Smith recounts devastating fire
A March 26 fire call to Center Avenue in Butler started like any other for Assistant Chief Kevin Smith of South Butler Volunteer Fire Department.
Smith, 46, is a veteran of 200 fires. On that Sunday morning, with the three-story building at 339 Center Ave. burning through the roof and smoke filling its hallways, Smith was where he should have been: manning the nozzle on a 1¾-inch hose as he led his attack team into the building in an attempt to extinguish the flames.
But as Smith's team pressed through a third-story fire door and into hallways pitch black with smoke and cluttered with entanglements, the fire refused to budge. With firefighters on the exterior preparing to cut holes in the roof to allow smoke and heat to escape, the call came for the team to exit the building.
That's when “normal” turned into a life-threatening situation for Smith, who had dropped the nozzle of the hose to untangle it from an unseen obstruction.
As other members of the team followed the line back out of the building, Smith lost track of the hose and became disoriented.
His most fail-safe method of finding the exit gone and his oxygen tank running low, Smith tried to follow a wall back the way the team had come. But cloaked in the oppressive smoke, he made a vital mistake.
“I just went the opposite way as everybody else,” Smith said.
Instead of leading him out, the wall led Smith to a bedroom, where he smashed a window and climbed out, hanging by an arm while crews used a ladder to rescue him from the three-story drop. As he climbed down the ladder to safety, Smith stripped off his mask, his 20-minute supply of oxygen completely exhausted.
Even months later, Smith still marvels at how quickly things went sideways inside the Center Avenue building, and says the gravity of the situation didn't dawn on him until the very end of his ordeal.
“People ask all the time, 'Were you scared?,'” Smith said. “I never knew I was really in trouble until the very end, when I thought I was in one place, broke a window, and ended up being in another.”The veteran firefighter said he's taking his story to other departments and firefighters because he believes they can learn from his mistakes.“Getting lost isn't a heroic thing,” he said. “It's a screw-up, and that's truthfully what it was. Things happened that should not have happened. I put people's lives in danger. You have to let people know what happened so maybe they can do something so that it doesn't happen to somebody else.”Since the March 26 fire, Smith has taken his story of survival across the region, sharing a presentation on his experience with 150 firefighters from nine regional departments. He will give the same presentation at Butler County Fire School this weekend at BC3, and again in November at a statewide fire instructor conference the school expects to draw 180 veteran firefighters.He said the message will remain the same: experience shouldn't make you complacent or overconfident, and training can save your life and the lives of those around you.“That's a lot of people that have a lot of experience,” Smith said. “But just because you have a lot of experience doesn't mean something can't happen to you.”
