A terrifying blaze at 200 Wellesley brought a fire crew to its knees — and changed the way Toronto fights highrise fires forever.
By Francine Kopun City Hall Bureau — December 17, 2021
\n F \n irefighter Brent Brooks was in the stairwell of a burning highrise when a member of his crew staggered down from the 24th floor. The man was retreating from a blaze so fierce that the water being used to fight it was boiling in the hallway. His face was black with soot. He had wrenched off his breathing apparatus. He dropped to his hands and knees, gasping for clean air close to ground.
\n He was trying to tell Brooks that two firefighters on the fire floor two storeys above them were running out of air and needed to be rescued. But he had inhaled so much smoke he couldn’t speak.
A terrifying blaze at 200 Wellesley brought a fire crew to its knees — and changed the way Toronto fights highrise fires forever.
By Francine Kopun City Hall Bureau — December 17, 2021
F irefighter Brent Brooks was in the stairwell of a burning highrise when a member of his crew staggered down from the 24th floor. The man was retreating from a blaze so fierce that the water being used to fight it was boiling in the hallway. His face was black with soot. He had wrenched off his breathing apparatus. He dropped to his hands and knees, gasping for clean air close to ground.
He was trying to tell Brooks that two firefighters on the fire floor two storeys above them were running out of air and needed to be rescued. But he had inhaled so much smoke he couldn’t speak.
“We knew something horrible was going on,” said Brooks, whose job that day was to keep track of the incoming crews and their assignments, a job rendered so complex by the crews of firefighters pouring in to respond to the six-alarm fire that Brooks tossed aside his clipboard and began keeping track on a wall.
On the day of that fire at 200 Wellesley St. E., in September 2010, Brooks had been a Toronto firefighter for 15 years, four of them on the department’s specialized highrise truck. He believed then that he knew everything there was to know about highrise fires. The fire at 200 Wellesley would prove him wrong.
“There’s a saying: Good luck can teach you bad habits,” said Brooks, now a captain.
The fire was like nothing he or anyone else on-site that day had ever seen. It started at 5 p.m. and burned uncontrollably for six hours, with hot spots still glowing like coals at 3 a.m. the next day. It launched Brooks on a mission that would transform his career, and it changed the way highrise fires are fought in Toronto.
Thirty minutes after the first alarms rang that evening, as Brooks kept track of operations from the 22nd floor, apartment 2424 remained an inferno. Nearly a dozen firefighters had already tried to access the unit to drown the roaring blaze with water.
The fire had started on the 24th floor when a cigarette landed on the balcony of 2424, igniting hoarded paper and books.
The occupant, Stephen Vassilev, had accumulated a mountain of documents in his legal battle against banks that had foreclosed on his investment properties.
He wasn’t home, and his front door was stuck partially open – debris had fallen behind it.
The wind was pushing the fire, smoke and heat into the corridor like a blowtorch.
“The fire wasn’t dying down,” said Brooks. “If you have a couch fire, eventually that couch is going to get smaller, and we’re going to be able to gain entry into the apartment, but in this case, it wasn’t getting smaller, it just kept getting worse.”
The hoarded papers were acting like a fuel cell. The overhead lights were melting in long gooey strings of plastic; aluminum from the casings fell in droplets. Visibility was zero.
Three firefighters from Brooks’s crew were applying water to the flames in unit 2424 when the alarms on their breathing equipment went off, signalling that they would soon be out of oxygen and had to turn back. Staying low to avoid the worst of the heat, they crawled across undulating fire hoses on the ground, searching for a stairwell to relative safety two floors below.
Only one of the three made it: the firefighter crouching mutely on the 22nd floor in front of Brooks. One lost consciousness in front of a bank of three elevators. The other dropped to the floor a few feet opposite. He summoned the last of his breath to speak into his radio.
“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday…” he said. The message crackled across the radio handsets of personnel on the scene of the six-alarm fire, stopping them in their tracks.
“I’m out of air.”
