NY Daily News

Lt. Howard Carpluk, 43, a 20-year veteran, lived in Yaphank out on Long Island. Firefighter Michael Reilly, 25, came from Sleepy Hollow up along the Hudson River. He was just four months on the job in Engine 75. Carpluk was assigned to Engine 42 but covering Engine 75 that day.

Engine 75 is the busiest company in the city, and worked 4,108 fires last year. Housed with Ladder 33, the firehouse is a magnet for a dedicated smoke-eaters, covering the neighborhoods hugging the Cross Bronx Expressway in the west Bronx.

Days after the fire had been extinguished, ashes still floated in the breeze across Mount Eden Ave., from the Mega 99 store on the corner of Walton Ave. It was a gutted black hole, except for the orange Tide jugs sitting where the window once was. "99 cents - or less!" boasted the shred of sign left. The travel agent/income tax/computer service store next to it was a wreck, and people milled around behind yellow crime-scene tape, watching firefighters and Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta walk in and out inspecting the premises.

It had been the scene of an arson fire six summers ago.

"The whole strip of stores went up, it was a three-alarm, just like this one," recalled John Halpin, a decorated FDNY lieutenant who retired out of Ladder 33 last May. "After we put the fire out, we took the rig up to St. Barnabas Church for the funeral of Firefighter Francis O'Neill. He died of a heart attack a few days before right in the firehouse."

The marshals picking through the ruins of the 99-cent store at 1575 Walton were not investigating arson, but whether faulty, cheap repairs to the structure after the July 2000 blaze led to the collapse of the floor, and the deaths of Carpluk and Reilly, and the injuries of three other firefighters.

One of the owners of the building, David Gold, was charged in 1983 in an arson-for-profit scheme that was responsible for 43 fires in 37 buildings, from 1976 to 1980. Some of those buildings were in the west Bronx. He pleaded guilty to a federal mail-fraud charge.

Back in those days when the Bronx was just about finished burning down, vacant hulks or piles of rubble were everywhere, and there were so many eyesores looming over the Cross Bronx Expressway - shocking drivers and embarrassing the city - that one day the buildings commissioner decided to put decals over all the glassless windows, so that they resembled windows with shades, or blinds, or curtains, a flowerpot sitting on the sill, to make them look occupied to drivers whizzing past.

Now, the window dressings and potted plants are real, because the buildings have been rebuilt or rehabbed.

But Engine 75/ Ladder 33 is still as busy as ever, not because someone is burning the neighborhood down, but because it's being built up - in slipshod, dangerous ways. It's a problem firefighters complain of in Brooklyn and Queens, too.

A fire marshal told me that at fire scenes, he constantly encounters corner-cutting construction jobs, for which the owners do not obtain proper permits. Illegal alterations that cut off fire escapes, subdivided apartments that squeeze more people in and buildings whose electricity is not up to code, are increasingly the cause of more deaths, injuries and extensive damage.

In the Black Sunday fire in January 2005 on E.178th St., just blocks from here, two firefighters died when they jumped from a window of the fourth floor, where a makeshift wall blocked them from the fire escape. The apartment below, where fire broke out, had been converted into five single-room occupancies. Indictments were brought by the Bronx DA for manslaughter and reckless endangerment.

Last week, Halpin found himself again at a fire scene on Mount Eden and Walton, and then at wakes and funerals for two more firefighters who died in the Bronx, facing unseen peril among the smoke and flames.