conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a story about Gina, Russia, Billie with the genre: Literature & Fiction, United States?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this story could be 'The Fires'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Fires
  An hour earlier, Donovan had been on scofflaw duty, out ticketing cars parked in front of fire hydrants near his firehouse, Engine Co. 18 in Greenwich Village. When the company was called out on an alarm, Donovan raced back to check the house journal for the address of the call, jumped in his car, and headed for the corner of 23rd Street and Broadway. While Donovan drove to the scene, the men of Engine 18 entered the Wonder Drug store on 23rd Street with Ladder Co. 7. The bulk of the firefighting operations that night wasn't actually on 23rd Street, but a block south, on 22nd Street, in a building that was connected to the Wonder Drug building by a walkway on the third floor. There was a basement fire on the 22nd Street side, too hot and smoky for even Rescue Co. 1 to get water on it, and the crews on 23rd Street were supposed to check the connected building for signs of fire extension. They'd found a few small pockets of flame but not much, barely a pool-hall haze of smoke in the air. What they didn't know was that the basement on 22nd Street had been illegally extended forty feet beneath the 23rd Street building, where a blazing fire was eating away at the ceiling holding up the rear of the pharmacy. A wooden ceiling, which insulated the flames, kept them from heating the pharmacy's concrete floor above and thus alerting the men of Engine 18 and Ladder 7 to the fire below them.
  Outside the Wonder Drug, John Donovan pulled up to the scene to find Engine 18's chauffeur—driver Manny Fernandez—connecting hoses to the pumper. Donovan asked him where the rest of the company was. "They're in there," Fernandez said, pointing at the front door of the Wonder Drug. With that, the flame-rotted wooden ceiling above the burning basement let out a brief sigh, and shrugged. The floor "fell like a hangman's trap," fire investigators said later, and ten of the twelve firemen in the back of the store went with it, the two left on solid ground blown backward and knocked unconscious by the explosion. The fireball that roared up through the collapsing floor blew out the windows of the pharmacy, and a fireman inside the doorway was shot out into the street like so much debris, landing face-first and skidding to a stop on the sidewalk by Donovan. Fernandez ran past them to the entrance, shouting, "Eighteen! Eighteen!" The only sounds he could hear over the roar of the fire were air-mask alarms, tripped when they're knocked from the tanks, to help locate fallen firemen.
  The scene on the street turned to chaos, as panicky officers shouted orders at random and tried to figure out who was inside the store. Donovan grabbed the nozzle of a hose line and led a group back into the pharmacy in almost zero visibility, flashlight beams bouncing back uselessly off the black smoke. Inching forward, toward a flickering orange glow at the back of the store, he never saw the void in front of him.
  As Donovan told his story to Fire Commissioner Lowery, he did so to a man who was completely unprepared for the scene in front of him. Appointed by the mayor, fire commissioners are often civilians with no firefighting experience. They handle the politics and the budgets, while the civil service-tested chief of department runs the everyday operations. Lowery was no civilian; he'd become a firefighter in 1941. But political connections in the Democratic clubhouses of Harlem quickly got him appointed as a fire marshal—part cop, part fireman, carrying a gun and investigating suspicious blazes (and, when needed, other firemen, marshals serving as the department's de facto internal affairs division). Cautious, dependable, and politically savvy, Lowery was the first commissioner appointed by Mayor-elect Lindsay after his victory, and the first black commissioner the FDNY had ever had, a good politician and an effective mediator between City Hall and the fire service. But he was out of his depth when it came to the battlefield tactics of handling a multiple-alarm blaze. Fire officers and even high-ranking chiefs were shouting panicky, contradictory orders at one another. Not sure what to do, firemen attacked the fire the best they knew how—some, like Donovan, nearly getting themselves killed in the process. No one even knew how many men were missing, although there was a rumor that the commanding officer on 23rd Street, Assistant Chief Thomas Reilly—O'Hagan's replacement as the head of Manhattan's Third Division—had gone into the store with Engine 18 and hadn't come out.
