Clarence Tabb Jr. / The Detroit News The city’s retired ladder trucks are kept at the fire department’s vehicle graveyard where they are cannibalized for parts. The trucks do not have working aerials and some cannot even start.

Bad policies weaken fire protection

Standards are ignored, fixes often haphazard

By Melvin Claxton and Charles Hurt / The Detroit News

he story made headlines: An angry landlord hires thugs to burn out a delinquent tenant and the plot ends in the murder of four children.     The youngsters, ranging in age from a toddler in diapers to a 9-year-old fourth grader, were burned to death on Feb. 17, 1998, in the fire-for-hire scheme. Their mothers, prevented from entering the building by the flames, heard their final screams for help but could do nothing.
    The story’s subplot is less well known but also compelling. It represents the larger picture of lax oversight by city officials and mismanagement by the Fire Department. Those factors hampered firefighting efforts that day and likely contributed to the deaths of the children.
    Time and again, Fire Department officials have made decisions that place firefighters and those they protect in serious jeopardy. They have ignored national firefighting standards, repeatedly neglected to fix broken equipment and failed to replace a citywide fire alarm system they dismantled more than a decade ago.
    They also routinely idle fire companies throughout the city, leaving entire neighborhoods without immediate fire protection. All these factors came to bear with tragic results that February day.
    That day, arsonists set the house at Eastlawn and Linville on fire and a distraught mother called 911 to say four children, including her two young daughters, were trapped in the burning building. Dispatchers took the address and found the closest ladder truck and pumper stationed in the same firehouse just a mile away.
    But the pumper, the department’s main piece of equipment for putting out fires, wasn’t in service, department log books show. Fire officials had closed that company and two others that day, sending the firefighters and trucks to City Airport because the airport’s fire truck was out of service.
    It was common practice.
    The airport fire truck, which was finally replaced in January, was broken so often that fire officials had a standing policy to substitute three pumpers whenever it didn’t work. This meant leaving three heavily populated areas of Detroit without their closest pumper trucks.

Clarence Tabb Jr. / The Detroit News A mechanic fixes Engine 40 on Dexter, after the 2-year-old truck broke down while on a fire run. The Detroit fleet is plagued by broken trucks and poorly maintained equipment.

    That policy, records show, proved disastrous that day.
    Because the closest pumper, Engine 52, was not available, dispatchers sent the second closest, which was nearly twice the distance away. Ladder 31, an aerial truck designed for rescue, was also dispatched.
    But there was another problem.
    Ladder 31’s dot matrix printer on which fire companies receive their orders to go to fires was broken, and firefighters sitting in the station had no clue that they were needed at the fire 10 blocks away.
    They didn’t realize it until two minutes later when they heard a fire dispatcher on the radio. With the fire raging, the lost time was critical.
    Fire officials knew the printer was down, but did nothing. Court records show that firefighters had informed headquarters at least twice in two days that the printer was out.
    But fire officials didn’t fix it and they didn’t inform dispatchers that it wasn’t working.
    The first company at the scene of the fire, Squad 6, traveled nearly two miles to get there. But squads don’t pump water and have no ladders for rescue.
    Ladder 31 got to the scene nearly five minutes after the 911 call — twice as long it should have if its station’s printer had worked. And the first pumper wasn’t on the scene for several minutes after the initial 911 call.
    An autopsy report ordered by defense lawyers indicated that the girls may have lived in the burning house for up to 10 minutes. And firefighters and neighbors agree the girls were seen alive minutes after the first truck was on the scene.
    Even after the tragedy, the city and Fire Department continued to close companies and send fire trucks to the airport.
    The mother of two of the dead girls has filed a lawsuit against the Fire Department.
   
Truck makers complain
    The Eastlawn case is just one in a troubling pattern. But nowhere are the consequences of bad policies and decisions more clearly documented than in fire officials’ failure to maintain and service fire trucks.
    This failure has led even fire truck manufacturers to condemn the city and level charges that fire officials have turned the trucks into death traps.
    A case in point is a March 27 letter from Ohio-based ladder truck manufacturer Sutphen Corp. to the Fire Department’s then-chief of operations Ronald Naumann. The city had sent a 15-year-old truck to Sutphen for minor repairs.
    But the manufacturer found so many things wrong with the truck it demanded the city’s permission to fix them. In a scathing letter to the Fire Department that listed the problems, Sutphen’s service manager John Rideout had some final thoughts:
    “The city of Detroit should at least be happy that no one died as a result of this truck and that there are no lawsuits. I shudder at the thought of the condition of the emergency fleet.”