The fire at 200 Wellesley St. E., on Sept. 24, 2010 triggered a deep rethink within the department. It changed everything from what hose and nozzle package to use and how to deploy personnel to how much air firefighters should carry on their backs and what kind of fire trucks roll up in front of your building when an active fire is confirmed.
It brought more and better science to bear on the complex task of fighting highrise fires in a city that has become one of the most vertical in North America.
It overturned conventional thinking about how such fires should be fought and inspired policy changes that would take years to implement. And not a moment too soon. Toronto is expected to grow by a million people by 2030, and most of them will live in highrise towers — more than half a million residential units were added to the city between 2016 and 2020.
Highrise buildings represented 43.1 per cent of all residential structure fires Toronto Fire Services responded to in 2020, and more than half of the city’s fire fatalities, according to a recent report to city council.
If you live in one, what Toronto Fire learned at 200 Wellesley may save your life.
Out-of-control fires in highrises are rare. Fire-alarm systems, concrete walls and floors, and fire-rated doors mandated by Ontario construction codes go a long way to containing fires within individual units. Provincial fire code regulations also require routine inspection and maintenance. Firefighters liken it to a beehive — one cell in a highrise can be destroyed without affecting any other cells or the integrity of the hive itself.
The exterior cladding that turned the Grenfell Tower in London into an inferno that killed 72 people in 2017 is not permitted here. Another difference: there was only one stairwell in Grenfell Tower. Most buildings in Toronto have at least two stairwells and often three.
On the other hand, more than 2,800 highrises in Toronto were constructed prior to 2010, when sprinkler systems — one of the most effective tools against the spread of fire in highrises — were not required. The Toronto Community Housing complex at 200 Wellesley, in St. James Town, is one of those buildings.
Firefighter Bill Baker’s crew was on a nearby medical call when the fire at 200 Wellesley broke out. His team responded to the second alarm. From outside the building, it looked routine to Baker. He thought he’d be back at the fire hall in half an hour. “It looked like a lot of fires Toronto Fire had experienced. I didn’t think anything of it.”
Until he approached the door of 2424 with his crew. “The amount of heat that was coming out of there was like a blast furnace. We were trying to play water into the fire unit itself. And it was not achieving anything. The water was just turning to steam,” said Baker, who is now division chief, training, Toronto Fire Services.
It was the fire that wouldn’t go out. Baker and his crew went back four times, each time after returning to ground level for new air cylinders. By the third trip, there were firefighters lying on stretchers outside, recovering from heat stress. The normally loquacious Baker sat quietly for a time in a cooling chair, equipped with trays of water on the arms, to bring down his core body temperature.
“Baker’s not talking. Must be pretty bad,” cracked a colleague.
Residents were inundating 911 with calls, some of them screaming in fear that their units were on fire — in some cases mistaking smoke or heat for approaching flames. The wind was also spreading the fire from the balcony of 2424, piled high with hoarded paper, onto other balconies. The longer a fire lasts, the more time smoke gets to travel, and residents were spooked by smoke, curling under doors and drifting through ductwork.
The building was evacuated by firefighters, although some residents were able to shelter in place, in their apartments, throughout the fire.
On Baker’s fourth trip, the door to 2424 was burned away. Baker and two of his crew entered the living room. Baker was at the entrance to the unit, his colleagues ahead of him in the living room, when he saw a floor-to-ceiling wall of fire moving toward them from the bedroom. His colleagues had their back to it.
“It wasn’t coming at 100 miles an hour, but it was coming,” said Baker. “The fire was on us.”
Baker pulled the hose they were all holding back and forth, and signalled for them to leave. “By the time we had gone, it had gone for the ceiling. We would not have lasted in there another 30 seconds.”
He considers it a miracle no one was killed that day.
Wind-driven fires are hardly new — the phenomenon can occur in a bungalow. But wind speed increases with height. And as cities expand ever upwards, wind-driven fires are becoming more of a concern for fire departments everywhere. “It’s a world problem, not a city of Toronto problem,” said Brooks.
