The Staten Island Advance article from August 29, 2001, "
Firefighter Felled By Apparent Heart Attack At Auto Shop Blaze," by Frank Donnelly and Ryan Lillis, a copy of which recently made a reappearance online, contains several pieces of unique information concerning the fire that claimed the life of rookie firefighter Michael Gorumba two weeks before the tragedy of September 11. In a previous blog,
Rudi Giuliani, Michael Gorumba, and What the Talmud Teaches, I highlighted one such single-source reference: that Gorumba's body had been found by a New York City plainclothes police officer, slumped over the steering wheel of his company's Engine truck during the opening chaotic minutes of an "immense blaze that leveled" the business at 41 Rector Street, between Richmond Terrace and Castleton Avenue on Staten Island.
The fire was called in at 2:32 p.m., with other news sources specifying the second alarm was called in 13 minutes later, at 2:45 p.m.; eight minutes after that, the third alarm rang at 2:53 p.m., Ultimately 138 firefighters from 33 units were at the scene. But we're told the fire developed so rapidly that "after only a few minutes, half the building collapsed." The article goes on
"Port Richmond-based Engine Co. 157 was the first on the scene, rolling up in front of the entrance to the shop. A few seconds later, Gorumba's Engine Co. 163 arrived from its headquarters on Jewett Avenue in Westerleigh, pulling up behind the other engine, in front of a fire hydrant."
It would be impossible for Engine 163 to arrive only a matter of seconds after Engine 157, as the first engine had to travel only 1.4 miles, while the second company was located 3.6 miles from the fire.
From the firehouse for Engine 157 and Ladder 80, at 1573 Castleton Avenue in Port Richmond, to 41 Rector Street: 1.4 miles.
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From the headquarters for Engine 163 & Ladder 83, at 875 Jewett Avenue, in Westerleigh, to 41 Rector Street: 3.6 miles.
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And why didn't the house ladder companies respond with their engines to the first alarm? Don't Ladders do number one? We're told that the fire sent "a 75-foot wall of smoke into the air"--- ultimately firefighters "hosed the fire from ladders high above the blaze." But apparently, during the first, critical moments of the fire, when rookie Gorumba---on the job for all of a single month---took sick, went AWOL, and then was located by a passing New York's finest, with the brave firemen on the scene, members of these two, five-men engine crews, somehow failing to spot him.
Weirdly, the Advance article tells us that two
"emergency medical technicians who were injured had been on the other side of the fire building and were running across the area to aid the medics who were attending to Gorumba when they became engulfed in smoke and spray from fire hoses, a source said."
Somehow that reminds me of Bull Conners in Birmingham in 1963.
The New York Times' coverage provides some sense of the scene:
"Fire officials said the blaze appeared to have started in the rear of a sprawling set of interconnected buildings that make up the auto body shop."
Since the Advance article is specific that Engine 163 pulled up behind Engine 157 at the curb, it's unlikely they were leading a second front on the fire down some alley. The fire was being attacked by the men of 157 who had entered the front of the garage. How did EMT medics get "on the other side of the fire building," causing them to run through "smoke and spray from fire hoses," to the point of injury and becoming the object of rescues themselves?
Isn't the fact of such a swift-moving fire beginning in the nether reaches of a labyrinthine structure itself cause for investigator's interest? It sounds like a set up, and textbook arson to me. But the narrative logic, or lack thereof, gets even worse:
"Firefighters from Engine 157 were spraying the out-of-control fire when a 'mayday' call came over the radio, stating a firefighter was unaccounted for. Panic struck the emergency crews.
"You think, 'Where is he and how do we get him out?'" said Firefighter Rich Kane, an Annadale resident who was on a one-day assignment with Engine 157."
As Engine 157 kept fighting the blaze, several firefighters combed the area for Gorumba. A police officer who was nearby approached the 163 fire truck to find Gorumba -- in full gear -- unconscious inside the truck, fire officials said. He had never entered the garage.
"Member found, member at the rig," blared the fire radio.
"The truck's driver and the police officer began to give Gorumba cardiopulmonary resuscitation and medics from a St. Vincent's ambulance nearby were summoned. Gorumba was quickly placed in the ambulance and taken to St. Vincent's.
This is the first mention of Engine 163's chauffeur, who is never named in the public record. Where was he while Gorumba---who supposedly had been part of a two-man team manning a firehose before he took ill---backtracked to the truck's cab to die? Why would the men of 163 put out a radio announcement that alarmed the men of 157, who were working at the heart of the fire, doing what they are supposed to do---"spraying the out-of-control fire"
with w a t e r! OK, Helen Keller?
Even if Gorumba went missing, it's absurd he'd be near the action, with the first arriving company at an inferno, so why was 157 radioed at all, after somebody in Engine 163 failed to supervise his newbie partner? 157's chauffeur should also have been outside by the curb; by the hydrants and the engine trucks and 163's chauffeur. The radio report was inaccurate to boot: "Member
wasn't found," at least not by a brother fireman; and "member was
dead at the rig," not the "all-clear" that was sounded.
What makes the happenstance of Gorumba's being found by an undercover cop amid what the Times described as "a stretch of low-slung commercial buildings," (but what shows up on Google satellite as being a gritty auto-repair-shop district,) all the more interesting, is the guileless, gratuitous, but utterly transparent information found in the Advance article concerning Firefighter Rich Kane---a temporary fill-in member, who "was on a one-day assignment with Engine 157." It turned out to be such a special day out in the boonies of Staten Island. Did he go out on a call because someone had called in sick? His regular, higher-tone gig is in midtown Manhattan. Just ask Barack Obama, who greeted Kane and his cohorts when he came to town recently to publicize the United State's offing of Osama bin Laden.
