Clarence Tabb Jr. / The Detroit News Daree Shannon survived, but was left paralyzed, after jumping from her eighth-floor window to escape a blaze at the Pallister Plaissance apartments building in April. The fire claimed the lives of her mother, Norfessia, and her younger sister, Au-Jane.

Deadly apartment blaze shows fire department’s severe shortcomings

Special to The Detroit News Residents are rescued from the eighth floor of the Pallister apartments in April using an aerial ladder.

By Melvin Claxton and Charles Hurt / The Detroit News

or 26-year-old Norfessia Shannon, it was an act of sheer desperation. With a fire raging down the hall and black smoke billowing into her living room, she smashed the heavy glass of her eighth-floor window with her bare hands and tore away the screen.
Shannon heaved her 7-year-old daughter onto the ledge and pleaded with her to jump if she wanted to live.     Then, screaming for someone to catch her baby, she let her child go. On the ground 80 feet below, anxious neighbors waited with blankets pulled taut to catch the little girl.
    Nearby, a fire truck with a 100-foot aerial ladder designed to rescue people from multistory buildings sat in the driveway of the 188-unit Pallister Plaissance Apartments on Detroit’s west side. It had been there more than five minutes, firefighters and witnesses agree.
    But the truck, the first sent to the April 1 fire, couldn’t help in the rescue effort. Its ladder didn’t work. The ladder hadn’t worked in more than two weeks.
    That such a critical piece of lifesaving equipment couldn’t function at such a crucial moment is hardly uncommon in Detroit. The city’s fire trucks are so poorly maintained that on any given day between five and 11 of the Fire Department’s 24 aerial ladders don’t work. Some haven’t worked in years.
    The faulty ladder truck was only one of the Fire Department’s glaring failures that played out at the Pallister fire. At every turn, firefighters were hamstrung by the mismanagement of top department officials whose decisions left them without the tools and equipment they needed.
    Fire officials knew the aerial ladder wasn’t working when they sent the 15-year-old truck to the Pallister apartment fire. In fact, top fire officials were informed of the truck’s many problems in writing less than two weeks before the fire and did nothing.
    Not only was the truck’s aerial ladder inoperable, but two of its longest ground ladders were broken and it didn’t carry an exhaust fan to help clear smoke from the burning building.
    The rescue was further hampered when firefighters couldn’t get the nearest fire hydrant to work, losing precious minutes in the effort.
    Then there was the staffing issue. The trucks sent to battle the blaze carried only three firefighters — a common practice in the Detroit Fire Department.
    Nationally accepted standards call for a minimum of four firefighters to a truck, and some cities deploy five crew members on each truck.
    Fire officials deny that their decision to send a broken, ill-equipped and understaffed ladder truck to Pallister contributed to the four deaths and multiple injuries at the apartment complex.
    But the evidence, as seen in department reports, firehouse logs, dispatch tickets and medical examiner’s records, clearly points to their role in the tragedy.
   

Special to The Detroit News The first aerial ladder on the scene of the Pallister apartments fire wasn’t functional, so it couldn’t rescue residents. Not until two ladder trucks arrived later were residents able to escape. One child jumped from the eighth floor before firefighters could reach her.

A call for help
    From the start, dispatchers had every reason to treat the reported fire with special urgency. The apartment complex is one of the largest in the area and two passing police officers were among those who called 911.
    Emergency records show the first call to fire dispatchers from a Pallister resident came in at 11:38 a.m.
    “I can’t see the fire but our whole floor is smoked up,” the caller, who said she lived on the ninth floor, told the dispatcher. “I knocked on some of the neighbors’ doors for them to get their kids out and I’m leaving out.”
    Dispatchers noted the reports of heavy smoke in the building and the coughing in the background during the call, a Fire Department dispatch ticket shows.
    It was clearly not a false alarm, which should have triggered the department policy that requires sending at least one working aerial and three pumpers to fires in occupied buildings.
    Yet, dispatchers sent the broken ladder truck as the sole aerial along with one pumper truck. En route, firefighters on the ladder truck and pumper could see heavy smoke coming through the apartment building’s windows. Both crews radioed for backup.
    The pumper, also carrying only three men, arrived first and pulled up to the hydrant in front of the building. Two firefighters got out and headed for the eighth floor.
    They were followed by the crew of the broken ladder truck, which arrived seconds later. Firefighters on the ladder truck said they could see people pressed against eighth floor windows frantically trying to get their attention by banging against the glass.
    But men on the ladder truck knew they couldn’t raise their aerial to rescue them.

Special to The Detroit News Firefighters aid a victim of the Pallister fire. The first pumper on the scene found a broken fire hydrant in front, delaying the ability to fight the fire at a crucial moment.

The fire spreads
    Even as firefighters pulled up to the building, the fire — which investigators say was started by a careless smoker — was spreading rapidly and the 911 calls grew more desperate. Several people prepared to jump.
    “The fire is taking over,” a frightened caller told dispatchers, adding that there were people trying to jump, but “we can’t help them.”
    As firefighters raced toward the burning building, the driver of the pumper stayed to hook his truck to the fire hydrant.
    The plan was simple: the truck’s powerful pumps would be used to relay water from the hydrant into the building’s standpipes, providing firefighters on the eighth floor with the high pressure water stream they needed to fight the blaze.
    But the driver couldn’t open the hydrant. It was jammed shut.
    The hydrant was last inspected the month before and deemed to be working. But the Fire Department, which is responsible for checking hydrants, does visual inspections only and no one ever tried turning the hydrant on to see if it worked. Broken hydrants have plagued Detroit firefighters for years. And the Detroit Water Department has been slow to fix bad fireplugs identified by the Fire Department.
    So firefighters at Pallister had to try another hydrant several blocks away. They decided it would be quicker to let the next arriving pumper hook into that hydrant. That pumper arrived five minutes later and firefighters lost critical time that those trapped in the burning building could not afford to lose.
    In five minutes, experts say, a fire will grow from the size of match box to a full-room blaze. And five minutes is more than enough time to completely fill the hallway of an apartment complex with thick, poisonous smoke, national fire expert Dan Madrzykowski said.
    “At this point, people in the vicinity of the fire would have had very little time to get out,” said Madrzykowski, the leader of large fire research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. “At times like this every second counts.”

