Fireman Nugent in office. - PHOTOS BY JUNIOR DOWIE/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
"ALL HIS clothes was burnt off, the only thing he had left on him was his belt. When I tried to lift him up, his skin came off in my hands..."
In the heartbeat it took for the memory to form, the walls of his office in downtown Kingston fell away, and Assistant Superintendent Barrington Nugent was once again at the scene of a fire that raged 35 years ago at Shell Gasolene Plant in Rockfort, St. Andrew.
He said he and his colleagues took the man to the hospital as quickly as possible in a bid to save his life, but he was too severely burnt to live.
"I think he died within 12 hours. Even now I remember that," he said, his voice breaking. "But I tried my best."
Assistant Superintendent Nugent has been a firefighter for 39 years. He will retire within a year, but he says the sight of the man being devoured by flames 35 years ago still haunts him. After whisking the injured man to hospital, he and his colleagues worked feverishly to prevent a huge tank with more than 250,000 barrels of fuel from exploding. An explosion which,he said, would have totally obliterated several communities close to the gasolene plant.
"If that fuel tank had exploded, it would have been another Hiroshima," he stated bluntly.
With that knowledge, they poured water relentlessly on the fire surrounding the tank to prevent it from exploding.
"At one time, when I was trying to put out a fire close to the tank, I could hear the tank contracting and expanding, and I said to myself, 'Oh my God!', knowing that if it exploded, I would be one of the first to die," the firefighter reminisced.
Assistant Superintendent Nugent has been fighting fires for 14 years. However, for 25 years he has been part of the Fire Prevention Unit that investigates fires. The real challenge, of course, is to find out how fires get started and inspect buildings to make sure they meet certain safety standards. He might have missed the action from active firefighting when he was just assigned to his desk job but, with retirement looming, he says his desk job is helping to 'cool' him down.
"I am not as agile as I used to be," he said with a mischievous chuckle, his slivered-streaked hair the only visible sign of his claim to maturity. As he struggled to dredge up a treasured memory of his 14 years of extinguishing hungry flames, it is the face of the man who died from the burns he received in the fire 35 years ago which surfaces.
"That moment would have been a good moment, if that man's life had been saved," he said, his voice laced with regret.
- A.D.
