Ready and Waiting at the Sunshine Skyway

Before the thunderstorm, the two Bradys recline in the darkened living room at Fire Station 11 on 31st Street South in St. Petersburg, their faces lit by the glow of cable television. This is the first time the father and son have worked together since Jeff, the younger, was hired as a firefighter a year and a half ago. The occasion is marked by a slow shift.

After 5 p.m., when the trucks and the station have been cleaned, the equipment checked, the classes attended and the reports from the morning calls written, it is free time for the firefighters. The TV offers up the night’s main entertainment.

On the screen, an 18-year-old woman is trying to decide whether to get saline or silicon breast implants.

“This is the Health Channel,” the younger Brady says. “You never know when you might need this on the streets.”

An hour ago, Jeff Brady was applying Band-Aids to a woman who bloodied her leg by slamming her pickup into a parked car. It was a few days until the woman’s birthday and she was drunk. Other than the scratches on the woman’s shin, no one was injured.

On the TV, doctors are preparing the woman for liposuction. Excess fat from her lower back will be relocated to her breasts. The doctor jabs her with a long needle and blood oozes out.

“That’s gross, man,” says Bill Brady, a 28-year veteran of the St. Petersburg Fire Department. He is in shorts and a T-shirt, reclining deeper in the chair than his son.

In appearance, the two have little in common. Bill has dark hair, combed back, and a bushy moustache. Jeff has blond hair, combed forward, and a boyish face.

The operation is a success for the young woman on TV, and the elder Brady flips to a preview channel.

“…Nothing to watch,” he concludes.

Distant thunder rumbles out of the south, and the men begin telling bridge-jumper stories to a reporter in the room. The stories are mired in gallow’s humor, a cliché of emergency workers everywhere.

Once, a man listened to the station captain, Don Masters, tell him suicide wasn’t worth it, but he jumped anyway. Jim Cunningham, an 18-year veteran of the department was in the truck with Bill Brady watching the scene unfold. The captain was out of the truck, Brady says, and they started to believe the man wouldn’t jump. Then he did.

“He looked back at us and jumped right off,” Cunningham says.

That story leads into another, this one about a man who survived a jump, though his clothes didn't. Cunningham was below the bridge with the marine unit, this time with Dan Johnson, another diver from Station 11.

“So we check the rocks,” Cunningham says. “Sure enough, there’s a guy sitting there naked. Dan’s like, ‘Hey, did you just jump off the bridge?’ the guy says, ‘Yeah.’” The naked man had a broken neck.

Then Jeff tells about the time a man jumped off with his rottweiler. The dog survived. The man did not. But Jeff, who is only at Station 11 as a fill-in, has never been at a suicide-jumper scene, on or below the bridge, and he has few details.

They allow themselves the liberty of telling the stories with a smile when they are away from the scene, during a rescue there is no humor.

Other than Jeff Brady, everyone on this shift has at least 15 years' experience with the fire department. They have witnessed unimaginable scenes, performed unimaginable tasks and saved lives whenever they could. But along the way, they’ve learned how to relive tragedy as comedy. And from the comfort of their recliners, they fill the station with laughter.

Before the next story can begin, the alarm sounds: a three-note electronic chime out of the ceiling, followed by the voice of the dispatcher.

“That’s our song,” Cunningham says.

“Bridge alert,” the younger Brady says.

There are at least two reasons Station 11 is different from other fire stations in St. Petersburg.

The main one, say the firefighters who work there, is the marine unit. About half of those at the station are divers for the department, and the unit takes calls for the whole city, from the Gandy Bridge to Fort DeSoto. Often, they say, the unit is sent to retrieve a stolen car dumped in a lake with no one inside. Sometimes they respond to boat fires. Sometimes it’s sinking boats. Sometimes it’s bodies floating in the bay.

But Station 11 is also different because of the calls its gets about the Sunshine Skyway. Many counties in many states have bridges where traffic accidents occur. But only a few bridges in the nation draw as many suicide jumpers as the Skyway. A Florida Highway Patrol officer is assigned to the bridge 24 hours a day, and emergency telephones at the top of the span dial directly to a crisis line.

Monday night’s bridge alert is the 18th of the year for Station 11. Because the bridge is also covered by firefighters from Manatee County and FHP, station records may not offer a complete picture of how many jumper cases have been on the bridge. According to the log at the station, however, the last call that wasn’t a false alarm happened June 30, but the person was talked out of jumping.

This much is clear Monday: Bridge alerts don’t inspire panic in the men on shift tonight.

No one rushes. They talk about who should go with which truck and make sure they have the right equipment.

Bill Brady ends up with the ladder truck headed for the bridge, his son with the boat.

Jeff Brady sits on the floor at the back of the Suburban with the boat in tow, his bench seat sacrificed to a reporter.

“Are we there yet?” he whines as the truck eases out of the garage.

In the company of his father’s friends, Brady is childish and playful. He plays the role of the rookie, the daddy’s boy with this shift. But on the scene he is cool, a natural at walking into the horrific situations no one else wants to witness.

It is unclear which role he will ultimately have to play for this call.

On the way to Maximo Park, the dispatcher speaks from the dashboard-mounted radio with more details for the men. A 21-year-old man called his mother to say he is about to jump off the Sunshine Skyway. The mother then called 911.

The Suburban with the boat, officially Marine Unit 15, casts light into the darkened park at the end of 62nd Avenue South and the men joke on.

Ahead of them, the lightning builds in the clouds, hurling flashes of light and shadow down from the heavens.

The district chief comes on the radio, concerned for his divers.

“We need to find out what’s going on with this lightning because there’s a lot of it,” he tells the dispatcher. Then he addresses Rick LePrevost in the passenger seat of the Suburban, handling the radio for the boat crew. “Do not launch the boat,” the chief says. “Just stay there.”

“Marine 15 copy, we’re standing by,” LePrevost reports back.

The lights of the Suburban shine off palm trees and Cunningham stands outside, ready to help get the boat in the water if the order comes to head out.

The Florida Highway Patrol made its first pass across the bridge and found no one, the dispatcher reports.

The dispatcher has talked to a meteorologist at a local TV station. She says the storm is moving away from the bridge, not toward it. The men aren’t convinced.

“I’m waving a big b------- flag on which way that storm’s moving,” Cunningham says, now at the back window of the Suburban.

Brady begins to climb over the seat.

Cunningham stands in front of the door. “Where you going?”

“I want to learn something,” Brady says.

Johnson and Cunningham dig into him, pinching and wrestling.

“He said he wanted to learn something.”

The horseplay falls into laughter. The laughter drowns out the dispatcher’s latest report. But LePrevost hears it. The ladder truck has finished its second crossing of the bridge and found nothing. The highway patrol finds the same. The call is off.

“Okay, get back in boys,” LePrevost says.

They are back to the station by 10:30, some of them sitting down for more TV. “American Chopper,” a show about customized motorcycles, takes over the screen. A father-and-son team of mechanics show off their newest bike, made as a tribute to the rescue workers who responded on Sept. 11. It’s called the Fireman Bike

Jeff Brady calls his dad out for a look.