30 FIRES You Must Know
ON THE BOOK SHELF
By John M. Malecky February, 2025
30 FIRES You Must Know
By Billy Goldfeder, Frank Leeb and Friends
Available from:
FSP Books
433 Main Street Suite 2A
Hudson, MA 01749
1-800-522-8528
E-mail: support@fire-police-ems.com
Price: $39.00
This is a soft cover book measuring six inches by nine inches, with 330 pages. Royalties earned by this book will be donated to several organizations listed on the back cover. It is a Fire Engineering book. Billy and Frank are both chiefs who have dedicated their lives to promoting firefighter safety and improvements in the fire service, namely through equipping fire departments to best protect their members. For many years and in many ways they have contributed to this quest. They have chosen 30 horrific and fatal fires of which almost all resulted in line of duty deaths (LODD’s.) Photos of the deceased are found in each chapter. Many of the fires are memorable, at least to me, such as the NJ Telephone Exchange Fire in 1975, which although no one died at the scene, many died as time went on due to exposure to chemicals. The Hackensack fire in which five were killed is dear to my heart because I had tutored one of the firefighters to take the entrance exam in 1972 (along with two dozen others) in which he passed. He scored higher on the Hackensack list than the Bayonne one (our home town.) He tried twice to transfer, but could not get his seniority bridged so he stayed in the HFD only to die on July 1, 1988. Other fires include the Worcester, MA cold storage fire, One Meridian Plaza in Philadelphia, the McDonald’s fire in Houston, the Father’s day fire in Queens, NY, the Buffalo propane explosion, the Charleston sofa superstore and the Yarnell Hill fire in which 19 of the Granite Mountain Hotshots were killed. The fires are chronologically written according to the month of the year. In each story there is an introduction followed by a contributor who knows the details of the event. There are lessons to be learned and a remembrance training drill at the end of the chapter. This is a must read book to learn from the past in order to help save the future. A second book is presently in the works of additional fires.
No information from the author.
