Fire Investigator Tackles Covid, Fireworks

It was Friday night before the fourth of July, and Douglas Wardlaw was hoping he would not need to investigate any fires.

The 55-year-old fire investigator sat in his white Ford outside the New Haven Police Academy on Sherman Parkway, where he was on call as part of the city’s firework detail.

Just across the street, a man in a red T‑shirt was firing professional-grade fireworks into the air.

With 16 years of experience as a line firefighter, Wardlaw knows that one faulty fuse, and someone could lose an hand or even their life.

“If we go all night with nothing, it’s a blessing,” he said.

The city’s acting captain supervisor of fire investigation, he is back on the job after surviving a month-long bout of Covid-19. He is concerned that there might be a closer connection between fires and the pandemic than most people might think.

Wardlaw has seen an unusually high amount of firework-related incidents this summer. Across the state, reports of illegal firework activity and sales have soared. ​“People are so socially starved because of Covid that they’re doing interesting things to entertain themselves,” he said. In New Haven, fireworks complaints have shot up tenfold from a year earlier. From Friday through Sunday on July 4th weekend, 518 fireworks-related calls were made to 911. The New Haven skies crackled with fireworks; everyone heard them.

Just last week, Wardlaw investigated a fire set off by a group of 5‑to-10-year-old kids who were playing with cigarette lighters. They had ignited a bundle of recycling. ​“These kids are so deprived of seeing their buddies,” he said. ​“They were robbed of school and summer camp. They’re not arsonists. These are curious kids.”

Days before, Wardlaw saw two young men lighting fireworks in broad daylight right next to his car. He was wearing his fire investigator’s uniform. Instead of scattering upon seeing him, the men asked him, ​“You want to light the next one?”

He knows that citizens see him as a benign presence. Standing six feet three-and-a-half inches tall, with thick shoulders and muscular forearms to match, Wardlaw carries a badge, not a gun. He doesn’t have powers of arrest. ​“They don’t see an authority figure in me,” he said. ​“They don’t see us as as big of a threat.”

Message: Don’t Play With Fire

“This is my office,” Wardlaw said as he stood in the parking lot on Friday night, gesturing to the trunk of his car. Inside were a pair of thick black Honeywell rubber boots, his turnout gear — bunker pants and a sturdy coat — gloves, a helmet, in case the structure was unstable, and an N95 mask to filter out carbon monoxide and dust. Cardboard boxes of documentation sat in the back seat.

Wardlaw speaks with a deep, reassuring voice. He considers it his mission to educate the city’s residents about the dangers of fire. He knows that the youth of color in the neighborhood are far more comfortable communicating with firefighters than with the police.

“Our aim is to educate, not intimidate,” said Doug’s coworker, Jerry Rynick, the other fire investigator on call Friday night. Wardlaw said he hopes to educate the city’s many latchkey kids on how to safely cook their meals and to teach the public tips on fire safety. (“You’d be surprised how many people think you can put out a grease fire with water — that just spreads it,” he said.)

Wardlaw said that many property owners in New Haven are ​“all about the buck”. He has seen how people have lost their homes because the building’s fire safety standards were not up to standard. Some landlords don’t check whether electrical wiring is done safely, endangering tenants’ lives, and others illegally block off emergency exits in subdivided apartments.

“With so many folks in rental homes, it’s an everyday, overwhelming task,” he said.

Wardlaw grew up in Newhallville, on Division Street, in the 1980s. Back then, fights didn’t end with someone getting shot, he recalled. He lived in public housing with his grandmother. ​“We had no idea we were poor,” he said.

When he was a child, he played with fire crackers and sparklers, and got hurt trying to light them. Back then, professional-grade fireworks were far less accessible than they are today. He could not buy them in a Walmart or a gas station; he would wait for a buddy to buy fireworks from the South, where they were legal, and bring them back.

Part of Wardlaw’s job now is to apprehend people who set off fireworks illegally and to get the contraband off the street. On the eve of Independence Day, he watched as the man across the road launched roman candles into the leafy canopy. He called the police to come down and check on the violators.

