By fate, divine intervention or pure coincidence, the Westlake Fire Department, along with three other local units got to the scene of last week’s fiery airplane crash before the initial alarm ever sounded.

Westlake Fire Chief Gary Warren and firefighters Chris Ham, Chris Askew, Adam Finkenbinder and Ben Rife comprise the Travis County Hazardous Materials Team along with members from the Lake Travis, Pflugerville and Oak Hill departments. They just happened to have gathered in the vacant parking lot of Dave and Buster’s across from the Echelon 1 building for training.

“These guys, I think it’s just instinct for them now,” said Warren, who is also the chief of Oak Hill, said of the men he was training with and their quick reaction. “They go to so many emergencies, when they see something like that, it’s just instinct to get their stuff and head that way. It just must be the nature of a firefighter.”

The morning of Feb. 18 marked the first time they’d ever used that location for training. Their proximity was made all the more important by the fire Andrew Joseph Stack III had set at his home prior to using his Piper Cherokee to rip a gaping hole open in the office building, which housed Internal Revenue Service offices.

“All of the Austin fire units were gone to that structure fire so they weren’t close – that made it even more of a coincidence,” Warren said.

Lake Travis had the only fire engine of the four departments, so their crew immediately set about bombarding the fire ball that had erupted while the other three departments entered the building on the Old Jollyville Road side to begin a search and rescue mission.

“These guys, they were pretty seamless; it was as if they were all from the same fire department,” Warren said.

In his long career, Warren has seen train derailments, bombs and too many four-alarm fires to count. But he’d never dealt with a criminal act of that magnitude, so reminiscent of a terrorist attack that stole the lives of 343 occupational brethren. The 9-11 attack, he said, weighed heavily on his mind and kept him more careful than he might have otherwise been, he said.

“When the firefighters were inside doing the search and rescue, they reported that support beams were starting to sag, and I told them not to go to the third floor.”

Warren knows that he and his men had a part in limiting both casualties and injuries, but he said the building’s sprinkler system was equally instrumental.

“I don’t know if we would have been able to do those search patterns without it,” said Warren.

The Austin Fire Department relieved the Travis County departments after about an hour of service, and once Warren and his men debriefed to the FBI, they began their journies home.

“They would have stayed all day if we would have let them,” Warren said.