The incident, at the Chinese frozen food warehouse of a successful entrepreneur, Mary Pang, resounded through the city's administration long after the four heroes were buried. Amid allegations that the fire department had lax safety and training standards for its men, the department has been dealing with lawsuits from the four widows, even as it searches its own soul in the wake of the tragic loss.
If the blaze was a tragedy for the families and colleagues of the dead, it was, in its own way, both a personal and financial nightmare for Mary and her husband Harry: while the loss of their famous frozen food business hurt their well-earned retirement, they have been more pained by the loss of something much closer to home.
It was not until this summer that the healing process could really begin. It was then that the Pangs' 43-year-old son, Martin, stood before a judge to receive a 35-year jail term for having deliberately started the blaze that killed the firefighters.
In a letter which Pang gave the judge before his sentencing, the defendant wrote: 'I cannot even begin to know what the families [of the firemen] are feeling inside. I feel their anguish and I am ashamed, remorseful, and have embarrassed everyone who cares for me.' While the effusive mea culpa had no effect on the sentence - the 35-years was already agreed under a plea bargain - it nevertheless sent shockwaves through those who heard it. For most members of Martin Pang's extended family of relatives, friends and ex-wives, it was the first time they had ever heard him utter a word of apology.
The fire shed an unwelcome light on the tangled web of the Pang family - a family who, because of the success of Mrs Pang's cottage industry of Chinese cook books and frozen food, had acquired a squeaky clean image. What emerged from the ashes was the story of a family whose impossibly spoiled son grew up to become a reckless, violent, pseudo-playboy, while his only sister claims to have been in constant fear of mental and physical abuse.
In a dramatic sub-plot, the fire also sparked an international manhunt which, having led FBI agents to Brazil, caused a diplomatic row which reverberated all the way to the top of the Clinton administration.
If luck had not earlier smiled on Martin Pang, he would have spent his life in poverty in Hong Kong - which was where he was born, in 1955, as Sun Hing-wah. When his poor parents decided to give him up for adoption, the people who chose to raise him were the Pangs, who also decided to take on a girl from another Hong Kong family.
According to close relatives, the year-old baby's personality might have started taking shape the day his new parents greeted him and the girl off the plane at Seattle airport. While the Pangs' faces beamed with delight at the sight of the boy, their jaws visibly dropped when they saw the two-year-old girl, who was partially crippled with polio.
The boy, newly named Martin, is known to have grown up as the Pangs' little angel, getting everything he wanted and more. His parents, flush with cash from the burgeoning food business, provided him with Porsches, a speed boat, expensive clothes - everything he needed to maintain the lifestyle of a man-about-town.
Unfortunately, Pang never really earned any money of his own. He dropped out of college and drifted through a couple of business ventures - bankrolled by his parents - such as a restaurant and a designer jeans store, both of which went bust. Later on, he would fancy himself as an actor, landing a few bit parts on TV shows but mostly hanging out in Los Angeles frittering away his parents' cash.
For years, he drew a regular salary from the family food business, even though staff members said he rarely showed up. The company even paid the expenses for his divorces - and there were lots of them. Between 1978 and 1989, Pang was married four times, none of which lasted more than two years. In divorce papers, every one of his ex-wives described a violent personality and abusive behaviour.
His first wife, Jeanne Wyke, walked out after, she claimed, Pang attacked her so violently she was left with a broken nose and broken back. His second wife, Sandra Jean Spencer, said Pang gave her a broken jaw and a black eye, and at one point threatened to kill her parents.
The pattern continued, even as his wives bore him two children. Despite this history, Pang never came to the authorities' attention until 1993, when he beat up his latest fiancee and was arrested, and forced to undergo probation and 'anger counselling'.
But his penchant for expressing his anger through fire was already known to his associates. Having been nicknamed 'Pyro Pang' as a teenager because of his constant threats to burn down the property of people who crossed him, it seems he was beginning to plot how to put his words into action.
He bragged he was planning to burn down his parents' food warehouse, so he could share in an expected US$1.3 million (about HK$10 million) insurance payout. That loose talk ought to have spared Seattle the tragic blaze, since one of his ex-wives, Rise Johansen, tipped off local police. For reasons not entirely clear, however, a police watch which had been put on the warehouse was not in operation on the night Pang climbed into the basement to torch the edifice.
In the aftermath of the tragic fire, the local media vented most of its anger on the fire department, asking why the firemen entered the building without adequate floor plans or equipment, and not even knowing the warehouse had a basement.
Meanwhile, the police were busy looking for a culprit. But by the time suspicions fell on Pang, he was gone, having fled his usual abode in Los Angeles for the age-old criminal's sanctuary, Brazil.
A friend tipped off the FBI to his whereabouts, and Brazilian police soon arrested Pang at the classic Rio De Janeiro beach hangout, Ipanema.
When federal agents got to Pang's Rio jail, he confessed to having set the Seattle fire. But there then followed a year-long fight between Washington and the Brazilian courts over Pang's extradition. In December 1995, the Justice Department was frustrated when Brazil's Supreme Court refused to allow Pang's return to the US if he was to be charged with capital murder.
Attorney-General Janet Reno got involved in the case, and sent top officials to Rio to negotiate an extradition that would be acceptable to both sides.
In the event, when Pang was finally flown home in May 1996, prosecutors - under pressure to get justice for the four dead firefighters - still made a bid to file murder charges; they were blocked, once again, by Washington State's own high court, which ruled that it broke the extradition agreement with Brazil.
Pang languished in jail for several more months, stringing out the process until he lost his battle to have the Rio confession barred from his forthcoming trial. In February this year, Pang signed a plea bargain under which he would admit to four manslaughter charges.
Even as the darkly elusive man told the sentencing judge of his remorse, he was also hitting out at what he said were false media accounts of his life as a spoiled brat-turned-black sheep.
But these accounts have been backed up by his sister Marlyce, who ran away from home at 18, never to return - partly because she was scared of her brother.
After refusing to talk for months, Marlyce finally told her story after Pang made his deal and she was sure he would not be set free to come after her. She told a harrowing tale of being neglected and abused by her mother and father, even as they treated young Martin like an angel. 'My mom would hit me with a broomstick,' she told a Seattle newspaper. 'One time she said she was going to find out what was in my head. She pushed my face down on a cutting board. She had a cleaver in her hand, and she said she was going to cut my head off to find out what was inside. I screamed so loud I was sure the neighbours would hear.' Pang also made her childhood hell, she said. 'I dreaded when he would come in and I wouldn't be able to have my peace. I was afraid of him then, and all my life.' Prosecutors also defend this picture of Martin Pang. One of them told of being passed information by an old friend of Pang's about one incident that took place in the ill-fated warehouse. The teenage Pang, according to the friend, turned a scalding hot-water hose on Marlyce, yelling at her: 'Die, bitch!' The sister finally got some limited revenge. As Pang and his parents were asking the judge for leniency, she wrote him a letter urging him to impose the maximum term.
If the sordid tale of Martin Pang has even the barest silver lining, it is that the four firemen's deaths were not in vain. Seattle has adopted new stringent fire safety measures, and is drawing up plans of all the city's problem buildings, so firemen will know what they are dealing with before they enter.
Today, memories linger in the form of a poignant tribute to the Seattle Four, which appears on the website of a national firefighters' association. In honour of the men, it reproduces a little poem called the Firefighter's Creed, in which, in a plaintive final verse, a fireman asks God for a favour: And if according to your will I have to lose my life bless with your protecting hand my children and my wife