    Rideout wrote he was amazed that the Fire Department actually drove the truck to Ohio to have it fixed without the proper lights on the front and back of the truck.
    “I couldn’t believe how the city of Detroit was breaking the law, federal law. All trucks must have ICC (running) lights, yours were either missing or not working. This is illegal in your city, and to transport it clear to Columbus made no sense.”
    Other manufacturers have been just as critical. Ladder Towers Inc. slammed the city for its lack of maintenance on a fire truck it repaired.
    “After dissembling and examining the first (truck) returned to me for repairs I would like to call to your attention the deplorable condition and the lack of preventative maintenance that could have saved some of the repairs that we are currently doing to these ladders. We are astounded to find seven defective rungs, rails, uprights and diagonals on the first ladder,” wrote LTI service manager Robert Grey on March 22.
    “We can’t understand how a city could allow such deterioration on the ladder, the hydraulic system and related components. To allow these ladders to be used in service in their present condition would create, we believe, a tremendous safety exposure to the firefighters in the city of Detroit.”

Clarence Tabb Jr. / The Detroit News Firefighters stationed closest to downtown's high-rise district used this old pumper with a 20-foot ground ladder as a replacement late last month for their 100-foot aerial. The ladder truck was purchased in 1999 and was out of service for three months after an accident.

   
Too little foresight
    Even simple decisions involving small sums of money have become nightmares for the Fire Department. One example involves the decision not to get a service contract for its Plymovent System, designed to capture cancer-causing diesel exhaust fumes from fire trucks while in the stations.
    Although the system is required by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, between 15 and 20 of the Fire Department’s 71 systems are down or in need of repair, firehouse log books show. Because the city owed $15,000 to Hastings Air Energy, the company that installed the system between 1993 and 1998, it couldn’t get repairs to the Plymovents whose warranties had expired.
    Hastings stopped servicing the equipment in January. The city finally paid the company on Oct. 13, one day after the firefighters’ union went to court to get the Plymovents fixed.
    David Boeher, president of Hastings Air Energy, said when the system was installed the company offered the department a service contract for about $23,000 a year but fire officials declined. He said because of the lack of maintenance his company would now have to inspect every Plymovent system in the city before entering into any service agreement.
    The Plymovent system is installed in more than 35 fire departments in the state and most opted for service contracts, according the company.
    “This is a health issue,“ said Boeher. “It is imperative that we keep diesel fumes out of fire stations.”
    The Fire Department has tried fixing the Plymovent systems itself. Fire officials allowed a firefighter with no training or professional experience in repairing the system to go from station to station when the vaccuum-like system needs patching.
   
Misleading reports
    In their efforts to hide the department’s problem, fire officials have made statements they know to be misleading.
    Despite a chronic shortage of working ladder trucks and pumpers in the department for years, annual Fire Department reports from 1997 to 1999 claim the department has 12 extra pumpers and eight ladder trucks in reserve. The claim is published annually even though the city is forced to keep at least a dozen broken aerials and leaking pumpers in service because it has no replacements.
    And the annual reports show the hazardous materials unit fully suited. But the unit only wears the suits when posing for pictures or training, because the department hasn’t met the requirements to allow the unit to suit up for emergencies.

Too many leaders
    Charles Wilson, appointed by the mayor in January, inherited a department suffering from decades of bad decisions and ill-conceived policies.
    Among them is the department’s decision to buy fire trucks from seven manufacturers over 15 years. This has made it difficult for the department to order replacement parts in bulk or use broken trucks for spare parts.
    Detroit also bought two of its pumper trucks over the Internet. The fire trucks, purchased by former deputy commissioner James Love in 1998, had to be returned for special fittings because they couldn’t be hooked in the city’s hydrants.
    And when fire officials had 14 new pumpers designed to their specifications this year, they violated Michigan law and created problems for firefighters.
    Among the design problems:
   

The roofs of the trucks’ cabs are elevated in the back so that the rotating emergency lights can’t be seen from all directions, a violation of state law.
   

The engines are not designed to allow the firefighter in the front passenger seat to wear his air tank in the cab. The tanks are kept in the rear of the cab and firefighters lose time collecting them before rushing directly into a burning building.
   

The siren button requires the passenger seat firefighter to pump it constantly with his left hand, leaving him unable to talk on the radio, read maps and help watch for other vehicles while speeding to a fire.
   

The engines were designed without spotlights, crucial for finding street addresses at night.
   

The threads on the hose couplings that permit fire crews to pump foam on fuel fires do not match the threads on their trucks.




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