mile out, in every direction, damage was severe and fires were numerous but would not, so Hink Field stated, “anucleate with the main fire storm.”
There was no estimate of the casualties. Owing to the delay in warning by siren, an
“undetermined but vast” number of persons had been caught by the bomb in the downtown area.