It Looks Just Like a War Zone

(2 of 7)

As firemen in black-and-yellow gear crept on their arms and knees along the sidewalk, hoses coiling behind them, police in blue jumpsuits ran from doorway to doorway and, as some observers claimed, paused to return gunfire from the Move house with an array of shotguns and automatic weapons. Cameraman Pete Kane of Channel 10, a local CBS affiliate, watched the action from an upper story window just 100 yds. from Move's headquarters. "Debris was flying everywhere," he says. "Entire trees were exploding in fire." As night fell, the flames tinged the Philadelphia horizon red. Finally, at 11:47 p.m., even < as houses continued to burn, the fire department declared the blaze under control.

In Move's headquarters, authorities found eleven bodies, four of them children. The fire had destroyed 53 houses and severely damaged eight others. It left some 240 people homeless. The financial cost: at least $8 million. The historic City of Brotherly Love was numb, the onlooking world aghast. In newspapers and on television, the story created a first-glance impression that Philadelphia police had launched a cruel military operation against an entire neighborhood.

Philadelphians understood the episode to be an extreme case of Murphy's Law, when everything that could go wrong went even worse. But even so they were shocked by the devastation of an area whose residents --teachers, nurses, civil servants, factory workers -- were known for their flower gardens and congenial block parties. Ronald Merriweather, whose home escaped damage, looked at the smouldering ruins of other houses and said, "It looks just like a war zone. The neighborhood was here and now it's gone." Families that had evacuated supposedly for a day found themselves refugees in the emergency shelter that the Red Cross had established in the parish hall of St. Carthage Roman Catholic Church, or staying in dormitory rooms at city universities. When they returned to look at their homes, or what was left of them, many wept.

The disastrous episode provoked widespread criticism and questioning of the Philadelphia police tactics. Should a bomb have been used at all in an urban location? On a house occupied by children as well as wanted adults? Shouldn't the authorities have known fire might result? Hubert Williams, president of the Police Foundation in Washington, said the tactic was, at the very least, "an extreme police response." Mayor Ed Koch of New York said he would fire a police commissioner who even proposed such a "stupid" idea. Even those who held criticism in check could hardly help wondering how in the name of sanity it all had come about.