David Guralnick / The Detroit News Firefighters couldn’t open the hydrant closest to Pallister Plaissance Apartments, delaying their efforts to fight the fire. Broken hydrants have been a problem for years.

‘No more junk!’
    Battalion chief Michael Hastings, stationed at the same firehouse as the broken aerial truck, arrived at the scene at 11:46 a.m., just as calls came in to dispatchers that people had begun jumping.
    Powerless to help them, he immediately radioed for backup, angrily demanding that dispatchers send him “working aerials only, no more junk!”
    Inside, firefighters from the ladder and pumper trucks fought their way up the stairwell against a steady stream of panicked residents fleeing the building. Once on the eighth floor, firefighters faced thick, blinding smoke.
    Typically, firefighters would have used a portable, gas-powered exhaust fan that ladder trucks carry to help clear smoke. But firefighters didn’t have such a fan.
    On March 21, 11 days before the fire, a letter to Fire Department brass from the ladder truck’s commander listed the fan as one of the items the truck needed. The very next day firefighter Blaize Conti called the department’s supply shop to say that the truck was approved for a fan.
    The shop foreman returned Conti’s call that afternoon and said he hadn’t received the paperwork, an entry in the truck’s log book shows. The shop never sent a fan.
    Firefighters inside Pallister had yet another problem. Most didn’t have radios.
    The Fire Department has so few radios, it only issues them to crew leaders of each fire truck. And even they found the radios useless.
    The Fire Department has no in-helmet radios, forcing firefighters to remove their masks to use hand-held radios. But the heavy smoke on the eighth floor prevented them from taking their masks off.
    And because the radios aren’t waterproof, the firefighters carry them inside deep pockets where they can’t be heard. With limited visibility and no radio communication with the outside, firefighters on the floor had little knowledge of what was taking place at the rear of the building.
    They didn’t hear the call for additional trucks from their boss, Chief Hastings. Nor did they hear his desperate plea for working aerial trucks.
    They didn’t know that several people on the floor had begun jumping from windows into blankets being used as makeshift safety nets, as witnesses and hospital reports later recounted. Nor did they know of the chilling note from Fire Department dispatchers stating there was a woman in the back of the building “with babies hanging out of window.”

Norfessia’s choice
    That woman was Norfessia Shannon, a single mother of two who had lived in the building for six years. Her daughters, Daree and Au-Jane, were 7 and 2 years old.
    One of the men holding a blanket on the ground, Harold Smith, said Norfessia leaned out the window and begged them to “please catch my baby.”
    Balanced on the window ledge, Daree jumped when her mother released her.
    Shannon watched in horror as her little girl plunged 80 feet through the air, crashed through the blankets and slammed into the hard asphalt parking lot.
    The impact of the fall knocked Daree unconscious, fractured her pelvis, damaged several internal organs and snapped a vertebra in her back, leaving her paralyzed from the waist down.
    Shannon, witnesses recalled, recoiled from the window at the sight of Daree’s prone, oddly twisted figure. With her 2-year-old daughter clutched to her bosom, Shannon tried fleeing the smoke-filled apartment.
    Mother and child were overcome by smoke. Shannon’s body was later found in a narrow hallway in her apartment, her child at her side.

Other victims found
    In the meantime, firefighters had stumbled across their first body, that of 63-year-old Jeanette Ausby, who died of smoke inhalation. Ausby, a widow, was visiting her twin sister Annette Eggleston in apartment 816 when the fire started.
    But the heavy smoke delayed the discovery of Eggleston, who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and was confined to a wheelchair. Firefighters found her alive nearly 18 minutes after the fire was first reported, emergency rescue records show.
    Eggleston was discovered propped up in a nook near the stairwell, just feet from her fallen sister. Because the smoke was so thick, firefighters said they passed her twice before seeing her.
    Eggleston, who suffered second-degree burns over 25 percent of her body, died at Detroit Receiving Hospital eight days later. Firefighters believed Ausby and Eggleston were trying to get to the stairwell when they were overcome by the heat and the smoke.
    Several others on the eighth floor, including a mother, her four young children and an elderly woman, were rescued unharmed by working ladder trucks that arrived on the scene nearly 14 minutes after the first report of the fire.
    At least 12 others suffered injuries but survived. Seven-year-old Daree Shannon was among the survivors.
    Daree, who was born without a right hand and forearm, likely will spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair, doctors say. With her mother and sister dead, she lives with her grandmother, Hester Shannon, and requires round-the-clock care.
    Daree rarely speaks about the incident, says her grandmother, but she talks constantly about her mother and baby sister.
    “She will never have a normal childhood,” the grandmother said. “I can’t imagine what it must be like for a child not to be able to run and play. You know, do the things a child likes.”

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