Let me tell the uninformed something about a 2 1/2" hose. They can be quite energetic when charged. Hold it wrong and it can slam you around like a rag doll. That's why, on most nozzles, the handle is pushed forward to turn it off, and one hand stays on the top of the nozzle. I have seen more than one newbie go waltzing with a hose because he held it wrong. (Okay, okay, one of them was me. Gimme a break. At least I learned something from it.) We are talking about an awful lot of water, at any rate.
Now, we must also bear in mind that what Palmer saw was probably not the entire floor. We don't know how much smoke there was on the floor, what kind of dividers there were or what was burning. We just know that he needed more than one line to put it out.
Now, since heat rises and, consequentially, fire spreads upward far more easily than it travels downward, unless transported by burning liquids flowing down stairs or through gaps in a floor, the fact that there was any fire at all on #78 indicates that the fires were far from going out of their own accord. They should, by the CT reasoning, have nearly burned themselves out already.
Given the extent of the fires, even bringing in off-duty personnel left them short-handed, and it would be an unwise use of manpower to assign two teams to a floor where the fire was dying already.
There would be a minimum of two men on each line, perhaps three, as per local SOPs. Two handle the line, one watches what is going on in most cases.
Ergo, there is nothing in Palmer's last words to indicate that this was a minor situation.