A wind-driven fire in a bungalow can be fought from the outside. A wind-driven fire on the upper floor of a highrise must be fought from indoors, and there are hundreds — sometimes thousands — of residents to manage during the process.
It also takes longer to begin fighting a highrise fire. “A house fire — you pull up, you’re on-scene, you’re good to go, you can see your hydrant,” said Brooks. “You show up to the highrise building, but you’re not at the location. On average it’s six minutes and 20 seconds for us to get to the fire floor and then we have to set up, which takes another six minutes. Imagine pulling up to a house fire and waiting for 12 minutes.”
A terrifying feature of wind-driven fires is how quickly they can overwhelm firefighters and residents. In 1994, two women in the Bronx were killed by a fire on the 18th floor of a residential tower. The woman in the burning apartment was knocking on doors, trying to get one of her neighbours to call the fire department. Finally, a neighbour across the hall opened her door. Both women were later found dead; one with a phone still in her hand. When the door was opened, heat currents from the burning apartment travelled down the hallway, killing them instantly, according to New York Fire Department battalion chief Jerry Tracy, in a seminal video for the National Institute of Standards and Technology. “We were starting to see things we’d never seen.”
Toronto had a similar fire, at 2 Forest Laneway in North York in 1995. It began in a couch in a unit on the 5th floor of the 30-storey rental building, near Yonge and Sheppard. The occupant tried to put the fire out himself, opening his balcony door to vent the smoke. Neighbours came in to help, but they were unable to extinguish the flames. Everyone retreated, leaving the apartment door open. Wind blew into the apartment through the balcony door, across the fire and through the open door. Six people died in the five-alarm blaze, including a 16-year-old girl. They were overcome by smoke in the stairwells.
Sometimes the dynamics of wind-driven fires work the other way, providing what firefighters call “areas of refuge.” At 200 Wellesley, residents on the same floor as the burning unit were able to shelter in place for the duration of the fire, including a man in the apartment right next door to the burning unit and a resident across the hall, who took refuge on their balcony, and kept the balcony door shut, as instructed by firefighters, to prevent the fire from finding a flowpath through their unit.
What fire departments have learned about areas of refuge has influenced the thinking on routine evacuations. In fact, the rules many of us learned as children — leave the building by the nearest stairs at the sound of a fire alarm — have changed entirely.
Wind-driven fires had not been deeply studied until fire departments in New York City, Chicago and Toledo were able to conduct a series of experiments in abandoned highrises on Governors Island in New York in 2009.
Researchers had to first understand that wind-driven fires were a phenomenon. Then they had to find funding for research, and suitable locations to experiment in real time.
A wind-driven fire that killed three New York City firefighters in 1998 was the trigger, but it took 12 more years — the 9/11 attack in 2001 set things back — to draw together the right resources to conduct the experiments and get the results into the hands of firefighters, said Dan Madrzykowski, director of research for the UL Firefighter Safety Research Institute in Columbia, Md.
The resulting research and DVDs about it were made available at a fire department instructors conference in 2010, said Madrzykowski, who has a PhD in fire engineering.
“It takes time to get the word out, and then it takes time to adjust the training,” he said.
The Governors Island experiments found that in buildings like 200 Wellesley a wind-driven fire will move from the windward to the leeward side of a building.
Units on the leeward side risk creating a flowpath if a window is blown out or a door is opened or burned away.
Anyone in the flowpath is at risk of being killed by the blowtorch effect experienced by firefighters at 200 Wellesley.
Units on the same side of the building as the unit on fire remain safe from smoke and heat.
At Wellesley Street E., a firefighter, struggling down the hallway from the burning apartment, accidentally fell into a unit on the same side as 2424 and was shocked to find it free of smoke. Standing up, he watched from safety inside the apartment as smoke and heat streamed down the hallway in front of him. The apartment he had fallen into was on the windward side of the fire.
At the time, most fire departments in North America, including Toronto, were at the beginning of their understanding of wind-driven fires and how to fight them safely.
“A lot of stuff, you have to experience it and then you have to put the science into it,” said Brooks.