The squad car arrived and headed down West Ivy Street and West Hazel Street where, just before, the fireworks were exploding in the sky. For a few moments, the display stopped. The police drove off, flashing lights fading into the distance. As soon as the cop car was out of sight, the fireworks started up again, bursting into every color in the dark night.

Wardlaw called the police back again. The fire investigators never directly engage with people who commit fire safety violations if there is a possibility for a confrontation. They wait for the police to arrive and then approach the violators with the police. ​“But we can educate,” he said.

From Kitchen To Firehouse

As a young man, Wardlaw tamed a different kind of fire. In the kitchen of the famous Robert Henry’s restaurant on Chapel Street, which is now Union League Cafe, he learned to cook classical French cuisine. He moved into the world of corporate restaurants, working for General Mills

At 35, he decided that he had had enough of opening Red Lobsters and Olive Gardens. He decided to become a firefighter.

He liked that young people in the city often look at firefighters as heroes. Unlike his younger colleagues today, who often enter the service already armed with degrees in fire science, Wardlaw didn’t know a thing about fires when he took the entry-level exam. It took three tries before he passed.

But he had one advantage: he could cook. And the lieutenants and captains of the firehouses knew it. They enlisted him to cook special meals for them — white wine pasta, grilled salmon with cream sauce, sautéed seafood, and more.

He worked as the pump operator of Engine 6 on Goffe Street, known to be the busiest company in the city. His job was getting the water from the hydrant, through the hose, and to the scene of the fire. The work was physically gruelling and mentally demanding: he had to do quick math, calculate friction loss, and know how much pressure was needed to get the water upstairs.

Even today, 19 years later, Wardlaw can still smell his first fire. It was a double fatality — a mother and her baby. He was in the front window, holding the water pipe. Firefighters on the aerial ladder had to lift the roof of the burning house. Smoke billowed out. He looked down and saw them at his feet. The baby was the same age as his son.

He bawled his eyes out. Then, he went to help with the bodies.

The mother and child were victims of a landlord who had subdivided the building and converted it into a rooming house. In doing so, the landlord closed off one of the only two exits, in violation of legal requirements. When the fire broke out, blocking the only means of egress, the pair could not escape.

Today, Wardlaw sees himself as having come full circle in his work. He inspects apartment buildings and reports those that are not up to standard. ​“Now, we are trying to stop fires before it even happens,” he said.

“A Living, Breathing Thing”

In the three years since he joined the fire marshal’s office, Wardlaw has grown attuned to all the possible ways a fire can start. There are electrical fires, stovetop fires, car fires, and propane fires. Some have natural causes, like thunder and lighting. Some have man-made causes, like arson.

When he enters a movie theater, he always looks for the exits. When he visits friends’ homes, he listens for the chirp of a smoke detector. When he sees a power outlet, he checks if it is overloaded.

Electrical fires are among the worst and most common fires that he sees. They develop insidiously, hidden behind the walls. The only tell-tale sign might be the faint smell of smoke. But give it a couple of hours and the fire is circling through the home. ​“When it peeps its ugly head out, it’s a scary fire,” said Wardlaw.

In New Haven, there have been 129 fires since the year began and 31 fires in the month of June, as of Friday. Wardlaw has dealt with a dozen calls in one night. In his career, he has fought more fires than he can count.

After a while, the fires start to blend together. The people are harder to forget.

He has seen people on the worst days of their life, connected them to the Red Cross, and checked in with them for weeks after. He has walked through a hollowed-out home, stepping over beautiful family pictures scattered on the ground. He has fought fires while around him, parts of the building would fall and the ground would give way.

Recently, he met a woman whose home caught fire while she was at work. Not long before, she had lost her son to a shooting. The little bit of money that people raised for her to fund the memorial service was burned in the fire too.

“To see folks lose their possessions, their pets, sometimes, their lives, it’s terrible,” he said. But he chose this profession to provide for his wife and two children, who enjoyed an upper-middle class upbringing, unlike him. ​“Dad chose a profession where he runs into burning buildings for them to have a better life,” he said.

While fireworks filled the skies this past weekend, fortunately, fires did not. In that sense, despite the noise, it was quiet weekend, exactly as Wardlaw had hoped.