A Hero in the Smoke

An apartment in flames. Children missing. Jordan Sullivan gets the call.

- N. R. Kleinfiel

Ask a firefighter about his first fire, and details pour out. It was a chemistry lab of a school, a pizza parlour, a Laundromat. It was at 78th and York, in the ductwork of a Chinese restaurant. It was the top floor of a brownstone, backup man on the hose. The captain took a picture, rookie at his first fire, and it sits in a frame at home.

That’s what Jordan Sullivan, a rookie firefighter, or probie, out of the Fire Academy in New York City had spent 96 days waiting for: his first fire. Sullivan had done easily a couple of hundred runs, almost always in the junior position on the truck, the one called the can man, who lugged a big fire extinguisher. He had even been to the scenes of fires but always in a supplementary role, after the blazes were under control.

But he had not had what firefighters regard as their true first fire. It’s when their truck is the “first due”—the one first to arrive—and therefore they are the ones who go in first.

At 2:15 a.m. on Sunday, 16 March 2014, Sullivan finally got his chance. A resident reported smoke at an apartment building in a nearby Brooklyn neighbourhood. On this run, Sullivan rode the truck that was the first due.

Sullivan is soft-spoken, with alert eyes and an engaging smile. After wrestling in high school and a bit in college, he had wanted to be a wrestling coach. But soon after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, he decided he wanted to become a firefighter.

In 2002, he took the 85-question Fire Department entrance exam, receiving an 89. It was a good score, but it didn’t place him high enough among the 17,850 people who took the test to qualify. And by the time the next test was offered, in 2007, he would be 29, too old by department age limits to apply.