Firefighting knowledge has been passed down from experienced firefighters to new recruits since Rome was divided into 14 fire districts.
Tradition is the bedrock of fire departments — some fire stations in the U.S. still use wooden ladders, and firefighters have been known to resist change, including seatbelts in fire trucks and the protective bunker suits they now wear.
“When I came on, 30-odd years ago, you were under the tutelage of your crew, and they taught you a lot from experience,” said Geoff Boisseau, operations division commander, training and continuous improvement, Toronto Fire Services.
To a large extent, that’s still the case — firefighters still learn from one another. After every major fire in Toronto, Boisseau puts together a team to dissect what went well and what didn’t go well. Interviews are conducted with the crews and incident commanders. The resulting reports and recommendations, if any, are required reading for firefighters across Toronto Fire’s 84 stations. “It’s a self-critique — it’s let’s take an honest look at ourselves — how did we do,” said Boisseau.
Boisseau believes that firefighters are now more open to change. Today’s recruits have more education and a different attitude, which Boisseau sums up this way: “You can’t just tell me how to do it — you gotta tell me why.”
Baker says he went into fighting the fire at 200 Wellesley with knowledge that had been handed down to him by the old vets who staffed fire houses when he was a recruit. “Never, ever open a hose line ’till you see the fire,” Baker said he was told.
“This is the older guy, smoking a cigar, telling you, ‘Get your ass wet on the job, son’ — those guys, that’s who I absolutely learned from — Korean War vet guys. And they were good firefighters, too. I’m not trying to put them down. That was what they were taught, passed down from generation to generation.”
At Wellesley, firefighters used fog nozzles, which issue a finer spray than other nozzles — often likened to a fog or mist — instead of larger hoses fitted with smooth-bore nozzles that pump larger volumes of water that drown the fire as quickly as possible. Fog nozzles date back to the 1940s, when they were found, based on experience, to be effective in putting out small interior fires. It was also believed that using fog nozzles resulted in less water damage.
Fog nozzles still have their uses, but they were the wrong fit for a fire 24 storeys in the sky, driven by wind and being fought through a narrow hallway.
The thinking in Toronto today is to get as much water as possible, as quickly as possible, on any highrise fire, using larger-diameter hoses and smooth-bore nozzles. The smooth-bore nozzles have an added advantage. Not all buildings keep their standpipes — where firefighters hook up their hoses — in top shape. A smooth-bore nozzle will allow debris from leaves to mice to flow through — debris that can become stuck in a fog nozzle, resulting in a reduced water flow.
There was another faulty assumption at play the day of the fire at 200 Wellesley. Firefighters were packing 1,200-litre air tanks, which in theory, are supposed to last 30 minutes. The experience at Wellesley, coupled with scientific research, proved that theory dead wrong.
At the time of the Wellesley Street fire, Toronto Fire Services and researchers from the University of Waterloo had already been investigating the length of time it takes firefighters to go through a 30-minute, 1,200-litre tank of air.
Firefighters have known for a while that the actual duration for work while wearing a self-contained breathing apparatus was considerably less than 30 minutes. The study showed that firefighters, working under only moderately difficult conditions, would get to a quarter tank in as little as 11 minutes.
Conducted with researchers at the University of Waterloo, the study was published in the October 2010 edition of Applied Physiology, Nutrition and Metabolism, less than a month after Wellesley. Follow-up studies would show that extreme heat can impair cognitive function — critical to firefighters, who face myriad high-stakes decisions.
Now Toronto firefighters are equipped with 1,800-litre air tanks. The alarm goes off after 10 minutes, to give them ample time to return safely.
Brooks was close to the two firefighters who went down on Sept. 24 at 200 Wellesley St. One was a friend. The other was his captain.
“When a firefighter does go down and it’s your best friend, you want to go, you want to drop what you’re doing and go get him, or at least attempt to, but you can’t, and that’s tough,” said Brooks.
“But everyone did what they supposed to do, they followed their training.”
