Wednesday, January 8, 1987
Albert and Ethel Isaacs of Canarsie owe th eir escape from last week’s catastropohic hotel fire in PUerto Rico to one another — and to luck, they said in their home Monday.
The couple stumbled and groped their way down 18 flights of smoke-filled stairwell to survive the New Year’s Eve conflagration that killed nearly 100 others. Five days later they were still shaken and sore from the ordeal, but considered themselves fortunate.
“It’s sudch a miracle that we’re both here,” said Ethel Isaacs, 56. “This was the worst thing that ever happened to us.”
“It was a horror, an absoslute horro,” said her husband, 60, a computer instructor at PS 268 in School District 18.
As they told their story yet again — they had spent the whole weekend since their return contacting acquaintances — each of them would occasionally cough. They said their physician is monitoring them foir lasting injury from the smoke they inhaled.
“I don’t think I’ll ever lose the smell of smoke,” said Ethel.
It was about 3:45 p.m. Wednesday, December 31, and the Isaacs had j ust finished taking sh owers in their 18th flkoor room at the Dupont Plaza Hotel. Ethel was in a bath robe. Albert, wearing sh orts and a tank top, was getting ready to go out for a bottle of champagne.
It may have saved both their lives, they said later, that Albert had not yet headed downstairs.
Hearing screams, Albert looked ouit their window and saw smoke. near the bottom of the building. Not knowing. how serioius the fire would become, they took time to grab a different set of clothing, t hinking they would find a chance soon to dress themselves more properly.
They only got a couple of floors down — wisely shunning the elevator — before they met other hotel guests racing to the building’s roof. There was n o escape downward, the Isaacs were told.
They climbed back up one flight, but by then smoke was already becoming a problem. They sought fresh air on a balcony. “I was going to sit on the balcony and wait it out t here,” Ethel recalled.
It would be Albert who found them an escape route, but Ethel who inspired him to keep trying.
They saw flames licking from windows below, heard bullhons trumpeting, “Get out!” Although others were still heading for the roof, Albert felt th eir best chance to flee was downward.
“I said, ‘We’ve only got one choice,’” he recounted. They wrapped wet towels aroiund th eir faces and headed down the staircase designated as a fire exit. The wet towels probably saved their lives, he said later.
In th eir entire descent they saw heard no one else. The shaft was th ick with smoke and often pitch dark. They had to move c arefully: in places the floor was somehow damp, and Ethel, even under normal conditions, is far from an able hiker, according to her husband.
“That stupid robe,” Ethel recalled. “I was tripping all over it.” She laughed abouit the modesty that kept her from removing it, explaining: “Your whole life goes past you, but it’s also sort of cdrazy, and funny…”
“I would have gone out in the street naked,” he husband inserted.
But the full danger of the situation struck both of them after a descent that Ethel said “seemed like an eternity.” At approximately the third floor, they reached what seemed to be a dead end. There was a red glow behind a door there, and heat radiated from it.
Ethel started screaming, briefly coming close to panic, her husband said.,
It was a close moment for him, too. “I stayed pretty calm until we got to the third floor, and I thought my heart was giving out. But because of my wife, I kept going. If not for her, I don’t know — maybe I would’ve just shut down.
“I told her were were going to make it, but I really didn’t know how.”
On Albert’s mind the whole time was his wife’s astshma. “If she would’ve had an attack, I would’ve sat down with her. I wouldn’t have left her. That would’ve been it.”
They could find no way to continue downward, and they didn’t think they could endure a climb back up the stairs.
But, said Ethel, “Some kind of ghope glimmered in my head.” They groped some more, and in a dark corner found a door leading to the building’s basement. Descending, they found a kitchen that fire evidently had not yet reached. “There was hardly any smoke there,” said Ethel.
They passed through the kitchen and emerged into sunlight. A few moments later, they said, the basement kitchen was choked with smoke.
By then, Albert was so spent he could only gasp, “Oxygen!” Oxygen!” Both were rushed to a hospitala.
Even then, the orderal was not over for the Isaacs. The asthma attack Albert had feared took place once Ethel was in the hospital. In order to stay with her, Albert lost his own chance to be treated. There was “one confusion after another,” Ethel said, as patients — especially those who could not speak Spanish — tried to receive treatments, or locate companions.
Patients. helped one another, and there was an outpouring of aid from local congregations and individuals, the Isaacs said. During such a tragedy, said Ethel, “You end up kissing stranges. It brings people together.”
Their two daughters flew to PUerto Rico and helped arrange a flight home. Abandoning their belongings at the hotel, Ethel and Albnert returned home Friday, the first day of the new year.
Since then they have been contacting longtime acquaintances and people they met during the disaster.
They spoke warmly about the support that victims and volunteers gave one another following the disaster, but they were grim speaking about the tragedies they had seen or heard abouit: the 96 who died, the survivors who suffered burns and shattered limbs, the survivors who could not locate loved ones.
Like many who were caught in the hotel blaze, the Isaacs are bitter abouit the conditions that caused the tragedy. They complained about the apparent negligence of hotel and public authorities, and about the hotel’s fire-safeety system.
They didn’t yet know, however, if they would be joining other victims in some sort of legal action. “I’m not ready to do anything, yet,” said Albert. He said his lungs. have not felt normal since the fire, and that he has. had nightmares about the catastrophe.
“It’s going to take time for us to come back,” Ethel added.
But there are two ways they hope they have been affected permanently.
Being in such a sever crisis. has left them more willing to help others, they said.
And they will bne more caution. “Don’t just look for the fire exits,” Albert advissed. “Physically go down and see where it is, and where it goes to.”
Albert added that he will nebber again leave his wife alone in a setting she wouild not be able to escape from alone.
The couple said they now find special poignancy in a verse Ethel wrote to her. husband on his last birthday.
“You’re always there when I need you,” Ethel wronte on the birthday card. In this instance, though, they were there for one another — a knight and a maiden fighting a fiery dragon.
It’s one of the heartening sidelights of an appalling, probably avoidable disaster.
CALLOUTS:
“I told her wwere were going to make it, but I really didn’t know how.”
They were there for one an other — a knight and maiden fighting a fiery dragon.
FRONT PAGE CAPTIN:
Survivors: Albert and Ethel Isaacs at home in Canarsie five days after their fiery ordeal in a Puerto Rico hotel. The Isaacs tell how they escaped the high-rise inferno that claimed 96 lives. Story on Page 3.