  Shortly after Donovan spoke with Commissioner Lowery, Mayor Lindsay arrived on the scene and wanted to see some of the action. His political hero, Fiorello La Guardia, had rushed to fires in the sidecar of a police motorcycle when he was mayor, storming into burning buildings in a long leather coat and enormous Stetson cowboy hat to conduct "personal inspections" of the fire scenes, once crawling through smoke and ash to kneel beside two firemen trapped beneath a collapsed wall and talk with them until help arrived. The formal evening wear Lindsay sometimes wore when called to a fire scene was less practical than La Guardia's getup, but Lowery usually outfitted the mayor in a fireman's heavy rubber turnout coat and white commissioner's helmet (a glossy, ostentatious bit of haberdashery that left the tall, elegant Lindsay sticking out like a manicured thumb on a bricklayer's hand) and sent him in to survey the action. Not understanding the extent of the fire on 23rd Street, Commissioner Lowery let Lindsay enter the building, where a second collapse nearly killed the poor mayor. Lindsay quickly made his way outside to talk to reporters, unnerved by the close call and the intensity of the blaze.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Fires
  An hour earlier, Donovan had been on scofflaw duty, out ticketing cars parked in front of fire hydrants near his firehouse, Engine Co. 18 in Greenwich Village. When the company was called out on an alarm, Donovan raced back to check the house journal for the address of the call, jumped in his car, and headed for the corner of 23rd Street and Broadway. While Donovan drove to the scene, the men of Engine 18 entered the Wonder Drug store on 23rd Street with Ladder Co. 7. The bulk of the firefighting operations that night wasn't actually on 23rd Street, but a block south, on 22nd Street, in a building that was connected to the Wonder Drug building by a walkway on the third floor. There was a basement fire on the 22nd Street side, too hot and smoky for even Rescue Co. 1 to get water on it, and the crews on 23rd Street were supposed to check the connected building for signs of fire extension. They'd found a few small pockets of flame but not much, barely a pool-hall haze of smoke in the air. What they didn't know was that the basement on 22nd Street had been illegally extended forty feet beneath the 23rd Street building, where a blazing fire was eating away at the ceiling holding up the rear of the pharmacy. A wooden ceiling, which insulated the flames, kept them from heating the pharmacy's concrete floor above and thus alerting the men of Engine 18 and Ladder 7 to the fire below them.
  Outside the Wonder Drug, John Donovan pulled up to the scene to find Engine 18's chauffeur—driver Manny Fernandez—connecting hoses to the pumper. Donovan asked him where the rest of the company was. "They're in there," Fernandez said, pointing at the front door of the Wonder Drug. With that, the flame-rotted wooden ceiling above the burning basement let out a brief sigh, and shrugged. The floor "fell like a hangman's trap," fire investigators said later, and ten of the twelve firemen in the back of the store went with it, the two left on solid ground blown backward and knocked unconscious by the explosion. The fireball that roared up through the collapsing floor blew out the windows of the pharmacy, and a fireman inside the doorway was shot out into the street like so much debris, landing face-first and skidding to a stop on the sidewalk by Donovan. Fernandez ran past them to the entrance, shouting, "Eighteen! Eighteen!" The only sounds he could hear over the roar of the fire were air-mask alarms, tripped when they're knocked from the tanks, to help locate fallen firemen.
  The scene on the street turned to chaos, as panicky officers shouted orders at random and tried to figure out who was inside the store. Donovan grabbed the nozzle of a hose line and led a group back into the pharmacy in almost zero visibility, flashlight beams bouncing back uselessly off the black smoke. Inching forward, toward a flickering orange glow at the back of the store, he never saw the void in front of him.
  As Donovan told his story to Fire Commissioner Lowery, he did so to a man who was completely unprepared for the scene in front of him. Appointed by the mayor, fire commissioners are often civilians with no firefighting experience. They handle the politics and the budgets, while the civil service-tested chief of department runs the everyday operations. Lowery was no civilian; he'd become a firefighter in 1941. But political connections in the Democratic clubhouses of Harlem quickly got him appointed as a fire marshal—part cop, part fireman, carrying a gun and investigating suspicious blazes (and, when needed, other firemen, marshals serving as the department's de facto internal affairs division). Cautious, dependable, and politically savvy, Lowery was the first commissioner appointed by Mayor-elect Lindsay after his victory, and the first black commissioner the FDNY had ever had, a good politician and an effective mediator between City Hall and the fire service. But he was out of his depth when it came to the battlefield tactics of handling a multiple-alarm blaze. Fire officers and even high-ranking chiefs were shouting panicky, contradictory orders at one another. Not sure what to do, firemen attacked the fire the best they knew how—some, like Donovan, nearly getting themselves killed in the process. No one even knew how many men were missing, although there was a rumor that the commanding officer on 23rd Street, Assistant Chief Thomas Reilly—O'Hagan's replacement as the head of Manhattan's Third Division—had gone into the store with Engine 18 and hadn't come out.