Both firefighters were rescued — one by a Toronto Fire Rapid Intervention Team tasked uniquely with locating and saving firefighters who go down in a fire.
The second rescue was good luck and quick thinking. A team of firefighters took the building’s fire elevator to the 24th floor. As soon as the doors opened, black smoke began pouring in and the firefighters began pushing buttons to close the doors and return to the lobby.
Then they heard an alarm go off — the alarm that attaches to a firefighter’s breathing apparatus and goes off when they stop moving and breathing. Blindly, they reached out towards the sound and found the firefighter, dragged him into the elevator and used their own face masks to provide him with air.
The perils of being exposed to a fire are varied and increase with the duration of exposure. Off-gasses like hydrogen cyanide — created when synthetics burn — are just one danger. Superheated air that’s found in smoke can burn and cause swelling of the windpipe, throat and lungs, and in extreme cases, cause irreversible organ damage. The soft tissue between the cartilage of the trachea can burn, causing inflammation and restricting the airway. Your brain can live four minutes without oxygen, but as it shuts down, it pumps the heart and lungs more quickly, accelerating the poisoning.
“It was horrible, and it seemed like hours for them to get them out. And you know, when we did get them out, they didn’t look good at all,” said Brooks.
The fire changed the course of Brooks’s career. “I remember the fire was finally knocked down after five and a half hours. And I thought, we can’t do this again, it was way too dangerous, this is nothing that anyone that was there had experienced,” said Brooks.
He threw himself into studying highrise fire fighting, attending conferences around the world, visiting London to study the Grenfell Tower disaster. He’s been to Spain, England, France, New York City and Chicago. “I try to hit four conferences a year,” Brooks said.
He joined the Council of Tall Buildings, headquartered in Chicago, and has become one of the experts in highrise fire fighting for Toronto Fire Services. He will represent Canada at the 7th annual International Tall Building/High Rise Conference in London in May, to speak about highrise fire fighting techniques. Brooks and Baker designed the two new highrise trucks now in use in Toronto. The goal is to have one in each of the four quadrants of the city.
Brooks has turned his Burlington garage into a workshop where he explores the principles of wind-driven fires and works out ways to teach new recruits about the phenomenon. He works on small improvements to equipment and procedures, because in a fire, every second counts. At conventions, he corners manufacturers with his ideas.
Brooks’s garage props include a dollhouse version he built himself of the floor of a residential highrise, with apartments flanking either side of a long, narrow dollhouse hall. The mock-up resembles, in many ways, the layout at 200 Wellesley.
In the corner unit of the dollhouse is a machine that can produce smoke much the way unit 2424 did on Sept. 24, 2010. Driven by a fan to mimic wind on a fire, smoke pours down the hallway of the dollhouse. By using levers to open and close the doors to the apartments, Brooks is able to demonstrate the impact of a wind-driven fire.
Apartments on the windward side of the dollhouse — the side the fan is blowing on — stay free of smoke and fire, even when a door, window or both are opened. They are protected by the same wind feeding the fire next door. Residents in the apartments on the opposite side of the unit that is on fire — the leeward side — are at risk of death if they open a window or a door, which would let in smoke and fire. If they were to open both a window and a door, they would be creating a new flowpath for the fire, putting them at much greater risk of death. It could happen in seconds.
Brooks has built several dollhouse condos, with miniature firefighters, to demonstrate what happens when someone opens the wrong door or window during a wind-driven fire.
He’s tried to capture it on a GoPro camera placed on a tripod near the prop. He’s never quite been able to, because each time the dollhouse bursts into flames, melting the plastic firefighters and the GoPro.
“It’s instantaneous,” said Brooks.
Over the 11 years since 200 Wellesley, Toronto Fire Services has applied the lessons learned to how highrise fires are fought in the city.
If a fire alarm sounds, it’s now recommended that highrise residents, unless otherwise instructed, remain in their units, keep their doors and windows closed, and wait for instructions from firefighters, who will take control of the building’s public address system. Acting Toronto fire chief Jim Jessop says many fire deaths in highrises occur in stairwells, where people attempting to evacuate the building are overcome by smoke. It can happen quickly.
