Morning Lineup – December 16

I’m sure that there are a lot of sick-at-heart people in Gloucester this morning. As you’ll see if you haven’t yet read the update posted just before this, the City failed one of its citizens yesterday when 70-yr.-old perished in the apartment fire across the street from the fire house.

It has now come out that the FD was operating that night while it was staffed under its minimum, against its contractual obligations. As a result, the ladder truck that could possibly have saved him arrived with no truckies on it….only the driver.

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GFD photo

Additionally, the dispatch protocol was to send a reduced response on the initial alarm because it was “only” a smoke in the building call. Think about that….a 4-story apartment building filled with smoke in the middle of the night when occupancy can be expected to be full and mostly asleep.

It will be easy for people to point fingers and put the heat on the fire chief for this, but the blame should be put at the origin of the problems and that is the city council, which is where the policy of undercutting the fire safety of the city is created.

A couple of years ago, the city closed two of its four fire stations rather than pay for the firefighters needed to staff them. Earlier this year there was another fire death that happened nearby one of the shuttered firehouses and the public demanded that it be re-opened. So now they have 3 stations, all operating with a bare minimum of staffing and funding.

In 2004 the city was chastised by its neighboring communities for not holding up their end of the regional mutual-aid pact. In a most unusual letter dated August of that year, the Essex County Fire Chief’s Assoc. complained to the City that the Gloucester FD failed to provide routine mutial aid assistance on 19 days in July.

”The issue with Gloucester is, we feel that mutual aid should be mutual,” said Beverly Fire Chief Richard Pierce, who coordinates the District Five mutual-aid system in southern Essex County, which includes Gloucester and 19 other communities.

The Mayor and City Council are laying the blame on the citizens because they failed to approve a tax increase that they claim would have alleviated the budget restraints on the FD. But just perhaps the citizens felt that the revenue is sufficient but not being allocated properly.

Whatever the reason, the entire city has a burden to carry this morning.

Now let’s get our equipment checked. I’ll get the coffee pot going.

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KingCast

Ahh but wait, there's more:

Here's more that I can say:

Excerpt from the Gloucester times, which I have emailed and asked for verification that the subject premises had no occupancy permit as you will see in the comments from this post:

http://christopher-king.blogspot.com/2007/12/ki...

"Carignan said there were no fire extinguishers that he knew of in the building and firefighters didn't have one on their truck. He helped them to pull the hose in and held it down with them as they sprayed down his apartment.

Carignan's two-room, $700-a-month basement apartment was near the boiler room. He said that he'd followed landlord Gary Raso there days before the fire to ask him a question because Raso had not responded to phone calls. Carignan said that Raso told him he couldn't be in the boiler room and asked to meet him outside.

Carignan said that before he left the boiler room, he saw a fluorescent green liquid, like anti-freeze, all over the floor. He added that a heating company had been working on something in the boiler room for a week and a half, and he could smell gasoline from his basement apartment throughout that time.

Carignan said that on the day of the fire, new workers had come into the boiler room. He said they were not from the original company and arrived in an unmarked truck.

Raso could not be reached for comment yesterday."

Dal90

15 on duty is overstating the manpower for suppression. Per the local (Gloucester) newspaper article GFD had two ambulances on the calls, too. Leaving 11 available for suppression. In a city of 30,000.