Pants on Fire

How the San Francisco Fire Department turned a manageable house fire into a lethal disaster -- and then tried to cover up its firefighting mistakes

By Matt Isaacs

published: July 26, 2000

In her one-year career with the Fire Department, Melanie Stapper, more than anything else, wanted to belong. A sturdy woman with thick shoulders, Stapper was willing to lose 17 pounds when she didn't meet the department's weight requirements the first time she applied. When she was accepted the next year and successfully completed her training, she says she felt like she had finally found a job that appealed to her on all levels. "I was working my body, making intelligent decisions, and helping people," she says. "I was totally fulfilled."Still, Stapper says, it was difficult to become "one of the guys," especially with a few angry-white-male types hanging around her. So she made every effort not to show weakness. When she was doubled over with a pain in her stomach, for example, she didn't ask anyone from her station to take her home. "I could just hear the guys razzing me," she says. "I didn't want to hear, "Poor little Mel had to go home 'cause she had a stomachache.'" She hailed a cab to the hospital instead; there, she was diagnosed with appendicitis. It took two months for Stapper to recover. Her bosses wanted to bring her back slowly, so they assigned her to the sleepiest fire station in the city, atop Diamond Heights, where the joke went that the crew members would see every fire in the city, even if they never had to go to any of them.

A storm raged bitterly on Stapper's first night back at work, in March 1995, with wind gusts up to 60 miles per hour. But inside, the station was warm and cozy and filled with the background noise of rain on the roof. Stapper remembers completing a crossword puzzle, impressing her comrades by doing it in ink -- no room for mistakes. Then everyone settled down to sleep.

The call came well past midnight. A house down the road was burning. Though it was her first night back and she was a rookie, Stapper says she felt calm as she arrived at the scene. "I was just going to work," she says. "You get a call, you gotta go. It was nothing out of the ordinary."

Soon after Stapper and her colleagues went into the house through the garage, they discovered that the fire was, in fact, quite extraordinary. Winds roaring up Glen Canyon were blasting into an open sliding-glass door at the back of the house, creating a chimney effect that pushed the fire straight toward the crew, who had entered through the garage door. Within minutes, Stapper's commander called for a retreat. As the members of the crew tried to back out, they discovered the garage door closed behind them. There was a blast of fire, then another. Thick black smoke filled the garage.

In the next 10 minutes or so, Lt. Louis Mambretti, a 25-year veteran, died, and Stapper suffered oxygen deprivation that put her into a coma, from which she would emerge months later, blind and brain-damaged. By morning, nine others who were fighting the fire had been injured. The blaze, which required 92 firefighters to extinguish, came to be considered one of the worst tragedies in the recent history of the San Francisco Fire Department.

What happened in those 10 minutes remains in dispute. A departmental investigation cleared the firefighters on duty that night of any wrongdoing, blaming the death and injuries on extreme weather conditions and the inexplicable closing of the garage door behind the crew.

In 1996, Stapper filed a lawsuit against the garage door manufacturer, Genie Corp., for millions of dollars, alleging the company's product was defective. She didn't sue to get rich, she says. She wanted answers. "I wanted the right thing done," she says. "I put my faith in the jury system. If there was anyone to blame, let the jury decide."

But after all the facts were laid out and every witness had spoken at the trial earlier this year, the jury settled on another explanation for what had happened that night: Stapper's comrades had simply failed her.

Her chief apparently forgot she and her colleagues were in the building. The pump operator incorrectly attached the crew's hose to the hydrant, which may have prevented crew members from keeping the fire at bay. By botching these and a few other basic procedures, the jury determined that Stapper's comrades turned a dangerous but manageable fire into a full-blown and lethal fiasco.

This is not what Fire Department officials wanted to hear. In fact, the department had gone out of its way to avoid this version of the story, first by glossing over some of the facts in the incident report, then by helping Stapper try to pin the blame on Genie during the trial. No one likes to admit error, especially if the error has caused loss of a life. But in this case, department officials had an added financial incentive to obscure the facts: If a jury found the manufacturer of the garage door opener to blame for the disaster, the city would collect the money it paid for Stapper's medical expenses -- and probably more. Stapper's lawsuit began as an attempt to hold a supposedly negligent corporation responsible. The suit revealed a more complicated story about how the Fire Department deals with loss, and how it deals with mistakes, especially when those mistakes could significantly affect the city's bottom line.Following the fire, Stapper suddenly became the center of attention. Lying on her back, her face swollen and shiny, she teetered on the brink of death for weeks. The heat had inflicted third-degree burns on almost half her body. The sweat in her pants had scalded the inside of her legs; the metal buttons of her uniform left permanent brands.For weeks, Stapper's room was filled with colleagues trembling at the sight of her. There were vases everywhere erupting with flowers, and metal tins filled with cookies. Stapper received hundreds of letters from people she didn't know. At last, she had gained entrance to the firefighting family.

The sense of community affected everyone who came to see her, especially those who, like Stapper, had agreed to put their lives on the line in the name of the department. Caroline Paul, a San Francisco firefighter who wrote the memoir Fighting Fire, describes the scene in Stapper's hospital room as a personal catharsis. "Through the grief and the shock, I realize that something feels different inside me," she writes. "Today I feel, for perhaps the first time, unequivocally a part of the San Francisco Fire Department."

