The air tank at left, blew up in a Detroit fire truck, causing extensive damage to the storage area on the vehicle. The incident revealed the department’s need to inspect the tanks.

Department supplies

Equipment broken and old; some safety rules violated

Unsafe air tanks, radios regularly put lives of firefighters at risk

By Melvin Claxton and Charles Hurt / The Detroit News

etroit firefighters rely every day on equipment that’s outdated, routinely broken or in violation of state safety laws. Not only does the condition of equipment put firefighters at risk, but it also hinders their ability to battle fires and save the lives of city residents.     Making the problem worse, the department’s supply shop is closed nights, weekends and holidays. Firefighters must sometimes wait days for needed equipment.
    Here is some of the deficient equipment that firefighters are forced to use:

Air tanks
    The Fire Department violates state safety standards every time one of its firefighters uses an air tank.
    The tanks, which permit breathing inside buildings full of smoke, are filled from air supplies that haven’t been tested since January. The air supply systems are required to be tested every three months for harmful pollutants, according to state regulations.
    The city had a contract with Mortz Brothers of Farmington Hills to inspect and service the city’s six air compressors that fill air bottles. But in January the contract expired and the city hasn’t renewed it. The Fire Department still owes Mortz Brothers $8,000.
    In addition, as many as a quarter of the department’s 1,000 air tanks may not have been tested for leaks or weaknesses in their casings in the past three years as required by the state. A handful may have gone more than a decade without testing.
    Michigan Occupation Safety and Health Administration (MIOSHA) investigators are looking into the matter. They are expected to issue their findings this month.
    It isn’t the department’s first problem with the tanks.

Clarence Tabb Jr. / The Detroit News A firefighter uses a pike pole while fighting a blaze on Joe Street. The pole is standard equipment, but other essential items like personal alert systems are in short supply.

    In March 1995, the crew of Engine 33 was startled awake by a station house explosion. They found the cab of their truck destroyed.
    Within minutes, the explosion’s cause was found — one of the air tanks had exploded with the force of a stick of dynamite.
    An investigation by the department determined the tank was damaged that day when a fire truck had backed over it. The driver failed to report the incident. But the probe also revealed something else.
    The Fire Department was not inspecting tanks every three years — the same problem the state is investigating. At the time, some tanks had not been inspected in more than a decade.
    The department promised to introduce an inspection policy following the explosion. But the inspections, say firefighters, have proved shoddy and irregular.

Radios
    Firefighters must also protect their radios from water because many are not waterproof. This effectively renders the radios useless inside a burning building where water is a firefighter’s best friend.
    So firefighters protect their radios from water and heat by keeping them snugly inside deep coat pockets, where they can’t be heard.
    Making matters worse, the buttons on many radios are so small that they can’t be used with the thick gloves firefighters wear.
    And because the radios are hand-held, firefighters must remove their masks to use them — a violation of standards set by the National Fire Protection Association, which establishes safety guidelines for fire departments across the country.
    Detroit firefighters inside burning buildings often resort to leaning out windows and using hand signals with commanders below to relay information.
    Some fire departments equip their crews with radios mounted inside face masks so the firefighters can communicate without removing their masks or searching for buttons. The radios used by Detroit firefighters date back to the 1970s. Still, having even a hand-held radio is a privilege for a Detroit firefighter. Radios are so scarce that the department issues only one to the three or four crew members assigned to a truck.
    And in September, when the city ran out of spares for nearly a week, fire chiefs were asked to give their radios to fire crews whose radios broke.
    The Detroit Fire Department says it has ordered 150 radios. But Fire Department Commissioner Charles Wilson says once again the radios, expected to arrive this month, will be given only to crew leaders and fire chiefs. And, he said, they are water resistant, but not waterproof.

Personal safety systems
    National safety standards call for firefighters to wear personal alarms that alert their fellow firefighters if they collapse, fall through a floor or get buried under rubble while battling a fire. The device, about the size of a wallet, emits a sound like a smoke detector if the firefighter stands still for more than 18 seconds.
    But the devices used by the Detroit Fire Department are so poorly maintained and prone to malfunction that most firefighters no longer use them. And some Detroit fire companies have only one for their three or four crew members.
    In July, an employee from the deputy fire chief’s office found a box of the alarms in the repair shop. They had been turned in for repairs or to have batteries changed, but were never picked up.
    Detroit firefighters say the devices are more trouble than they are worth. But the national fire association insists the devices, called Personal Alert Safety Systems (PASS), are critical to firefighter safety.
    “Past firefighter fatality investigation reports document the critical need to wear and operate PASS devices when firefighters operate in hazardous areas,” an agency booklet notes.

Safety ropes
    As part of a volunteer training program, hundreds of Detroit firefighters are learning how to use safety ropes to escape the upper floors of burning buildings.
    Trapped by smoke and fire, the firefighter ties a rope to an object near an open window and drops down to safety. Jumping without safety ropes from windows is a common cause of firefighter injury and sometimes death.
    But the Fire Department doesn’t provide firefighters with rope. Only the members of the Fire Department’s Rapid Intervention Team are issued ropes. And those ropes, like almost everything else the team uses, were donated by private corporations such as Ford Motor Co.

Contact the reporters at churt@detnews.com and mclaxton@detnews.com.