About this series

Examining fire reports to find patterns

    For nine months, Detroit News reporters Melvin Claxton and Charles Hurt examined the operations of the Detroit Fire Department to determine if it adequately protects the residents it serves.
    The reporters faced several obstacles, chief among them a department that often operates in secrecy. Detroit fire officials have a standing policy that forbids firefighters from talking to the press.
    The reporters visited all of Detroit’s 72 fire companies, interviewed more than 300 firefighters and reviewed thousands of pages of documents from daily attendance records, firehouse journals, maintenance reports and dispatch tickets.
    With the help of a newsroom researcher, they created 12 databases using information gathered to analyze these records.
    They also interviewed dozens of fire industry experts, fire equipment suppliers, fire department top brass and federal and state officials.
    Claxton and Hurt looked at the fire department’s response to hundreds of fires, including fatal blazes over the past five years. They surveyed the condition of the fire trucks dispatched to these fires.
    The Fire Department record keeping follows no established format and information had to be gathered from hand-written entries kept in firehouses across the city.
    The information was at times unreliable and even incorrect.
    Fire officials said they couldn’t find documents showing the times fire trucks were dispatched to some fatal fires. And The News was unable to obtain broadcast tapes — recordings of the conversations between firefighters and dispatchers during a fire — for all but two fatal fires. Fire officials said the other tapes requested by the newspaper had been erased after 90 days in accordance with department policy.

Project reporters

Melvin Claxton
An investigative reporter at The Detroit News since 1998, Claxton wrote a series that exposed inadequacies in the Virgin Islands’ criminal justice system and won a Pulitzer Prize for the Virgin Islands Daily News in 1995. Claxton, 42, worked at the Chicago Tribune before joining The Detroit News. Claxton can be reached at (313) 222-2154 or at mclaxton@detnews.com

Charles Hurt
A city desk reporter at The Detroit News since 1995, Hurt has covered Detroit Public Schools and the Detroit City Council. Hurt, 29, and Claxton co-authored a project last year that examined the misuse of a $1.5-billion Detroit schools bond program. That project won this year’s Associated Press Managing Editors’ Freedom of Information award. Hurt can be reached at (313) 223-4686 or at churt@detnews.com

Project staff

Editorial Researcher
Zena Simmons
Graphics Editor
Charles Chamberlin
Assistant Graphics Editor
Tim Summers
Graphics Researcher
Julia Daniel
Presentation Editor
Janice Kowalski
News Design Director
Richard Epps
Assistant News
Design Director
Morieka Johnson
Photo Editor
Steve Fecht
Photographers
David Guralnick
Clarence Tabb Jr.
Digital Imaging Supervisor
Jan Lovell
News Editor
Bill McMillan
Copy Editors
Nick Assendelft
Don Bauerle
Doug Durfee
Mike Trojanowski
Assistant Managing Editor, News
Bradley A. Stertz