3000 Degrees: The True Story of a Deadly Fire and the Men Who Fought It - Hardcover

Flynn, Sean

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0446528315 ISBN 13: 9780446528313

Publisher: Warner Books, 2002

Synopsis

On December 3. 1999, the call crackled in to the men of Worchester, Massachusetts Fire Department: a three-alarm warehouse blaze in a six-story windowless colossus of brick and mortar. Firefighters love the excitement of a triple, but this was a different beast. What happened once insideand how their lives were changed foreveroffers and unprecedented look at these heroic men whose job it is to rush into burning buildings when everyone else just wants out.

About this title

About the Author

SEAN FLYNN writes regularly for Esquire and other magazines. His Esquire article "The Perfect Fire" won the National Magazine Award and was one of the most talked-about works of nonfiction of the year. He is the author of Boston D.A., an account of life inside a big-city district attorney's office.

Reviews

During the long night of December 3, 1999, a windowless, century-old storage building in downtown Worchester, Mass., was turned into a six-story stove. In gripping prose ("The smoke banked down like bolts of black velvet, heavy sheets curling and rolling and folding together"), Flynn describes how, once ignited, the deserted Worchester Cold Storage building must have been the perfect structure for a perfect fire. In a style similar to Sebastian Junger's, Flynn's chapters hustle from disastrous city fires that occurred earlier that summer, building tension and setting the scene for the final disaster in this tottering working-class New England town. With confident, deft description, Flynn brings to life this 3,000-degree catastrophe with a crackling intensity, which, unfortunately, he never quite achieves for the people within his story. The human element doesn't quite live up to what he presented in his first award-winning Esquire magazine piece that won notice for the survivors as well as the spouses and parents of the six firemen who were killed. Likewise, Flynn minimizes the subsequent police investigation and forensics that made national headlines for weeks after the fire. Nonetheless, the same work ethos that made New York City firemen and rescue companies run into the doomed World Trade Center towers is here in a smaller dimension but equally intense story of fire-fighting tragedy. Photos, blueprints and map not seen by PW.

Edition details

• Publisher: Warner Books
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0446528315
• ISBN 13: 9780446528313
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256