There were a lot of “what if’s” to ponder in the aftermath of the fire that killed a Reading volunteer firefighter and three civilians in the Reading YMCA building at Reed and Washington streets on Jan. 28, 1985
Two of them rise to the top, retired Reading Fire Chief William H. Rehr III said Saturday during the presentation, “Remembering the Reading Central YMCA Fire — 40th Anniversary,” at Reading Area Community College’s Schmidt Technology and Training Center.
What if an emergency exit door along Reed Street hadn’t been ajar, allowing an emotionally disturbed teenager to access the basement and pantry where he set fires?
And what if fire-suppression sprinklers were installed on the first and second floors, instead of just the two upper-floor rooms rented for transient individuals?
“We wouldn’t be sitting here today,” Rehr said each time after raising those questions that haunt the Reading Fire Department four decades later.
The audience of about 150, composed largely by active or retired city firefighters and their families, heard the presentation hosted by Reading Area Firefighters Museum.
The lack of sprinklers on the lower floors was just one of the design decisions that were made in the mid-1980s when the building was undergoing a series of renovations that factored into the tragic outcome, Rehr said during his introduction to the slide show. And the fire department itself transformed in the aftermath of the blaze, he said.
As tragic as the fire was, it could have been far deadlier, co-presenter Richard Boyer said.
Both men were deputy chiefs at the time and responded to the fire.
In another “what if,” Boyer suggested that over 100 lives would have been lost, instead of four, had the department not refused to budge on its refusal to allow the fire escapes to be removed from the building in an early 1980s renovation plan.
The city had just adopted its own building code. The project architect did get one concession in the interest of cutting costs —another decision that had a negative factor in the outcome.
Boyer said the YMCA didn’t have the money to install sprinklers on all six floors. Instead they were installed on only the fourth, fifth and sixth, which contained all of the rooms for the residents.
City fire and building code officials feared the organization would file for a variance, an exception to the code, so they struck a compromise.
Had there been sprinklers on all floors, the deadly flashover that occurred in the stairwell — with temperatures hot enough to melt metal alloys — wouldn’t have occurred, they said.
As firefighter Donald Jacobs was bringing down a victim in the stairwell, a flashover occurred, killing Jacobs, the resident he was rescuing and two other residents.
Along with Jacobs, Clarence E. Delp, 61; Todd A. Montag, 22; and Warren Eisenbise, 66, were killed.
The blaze injured more than 50 people, left more than 100 homeless and caused damage estimated at more than $1.2 million.
The fire was quickly determined to be arson. Tracy L. Pietrovito, 18, of Reed Street, Reading, was convicted of arson, second-degree murder and related charges. Investigators said he set fires in the basement before going up to the first-floor pantry and setting the fire that would eventually spread up the stairwell.
Call slow to arrive
Rehr said the fire happened a few years before development of Berks County’s 911 system. To report a fire in those days, you had to call the seven-digit number for the department or flag down a policeman or someone else who could quickly summon emergency crews.
At the security guard desk that night was a man employed by the security service contracted by the YMCA. Inexplicably, he didn’t know the number to contact the fire department, so he dialed the operator for the phone company.
The phone company, however, did not have an operator based in Reading. The guard got an operator in Philadelphia, which led to confusion and delay as dispatchers thought the guard was calling from a YMCA in that city.
By the time they figured out the fire was 60 miles away in Reading, a civilian who saw smoke coming from the YMCA building ran across North Sixth Street to Community General Hospital and flagged down a policeman. The officer went into the lobby of the Y and pulled the fire alarm.
Rehr played a recording of the fire dispatch.
Fire’s deadly path
Jacobs, a volunteer with Ladder Company 2 at 10th and Spruce Streets, responded with career firefighter Paul Hoffman and Terry Royce, who at the time was still a volunteer firefighter.
Fire was showing from the Reed Street side of the building. Two firefighters, one of them being Kevin Kulp, who more than 20 years later would succeed Rehr as chief, remained with the truck to operate the ladder.