  Shortly after Donovan spoke with Commissioner Lowery, Mayor Lindsay arrived on the scene and wanted to see some of the action. His political hero, Fiorello La Guardia, had rushed to fires in the sidecar of a police motorcycle when he was mayor, storming into burning buildings in a long leather coat and enormous Stetson cowboy hat to conduct "personal inspections" of the fire scenes, once crawling through smoke and ash to kneel beside two firemen trapped beneath a collapsed wall and talk with them until help arrived. The formal evening wear Lindsay sometimes wore when called to a fire scene was less practical than La Guardia's getup, but Lowery usually outfitted the mayor in a fireman's heavy rubber turnout coat and white commissioner's helmet (a glossy, ostentatious bit of haberdashery that left the tall, elegant Lindsay sticking out like a manicured thumb on a bricklayer's hand) and sent him in to survey the action. Not understanding the extent of the fire on 23rd Street, Commissioner Lowery let Lindsay enter the building, where a second collapse nearly killed the poor mayor.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: While O'Hagan was fighting for Local Law 5, RAND had expanded their second-section study to work on the questions O'Hagan and Isenberg had puzzled over years before: how to predict fire patterns and where and when to open fire companies to more efficiently fight those fires. From the fire reports O'Hagan and IBM had computerized over the years, they were able to create computer models that replicated when, where, and how often fires broke out in the city, and how quickly fire companies were able to respond to them. The models estimated which areas received faster and slower responses, and from there RAND could determine which companies could be closed with the least impact on response times. When Lindsay asked for budget cuts in 1971, RAND and O'Hagan devised budget-cutting options, such as turning some companies into TCUs instead of full-time companies, that wouldn't require widespread closings, but the unions rejected the ideas, and negotiations generally devolved into petty bickering and macho bluster. (One union man actually showed off by walking along the thin ledge of a balcony, hundreds of feet above the ground, outside the negotiating room.) RAND ran its models and recommended closing six companies and moving seven others (or closing thirteen companies and opening seven new ones, depending on how you looked at it). About half of the companies closed or moved were genuinely redundant—houses in Lower Manhattan that were built when most of the city's population was crowded into tenements south of 14th Street—and some of the openings were well placed. But the models also suggested closing some of the busiest ghetto fire companies in the city, including four FLAME second sections. Some of the new locations were equally puzzling, coming in places like sleepy Staten Island and the suburban Bronx neighborhood of Throgs Neck.
  How had models designed to make the least painful cuts and the most useful openings suggested closing some of the busiest fire companies in the city and opening companies in neighborhoods with few fires? How had systems analysis—designed specifically to favor scientific rationality over political and personal bias—given such dangerously irrational and politically expedient advice, allowing O'Hagan to close the second sections he saw as a personal affront and cut budgets in neighborhoods too weak to fight back?
  In some ways, gauging fire coverage is a bit like judging a pitcher. A pitcher's basic job is to limit the other team's offense enough that his own team can score more runs and win the game—so it would seem that an external measurement like a pitcher's win-loss record is the best indicator of how he performed in a given season. But a pitcher's win-loss record is so dependent upon factors that are completely out of his control (namely, how many runs his own team scores) that more internal measurements are needed. One of the first developed was earned run average (ERA), the average number of earned (i.e., not caused by a fielder's error) runs a pitcher gives up for every nine innings he pitches. Ultimately, the external result—how many games a pitcher wins and loses—is the most important thing to a team, but by gauging a key internal statistic, ERA gives a fairly accurate indication of which pitchers are the most likely to give the best external results.
  Internal measures of success, though, are useful only when they have a strong correlation with the more important external measures. Earned run average is a far-from-perfect statistic, but the fewer runs a pitcher gives up, the more games he's likely to win. The problem with response time is that a fire company's job goes far beyond getting from the firehouse to the alarm box. Firemen need to find which building the fire is in, coordinate with other companies, gain access to the fire, rescue anyone stuck inside, stretch and hook up hoses, prevent the fire from spreading, and put it out, and how quickly they do this varies from neighborhood to neighborhood and building to building. In poor neighborhoods in particular—where aging buildings spread the flames faster, overcrowding meant more potential victims, and heavy doors and bars installed on the windows to prevent break-ins made access difficult—driving was often just a fraction of the time spent before a company could actually fight the fire.
  RAND realized the problems with relying solely on response time, and researcher Ed Ignall later wrote a memo to seventeen fellow researchers and FDNY officials, laying out the difficulties: "We do not have good measures of the extent of fire when fire companies arrive... delays in discovering fires are sometimes long, sometimes short... Some fires grow quickly, others grow slowly," and he warned that "effects like these can cripple a naive approach to estimating the value of response time."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last two paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Famously bankrupting the ultimate quant hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management, run by a pair of Nobel Prize-winning economists and former colleagues of Mayor Bloomberg's from the investment bank Salomon Brothers.
  The Olympic bid was spearheaded by investment banker Dan Doctoroff, who later became Bloomberg's deputy mayor and is now the president of Bloomberg's media company, and by Lindsay's former chief of staff Jay Kriegel, who helped fight off attempts by Congress to prevent the city from using eminent domain and giving the land to developers.