Fire Department responds

Wilson pledges to fix staffing problems

Detroit fire commissioner promises more hires, but blames workers for calling in sick .

Morris Richardson II / The Detroit News Detroit Fire Department Commissioner Charles Wilson, front; Tyron Scott, deputy commissioner, left; Greg Bowens, Mayor Archer’s spokesperson, and Chief Percy Warmack, the new chief of fire operations addressed department problems and how they’ll solve them.

By Charles Hurt and Melvin Claxton / The Detroit News

    In their second press conference in as many days, Detroit fire officials vowed Monday to reorganize the city’s Fire Department and fix problems — including a shortage of firefighters — detailed in a Detroit News series.
    Department officials promised to beef up firefighter recruitment. But they also blamed firefighters for chronic absenteeism.
    At least 21 people have died in Detroit fires over the past four years when fire trucks sent to their rescue didn’t work or the closest stations were temporarily closed, the nine-month News investigation revealed.
    The Fire Department continues to place the lives of residents and firefighters in peril every day because it has too few workers, uses trucks that don’t work and relies on broken equipment to put out fires.
    Fire Commissioner Charles Wilson, who missed Sunday’s press conference because of his other duties as commander of the 98th Division of the U.S. Army Reserve, said Monday the department would aggressively recruit more firefighters. He added that he’s already begun addressing the problem by hiring 88 firefighters in September.
    But Wilson also acknowledged that the daily staffing average since that round of hiring two months ago has been 274 firefighters, or 12 below the number required to meet the minimum national standard of four firefighters on each truck.
    Even as Wilson spoke Monday inside the firehouse at Lafayette and Mt. Elliott, the two fire trucks behind him were staffed with three firefighters.
    The Fire Department’s staffing levels emerged as a key element in two 1998 fires in which three children died. The Detroit News found the nearest fire companies to those blazes had been closed because of firefighter shortfalls.
    The News also found that the Fire Department was forced to close fire companies on 61 days this year because of low staffing.
    The problem is made even worse when fire officials send firefighters to headquarters for clerical and other non-firefighter duties, The News reported.
    For several hours Monday, four firefighters were taken out of fire stations to move furniture to Cobo Hall from department headquarters downtown where it was used during Angels’ Night.
    Wilson denied responsibility for the botched rescue effort at an April fire in the fatal April 1 Pallister Plaissance Apartments.
    He said the broken ladder truck dispatched to the 12-story apartment building probably would not have rescued residents, even if its aerial ladder worked. Four people died in the fire and a 7-year-old girl was paralyzed after jumping from her eighth-floor apartment.
    “We probably would not have been able to reach up to the eighth floor,” Wilson said Monday.
    But the Detroit News reported in Sunday’s paper that the broken aerial was on the fire scene for five minutes before the girl jumped. An aerial truck with the same reach that arrived later raised its ladder and saved a mother and four children from the eighth floor.
    When this was pointed out, Mayor Archer’s press secretary, Greg Bowens, interrupted and said and the press conference was not about the “minutiae” of the Pallister fire.

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