By James Rincon
Pflag Reporter

Within 150 seconds of when Joseph Andrew Stack’s Piper Cherokee airplane exploded into the offices of the Echelon 1 building at roughly 9:45 the morning of Feb. 18, Pflugerville firefighters were entering the flaming edifice to search for and rescue those trapped inside.

Lt. Mike Anderson and the PFD B Shift were undergoing plume-modeling training with the Travis County Hazardous Material team less than 2,000 feet from the crash site when they heard the explosion. District Training Chief Robert Hartigan was overseeing the drills when the plane hit.

“Whenever we go to training we’re always prepared for anything and most of the time we bring our HAZMAT trailer, so we don’t have our normal apparatus,” Hartigan said. “Everyone who was at the training had their bugger gear, which is our protection for fire. We take that with us because we don’t know what we’re going to run into.”

One of the county’s HAZMAT trailers was in the shop that day, so a fire engine replaced it in the training exercise. Firefighters from Westlake, Oak Hill, Lake Travis had met at the Dave and Buster’s at 9333 Research Blvd. for the morning’s drills and instead they were in place to be the first team on the scene of what Hartigan calls a once-in-a-lifetime call.

“We all heard something, it sounded like a plane, then there was an explosion. We took a few steps back, looked across the street, and we could see the building was on fire, plus all the smoke that was billowing out of it,” Hartigan said. “This is something that will probably never happen in my career again, and you learn from it, and you pass that experience on to your fellow fire fighters who were watching it or listening to it. We revert back to our training – not to say that our training encompasses planes flying into buildings – but we fall back on the basic stuff we know we need to do.”

The Pflugerville crew brought a trailer, not an engine, to the training. So when the team responded they threw their gear in the back of a pick-up and drove literally across the street to do a preliminary assessment of the situation.

“They were aware immediately of the crash,” said PFD Assistant Chief of Operations Butch Miller.“They had all their gear that they would need to go and fight a structure fire… And because of the logistics of having a county-wide training session, we just chose that area because it gave everyone a centralized meeting location.”

Hartigan and his team’s reaction to the unique circumstances of the emergency was as if they had been sitting at a fire station awaiting a call to duty.

“You get so in tuned from being at the station to know when the tone drops, you adjust your excitement level and get yourself prepared for what you’re going to get into. This was a little bit different because we could actually see it. So it was like, OK, now we know what we have, we saw it on the drive it took to get over there,
which is better than listening for radio traffic or an update on the computer,” he said.

Stack’s attack took one life other than his own, and as tragic as the loss of that life, said Hartigan, the circumstances of the county HAZMAT team’s response was serendipitous.

“We had one engine there because one of the HAZMAT trucks was down, so we luckily had an engine there. We went in there and knocked some of the fire down right there at the base of it and went in and did some search and rescue on the first and second floor,” he said. “It seemed like it took forever for everybody else to get there… Two of the crews went down with the engine and the other two came down around the other side, but it just seemed like they took forever to get there as far as the backup, but it was only minutes.”

During those few unaided minutes Hartigan and the team set up a command post, made a list of priorities, started fighting the blaze and launched a search and rescue.

“We have to think far in advance on these types of incidents so we can stay ahead of the game,” Hartigan said. “When you have a seven-story building and you have devastation on three or four floors, it takes a toll on people.”

Despite the magnitude of the incident Hartigan said the first responders stayed optimistic about their ability to preserve lives.

“We take it to where, we’re going to get everybody out. We’re not going to write that off. The only way you would do something like that is if there was just no way you could go inside – if there was fire coming out of every single window,” he said. “And there was the gentleman who had the ladder from the glass company – kudos to him because he did above and beyond what he needed to do and he got four or five people out of there.”

The “gentleman with the ladder,” was Austin man Robin De Haven who used the two-story ladder from his work truck to lower trapped office workers out of the building and away from the flames – another link in the chain-reaction response that Hartigan describes simply as lucky, and that U.S. Rep. Mike McCaul summarized in a press conference that day as, “a great response to a very tragic episode.”

jrincon@pflugervillepflag.com