For Rescuers, Helm’s Death Came as Final, Frustrating Blow

Orange County firefighter Charles A. Nicola first met Buck Helm at the end of a flashlight, in a crawl space slightly taller than a bathtub.

Nicola hoped the next visit with the tough longshoreman, rescued after four days in the rubble of the quake-damaged Nimitz Freeway, would be less confining, maybe over a cup of coffee or a beer.

Nicola, a battalion chief, and four other county firefighters who assisted with Helm’s dramatic rescue, wanted to go to Northern California to meet him and deliver a present: a piece of the concrete freeway column that crushed his car.

“Selfishly, I am very sad he is gone,” Nicola said Sunday after learning of Helm’s death Saturday in an Oakland hospital. “I wanted very much to meet him and just talk. He symbolized many things, but for me he made all those long hours worthwhile.”

In Nicola’s line of work, the rewards are few. In 1985, Nicola and Steve Shomber, a county fire captain, were dispatched to Mexico City to search for victims of that country’s massive earthquake. They found none and, last month, after two days of retrieving bodies in Oakland from the freeway viaduct flattened by the Oct. 17 quake, Nicola believed rescuers would be frustrated again and find only death.

Then Helm was found in a concrete tomb, his car sandwiched under the collapsed upper deck, and Nicola was among the first to reach him. In 22 years as a firefighter and disaster specialist, Nicola said few people have touched him as Helm did.

Nicola has tracked only a handful of the survivors he has helped rescue.

“But Buck was different. Hundreds of people were crawling on and around that freeway, hoping to find survivors,” Nicola said, from his home in Corona. “Spirits were low. . . . When Buck was found it was so uplifting. His death has taken the wind out of our sails.”

Shomber agreed. “I definitely have an empty feeling,” he said. He was in his office in Orange early Sunday catching up on paper work when he heard the news of Helm’s death.

“It’s like all of our efforts were for naught,” said Shomber, who was on the crumpled freeway the drizzly day that Helm was found. “It’s almost like losing a child.”

County firefighter Dan Mackay was at the controls of the hydraulic jaws that were used to cut open the car door that freed Helm. Working in a darkened crawl space less than three feet high, Mackay, along with Nicola and five others, spent an hour pulling Helm from the car and lifting him to daylight.

As rescues go, Mackay said, it was a rather “easy extrication,” especially considering the pancaked condition of other vehicles trapped between the double decks of the Nimitz Freeway.

He was philosophical about Helm’s death.

“It was a shocker, that’s all I can really say. . . . Maybe it’s better . . . he didn’t suffer any longer,” he said.

Nicola found some comfort in the final month that Helm had lived.

“While I am sad, I am also happy that Buck had some time with his family before he died,” Nicola said. “I don’t know whether it was quality time, but at least they had a chance to talk and hopefully say things that in a disaster, when death is sudden, never get shared.”