Detroit: City Council Hearing on Massive Fires

[Truck4 48]

The Detroit City Council held a hearing over the widespread fires of Sept. 7 that destroyed nearly 80 homes after a major wind storm. Some of the findings at the hearing:

-Despite warnings of strong winds that day, the utility company UTE never alerted emergency responders to the potential for downed power lines causing fires.

-Citizens reported responses times of over 2 hours by the fire department.

-The utility company reportedly averaged a 2 hour response time to downed power lines. Some of which reportedly caused some of the fires.

-(14) of the (25) off- duty firefighters recalled reported to work. Others members could not be reached or declined to come in. Some members live 25 miles or more from the city. The Firefighter's Union stated that the recall was not mandatory and that more members would have responded if told of the circumstances and told that the recall was mandatory.

-UTE reported more than 60,000 illegal power connections in the metro area in 2009.

-911 system was overloaded, causing callers to get a busy signal.

-The city demolished most of the destroyed homes before fire investigators could investigate the causes.

(At no point in the article does the Detroit Free Press address fire department staffing)

http://www.freep.com/article/20101007/NEWS01/10070383/-1/ADNETWORK/Fire-losses-in-Detroit-blamed-on-emergency-response-missteps

Original IA:

http://www.emtbravo.net/index.php?showtopic=38371

[SageVigiles 1,194]

So basically they are blaming the power company and the FD members for this, instead of terrible mismanagement by city government? Yeah, I pretty much expected that.

[INIT915 1,119]

So basically they are blaming the power company and the FD members for this, instead of terrible mismanagement by city government? Yeah, I pretty much expected that.

Some of their conclusions make little sense.

How do they find that the power company was the only one who knew high winds were coming? Was this fact kept out of the news and somehow a secret from the FD? That makes no sense at all.

And some of their points seem obvious. Given the call volume, why are they surprised that response times were long and 911 call centers were overwhelmed?

I hope they didn't waste a lot of money on this "investigation."

[Remember585 815]

An average of two hours for the utility company? Not bad. The snow storms and windy days around here overload every resource. Even with pre-planning. Sometimes Mother Nature wins...