PEOPLE in the neighborhood said later
they heard a roar, felt a rush of air.
Suddenly a cloud of black smoke hung
in the air where a building once stood.
Wreckers had been dismantling an old building
southwest of Chicago's Loop to make room for a
new shopping center. Without warning, the floors
had collapsed. Of 29 workmen in the building, 15
were injured when the three-story structure came
crashing down on them. At least three men were
trapped and perhaps still alive, waiting for fire
men to dig them out.
My men went to work. I climbed through a
narrow passage in the debris and after a IV2
hour struggle uncovered one man. His thighs
were crushed under bricks and mortar, and all we
could do was ease his pain before he died.
It would be two days before we located the body
of the second victim. But the third man, William
McCoy, was another story, and an amazing one.
We knew he had been working on the first floor
and probably was now buried in the basement.
But where should we begin digging? And how
long did we have?
Crawling under the basement floor, I began
shouting through the floor beams, hoping McCoy,
if he were alive, would hear. Suddenly my driver,
Bill McDonough, nudged me. "I think I hear
someone," he said. McDonough was right. A weak
voice cried for help somewhere above us in the
maze of rubble.
I shined my flashlight upward. "Yell when you
see the light!". I shouted. A frightened voice an
swered "Oh, Lord, help me! The pain is terrible.
I can't take it long!" His words told us about
where he was and that we must hurry.
Pacing off the distance to the nearest wall, we
returned to ground level. I paced off the same ap
proximate distance there and told the rescuers:
"Dig here. Our man's somewhere below."
BUT "somewhere below" might not be good
enough. We had more than a dozen feet of
loosely packed brick, board, and concrete to dig
through before we could uncover McCoy. The
still-standing walls teetered above our heads,
threatening to buckle at any moment. We couldn't
utilize any heavy equipment that might dislodge
them. We had to dig carefully by hand, chipping
away like a master cutter at a precious diamond.
Failing to dig directly down to McCoy might cost
us hours. A matter of minutes in our uncovering
him might make the mortal difference.
McCoy probably didn't have much time. A
heavy steel I beam lay across his left calf, pin-
THE
SOUND
THAT
CHEATED
DEATH
By ROBERT J. QUINN
Fire Commissioner of Chicago
as told to Hal Higdon
In the debris of a collapsed
building, an injured
man is trapped but where?
A fire fighter finds the
answer in a newscaster's hand
ning him. Another steel beam had landed along
his right side. It supported a sheet of metal floor
ing which had protected him from cascading
debris. McCoy lay face down, unable to move,
completely buried and with time running out.
And we had only a vague idea of where he was.
Then I had an idea. A crowd of several thou
sand people, including McCoy's wife, had gath
ered to watch the rescue operation. I noticed
newscaster Jim Hurlbut circulating along the
fringe of the crowd. Using a battery-powered
recorder, he was taping eyewitness accounts.
I went up to Jim and said: "There's a man
down there. We can hear his voice faintly, but we
can't tell exactly where he's located."
Jim's eyes lighted up. "Maybe we can drop a
mike down to him and let him tell us," he said.
The building's wreckage had fallen in a pile like
matchsticks spilled from a box. It was jittery as
a bowl of gelatin. But enough holes or breathing
spaces existed so that small objects could be low
ered through the debris with some chance of get
ting below.
HURLBUT's recording unit contained a long
extension cord. We got down on our bellies
above where we thought McCoy was buried and,
using this long cord, lowered the business end of
the recorder, the microphone, through the debris.
We were fishing for a human life. "McCoy, can
you see the mike?" I shouted.
"I can't see anything," McCoy's voice echoed
dimly through the wreckage. "Won't you people
ever get me out of here?"
"We're trying, McCoy. We're trying!"
We hauled the mike back up and lowered it
again through the debris in another spot. Then
we tried again, straining to hear.
"I see the mike!" McCoy shouted. "It's only
three feet in front of my head." His voice came
loud and clear. Now we knew where he was!
I stood up and motioned the rescue crew to
move over. "We've been digging in the wrong
place, boys. He's down here."
Nineteen-and-a-half hours after being buried
alive, William McCoy was lifted from the wreck
age. His leg, pinned all this time without circula
tion under a steel beam, had to be amputated be
low the knee, but he would survive. "I'm a lucky
man," McCoy admitted as the ambulance drove
him away.
He was lucky, because the place we had found
him was maybe a dozen feet away from where
we had originally started to dig. Not very far as
distances go perhaps just the distance between
life and death.
Willi more than a dozen feel of loosely packed brick, bonrd.and concrete to move. Commissioner Quinn (in white helmet) and his fire fighters dig for McCoy.
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