Editorial: Saluting 2 heroes who gave their all
December 22, 2010 6:50PM
Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM
A firefighter never knows. Death may be as close as the next call.
On Wednesday, grim reminders of this truth were everywhere.
On the South Side, two firefighters were killed and 17 were injured when a roof and wall collapsed in a blaze, even as they heroically battled to save their fallen comrades.
Earlier on Wednesday, firefighters had gathered at a memorial marking the 100th anniversary of the Union Stock Yards fire that killed 21 Chicago firefighters. By eerie coincidence, a mayday call alerting firefighters to the South Side fire came in just as victims’ names from the 1910 blaze were being read in a small park at Exchange and Peoria.
And in Washington Wednesday, Congress battled over legislation to give financial aid to the emergency first responders to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Hundreds of first responders, including firefighters, fell ill after working unbroken days and weeks amid the dust and rubble. More than 340 firefighters and paramedics died, and many more later suffered from respiratory ailments and other diseases.
What more do we need to remind us that every day our firefighters stand ready to come to our aid, putting their lives on the line? In fact, when the mayday call came Wednesday, two firefighters rushed from the the Union Stock Yards memorial service to the South Side fire, which broke out in an abandoned laundry building on East 75th Street.
To them, as with other firefighters, speeding toward danger is entirely the point, what they signed up to do.
At the scene, firefighters pulled to safety two of their own who had been trapped. They dug furiously through rubble to find others who were missing.
Tragically, two of the firefighters perished: Edward Stringer, a 12-year veteran, and Corey Ankum, 34, a former Chicago Police officer and two-year member of the Fire Department.
Both men were “excellent men, excellent firefighters, excellent parents, excellent friends,” a Fire Department district commander said.
Somehow, that doesn’t surprise us. They were Chicago firefighters.
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