Valley Burn

At 4:59 on a September afternoon, a Metro bus lies on its side across a gray Ford at Nordhoff and De Soto, and Engine 96 is the only company that can reach it. Captain Elena Vasquez has five firefighters and ten hands, and every freeway in the San Fernando Valley is locked solid. A woman is pinned in the third row. A man is under the car. The dying driver says something Elena chooses not to put in her report. Then a news helicopter that has been circling too low all afternoon falls out of the sky half a mile east. It comes down in a container yard she has known since she was nine years old, on the edge of two apartment buildings full of people who will not leave. There is one engine and there are two fires. There is not enough water for either, and the black duffel pulled from the Ford is one that nobody official will sign for, though somebody badly wants it back. Elena has ten seconds to split her company. She will spend the rest of the night paying for it, one radio call at a time, while a paramedic shields her own family from the cameras and a rescue man’s hands begin to fail. By morning the city will have a clean story about what happened. Valley Burn is the story of what the five people of Engine 96 saw that night and kept.