More than 1,000 firefighters from around the state attended Louis Mambretti's funeral at St. Mary's Cathedral. They all wore white gloves in honor of the fallen veteran, whose retirement had been only a few months away when he died. Then-Mayor Frank Jordan said a few words, according to newspaper reports, declaring that Mambretti instinctively "knew what to do" at the fire that night. Mambretti and his crew went inside, Jordan said, because that's what firefighters do.

During the funeral, according to Paul's book, Jacobs, the pump operator at the fire, was found stumbling around in the rain, crying in front of the house where his commander had died.As Stapper began the long process of recovery, spending more than 100 days in intensive care, then months at Davies Medical Center learning how to walk again, she filed a lawsuit against the Genie Corp., hoping to recoup a little of the life she had lost.A Fire Department review of the incident had focused on the garage door opener; the review's top recommendation was to teach firefighters how to disable the machines when they have to enter a house through the garage. The report never suggested simply making sure to prop open the door, a rudimentary mistake made by Stapper and her colleagues. It glossed over other mistakes as well. While it acknowledged Jacobs' error attaching the hose to the hydrant, it speciously concluded that the error had no effect on the crew's water supply inside the garage. It never addressed the question of why Battalion Chief Bob Boudoures failed to retrieve his people from inside the house, nor did it mention the crew's failure to activate their personal alarm systems. (None of the firefighters involved in the incident has been disciplined. Fire Department officials have declined requests to comment for this story.)

Stapper hired Browne Greene, one of the top trial lawyers in the state, to handle her case. Given the tragic circumstances, the lawsuit looked like a sure winner. The articulate Stapper seemed the perfect victim. She had found her dream job with the Fire Department, and this seemingly preventable accident had taken that away. On the other side, Genie, a faceless corporation, appeared to be a made-to-order deep pocket. The local media, smelling an easy exposé, began running garage-door horror stories. Television news programs showed the automatic doors chomping down on plastic baby dolls.

The trial got off to a good start, from the city's point of view. The Fire Department had gone out of its way to help Stapper prepare for the lawsuit, providing fire engines to re-create the scene and witnesses at a moment's notice. When Stapper took the stand, a few jury members broke down in tears, always a good sign for a plaintiff seeking millions of dollars.

Then, suddenly, the tide turned. It began when Jim McMullen, a retired chief fire marshal appearing for the defense, called the department's investigation of the incident a "whitewash." He pointed out the discrepancies in the report, and in painful detail described the many errors made by the firefighters. "I felt the report did not encompass everything it should have dealt with," McMullen said in a recent interview. "There should have been an outside investigation. It's a better way to go than friends investigating friends."

The defense systematically built its own case against the department, calling into question Jacobs' bungled attempt to provide a water supply to the crew, and exposing Boudoures' apparent mental lapse. Fire Department officials, in response, bitterly disputed any question of wrongdoing. One of the lead investigators testified that he wouldn't have done things any differently than the crew.

The department's protests rang hollow, however, when Superior Court Judge Paul Alvarado announced on the final day of the trial that the city had cut a deal with Stapper to take 10 percent off the top of whatever award she won from Genie. The city attorney had suppressed this information throughout the trial, and for good reason: The highly irregular deal colored the bulk of the department's testimony, giving the impression that city officials had a financial incentive to obscure the facts.

Mayor Willie Brown didn't improve appearances when he showed up in court before the closing arguments.

"[The city receives] a cut of any recovery in this case," Warren George, Genie's attorney, told the jury that day. "As a matter of fact, the mayor was in today. Perhaps he was checking on his investment."

Stapper's attorney told the jury that the deal was a standard agreement to help the city collect part of the roughly $1.5 million it had spent on his client's medical bills. But the defense pointed out that if the jury awarded Stapper everything she was asking for, the city would stand to make a handsome profit. Greene was asking for an award ranging between $26 million and $46 million including damages for pain and suffering, which would give the city as much as a $3 million bonus above what it paid for Stapper's medical costs. This was not a standard settlement, George said, and the judge agreed, informing jurors that they could use the information regarding the city's deal to decide if there was any bias in the testimony of Fire Department officials.

Deputy City Attorney Kim Manolius says the agreement was always available to the defense, and contends that the pact allowed the city to recover only as much as Stapper's medical costs, and no more. The agreement, however, makes no mention of any limitation on the city's cut of a favorable verdict.

After a day and a half, the jury found in favor of Genie. It awarded no money to Stapper. Sitting outside Cafe Flore in the Castro, discussing the trial, Stapper does not seem terribly surprised at the jury's decision. She wanted answers; now she's better informed. She's more disappointed at the recent treatment she has received from her former comrades. When she was in the hospital, firefighters would come to visit her every day. "There was drama, television cameras," she says. "They saw something in me, maybe something that frightened them and made them reach out. They embraced me."

That goodwill, she says, extended through the trial, when the department threw all its resources behind her. But these days nobody calls. "Now it's as if they're angry," she says. "Like somehow I have changed. It's as if I were erased. I feel abandoned."

Stapper says she thought about suing the department, but couldn't. Workers' compensation laws prevent employees from suing their employers for negligence, except in extreme circumstances. She says she plans to appeal her case against Genie Corp.

Even if the trial verdict in her lawsuit stands, Stapper will earn a $50,000 pension for the rest of life. She proudly shows a photograph of the house she has just bought in Guerneville, leaving the irony of her inability to see the photo unmentioned. She wants to get back to the country, she says, away from the sirens howling in the night.

She has talked with her colleagues about the mistakes made that night. But she says she wants to keep those conversations to herself. "Besides, even if I have feelings about what people did," she explains, "it doesn't matter. It doesn't change what happened."