“The three of them (Jacobs, Hoffman and Royce) went into the building through the lobby and up the stairwell,” Rehr said. “When they got to the landing between the first and second they were starting to get smoke. The smoke was banking down from the second floor.”
That struck Royce as odd because they had seen smoke venting from the first floor when they pulled up.
“They put their masks on and decided to advance,” Rehr continued. “The smoke suddenly banked down to the point where they couldn’t see their hand in front of their face.
“Terry lost contract with Donald (Jacobs). At some point Donald must have continued up the steps and encountered a civilian, a resident of the building by the name of Todd Montag, so he decided to escort Montag down the stairwell to the lobby.”
However, the fire that started in the pantry had taken a meandering path to the second floor hallway, climbing a separate, shorter stairwell from the pantry to the second floor, where it ended and wasn’t accessible to residents. With nowhere to go once it climbed to the top of that short stairwell, the fire breached the transom door and got into the north-south hallway.
“It was intensifying with such rapidity,” Rehr said, “that the fire roared down the hallway into the lobby and the doorway, which was propped open, by all things, a fire extinguisher.”
The guard had propped open the door to give firefighters access to the stairwell. Rehr said he can’t fault the guard; it’s understandable that he didn’t remain at the desk to buzz in firefighters as they arrived because the building was supposed to be evacuated.
“The fire caught Jacobs and Montag in the stairwell right near the first floor and they were killed instantly,” Rehr said.
It was a flashover, a thermodynamic event.
“A simple definition is a simultaneous ignition of all combustibles,” Rehr said.
The corridor, from the ceiling tiles to the wallpaper to the carpet, was filled with combustible materials, he said.
“As it begins to propagate down the hallway it gains intensity and advances very quickly,” he explained.
With the stairwell door proposed open down in the lobby, and with the doors to the fire escapes being opened above by evacuating residents, “it was like a perfect wind tunnel,” Rehr said.
The flashover generated heat in excess of 2,000 degrees, which is unsurvivable even with the best gear, he said.
The only way out from the upper floors was the fire escape.
Royce was badly burned by residual effects of the flashover. He was pulled out of the fire escape by Reading police officer Kevin Rudy, who, despite wearing gloves, suffered burns to his hands when he grabbed Royce’s overcoat to yank him out.
The fire went up the stairwell until it ran out of energy. When it reached the fourth floor the sprinklers activated and extinguished the fire.
Incredibly, despite his injuries, Royce went on to join the ranks of career Reading fire personnel and is still an active firefighter with the department.
Paying tribute
Royce spoke after the slide presentation. He didn’t talk about the events of that night but gave an ode to his late friend. He described Jacobs as kind and caring and passionate about the fire service.
Jacobs’ sister Donna Brownholtz, who attended with her husband, children and other relatives, also spoke. Brownholtz, who was 17 when her brother was killed, thanked the museum for putting on the presentation, saying it was enlightening for her children to hear things about the late uncle they never met.
The fire caused the Reading Fire Department to transform a culture that had existed for two centuries.
Reading’s was a combination department, using volunteers to supplement paid firefighters. The fire laid bare the city’s liability with regard to the volunteers, Rehr said.
The department had no standards for its volunteers, who were de facto city employees when they responded to fires. There were thousands of volunteers among the 14 fire companies in Reading, but the city had no records of their training let alone their next of kin.
A volunteer could be elected a member of a fire company and be on a truck heading to a fire that very day.
“There was a core of about 200 volunteers who responded to fires, and Donald was one of them,” Rehr said. “Most of them, like Donald, obtained training on their own.”
Rehr was directed by his chief in 1985 to establish standards, including requirements for periodic training. Some of the members who responded directly from the social club voiced their displeasure, predicting the changes would be the death knell for the volunteer system.
The volunteer ranks did indeed dwindle, but Reading remained a combination department for another 30 years until 2015, when the department formally stopped using volunteers, Rehr said.
Source: Berkshire mont