If the fire is in your unit you should leave immediately. Toronto Fire advises that you close the door behind you, but not lock it, as firefighters may require access. Then exit the building by the nearest stairwell. Toronto Fire does not recommend climbing to the roof to be rescued by helicopter. That only works in movies.
For those fighting the fire, too, there are changes. The department has two specially kitted out highrise fire trucks, with new equipment that includes lightweight hoses that are easier for firefighters to carry up stairs but deliver more water once they’re hooked up. Smooth-bore nozzles have replaced fog nozzles, delivering a strong stream of water.
“This right now is like punching the fire in the throat,” said Baker.
The smooth-bore nozzles have fluorescent bumpers on the tip and fluorescent inserts in the handle and are visible in smoky conditions. The trucks carry nozzles that can be squeezed into a small space to blow water into the unit from outside it. Double-headed nozzles allow crews to fight fires on the building exterior; and curved nozzles can be deployed out one window to blow water into a unit one floor above or beside the fire unit.
Firefighters have access to aerosol extinguishers that are like grenades — pull the pin and toss them into the fire from a distance. “We have more options than we did in 2010,” said Brooks.
Toronto Fire has also recently purchased the tallest articulating aerial tower in North America. The Bronto, which is expected to go into service soon, will have an articulating boom with a basket that can reach 230 feet, or 70 metres — nearly twice the reach of a typical aerial device. It will be able to reach close to 20 storeys high.
Now, when they pull up to a highrise, firefighters look for the telltale signs of a wind-driven fire — wisps of smoke escaping from a window, which can signal that the wind has turned the hallway into a chimney. There are new procedures around how to open doors when a wind-driven fire is suspected, and how much air firefighters carry.
Fire teams also have more people. It takes a fantastic number of people to fight a fire in a highrise — the National Fire Protection Association recommends dispatching a minimum of 43 to a highrise, adding or subtracting further resources as necessary.
Even with all the improvements, the work is arduous. Once, Brooks had to walk up 68 floors in a building under construction where the elevators were locked up at night. “It wasn’t fun, but after the 22nd floor you get your sweat on, and then it almost becomes a challenge,” said Brooks.
In one recent event, a firefighter had to rappel down the exterior of a building for an elevator rescue.
Toronto Fire estimates it will need to hire another 156 firefighters between 2023 and 2025 to meet the escalating demands created by highrises. “We’re responsible for challenges that candidly, outside of New York City, no other fire service in North America has,” said Jessop.
Brooks, 49, will become eligible for retirement in April. He’s not sure if he’s ready.
On the one hand, projects await. His travels to Chicago introduced him to the work of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and he has spent five years transforming the suburban bungalow where he lives with his family into a restrained and elegantly crafted Prairie-style home. If he retired, he could finish it. Or take on a new challenge, perhaps write a book about highrise fire fighting.
But he still loves the job, and with more cities building upwards, the need for training firefighters in the complicated task of fighting fires inside them is building too.
There are days Brooks is sure he will stay and days he is sure he will leave.
Standing outside 200 Wellesley, 11 years after the fire that burned for six hours and somehow, miraculously, killed no one, and which transformed his life and his work, Brooks looks up at a mural that runs most of the length of the building’s south face.
It was initiated by Steps, a charity that supports public art, painted by professional artists working with local youth. It was meant to symbolize the resiliency of residents in the area — 1,700 people were initially displaced by the fire, hundreds were displaced for weeks or months. More than 600 tenants brought a successful class action lawsuit against TCH and the former operator of the building for failing to take steps that could have prevented the fire. They won $4.85 million.
The mural was rendered in bright yellow and red, like the flames of the fire that changed the lives of those who lived in the building on Sept. 24, 2010, those who showed up that day to save them, and those living in highrises today who have benefitted from the changes it wrought.
It’s a phoenix, risen from ashes.
Doug Cudmore, Sarmishta Subramanian, Andrew Meeson
Video provided to the Star by CityNews