Source SI Live image, Obama and Rich Kane
It seems certain that Kane's quote in the Staten Island Advance wasn't an elaborate ruse on some grand chessboard. Other quotes in the same article back up Kane's as being exceptions to the taciturn flow of public information that normally issues out of this hierarchal "brotherhood," one which is beholden to the same rules of order and discipline and secrecy as the military services.
Opinions outside the usual chain of command describe Gorumba as being fantastically fit:
"Disbelief," was how Battalion Chief John Calderone of the 22nd Battalion described the scene.
"I mean, I hate to use the word routine, but this really was a routine fire," said Deputy Chief Theodore Goldfarb of Division 8. "[Gorumba] was in excellent shape. He was one of our fine young products."
Recently, I have been studying the newspaper record of New York City firefighter fatalities going back over 30 years, and I've never encountered such anecdotal, and contradictory, commentary in any other case. Which is not to say that other previous line-of-duty deaths in the department are necessarily real---in addition, I should clarify, to the soap opera fiction known as 9/11. Little appears to be what we are told it is in recent years, being either faked death, or in some cases, sacrificial, occult, or "collateral," murders. Not that we can't find contrast in the authentic response when real tragedy strikes---like the legitimate Deutsch Bank fiasco that took two beautiful men's lives.
When I saw Rich Kane's "one-day assignment" quote in the Staten Island Advance article, which only recently resurfaced, my skeptical eyebrow went up. Then I saw the photograph of Kane and Obama shaking hands as part of the president's recent firehouse tour, (which I found posted online at SI Live---it may be in the print edition of the Advance too,) I recognized a strong connection between these two occasions, but I interpreted it's meaning wrongly at first, I believe, as only some sort of sinister showing off.
Then I began to see a direct parallel between the Kane/Obama image and another photograph published of President Obama greeting Beverly Eckert at a White House function, taken less than a week before her sudden death in a airplane crash, which was caused by something other than the blind-fate coincidence we are told is its only significance. This image is used at Wikipedia to illustrate her entry, and it is both beautiful and profound.
I have never been able to tell clearly the good guys from the bad guys in the 9/11 drama, and its coverup, which doesn't reflect a moral relativism in me, just an average naivety and hopeless narcolepsy. But I just went back and reread a blog I wrote about her,
Given Beverly Eckert's Death, it Behooves Us to Ask the Question: Could the Jersey Girls Possibly Be False Flag Agents of the Conspiracy? from Feb. 14, 2009, as well as a supporting piece,
Continental Connection Flight 3407, from February 18,2009, but I did so with dread. I expected to be mortified that I'd gotten so much wrong in long ago "experimental" work, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that I'd gotten it just about right. Our collective consciousness is rising, and developing, from all the strain we are putting it through.
I've concluded that it's hard to know the truth about reality, and there's nothing to be afraid of in that. Since money never offered what it promised, neither will death I bet. Maybe Rich Kane is a good guy, who on August 28 was working, like
Maxho the Russian---who flew over the Pentagon on August 25, 2001, and down the Hudson on September 11 at 9:03 a.m. A spy maybe, a witness certainly, a taker of pictures, or the subject in pictures.
They can't get away with unjust murder. My friend Russ J. was Chief Oreo Palmer's aide for quite some time. He tells me that I would have really liked Chief Palmer if I'd ever had the chance to meet him. Who knows?
(Oh rats. I may have gotten Rich Kane exactly backwards. Read this Staten Island Live article from last month, "
15 who never came back are unseen guests as Obama lunches at 9/11 firehouse," by Stephanie Slepian, for the most maudlin crap. It closes with this line: "It provides some closure for 9/11," said Kane, who hasn't been to Ground Zero since March 2002 -- the day one of the firehouse's rigs was found."
The rig was parked on the street, wasn't it? Can they mean to say that some portion of the surrounding streets wasn't cleared off for six months, enough to bury a whole, even flattened, firetruck, and not even a corner of it poked through? Maybe they'd want to get in there and look for some pf those old stinky body parts? You see, without an iota of objective truth to fall back on, it's just all B-movie screenwriting. Drat, and fie on them!)
The following two compendiums organize some of the research :
News Articles Concerning the LODD of FF Michael Gorumba
Worksheet on the LODD of FDNY FF Michael Gorumba,
The forum page for "
Engine 054 / Ladder 004 / Battalion 009 - Manhattan," at www.fallenbrothers.com, has done some heavy lifting for this house where Kane dined; famous for loosing 15 of their comrades in lasagna and schnitzel.
So why do they list 17 names? Am I missing something?
ENGINE 54
FF. Jose Guadalupe
FF. Leonard Ragaglia
FF. Christopher Santora
FF. Paul Gill
LADDER 4
CPT. David Wooley
LT. Daniel O'Callaghan
FF. Joseph Angelini, Jr.
FF. Samuel Oitice
FF. Michael Haub
FF. John Tipping II
FF. Michael Lynch
FF. Michael Brennan
BATTALION 9
BC. Edward Geraghty
BC. Denns Devlin
FF. Alan Feinberg
FF. Carl Asaro
FF. Charles Garbarini
So far, I've only looked up David Wooley, which the Times profile said had a sideline putting up wallpaper. He even took a job putting up the wallpaper in the post-presidential Westchester home of Bill and Hillary Clinton, whom he describes as "very nice." Who could make this stuff up?
