Official says failure to immediately send closest department honest mistake.
By Jeremy Grad
The Times Leader
WEST HAZELTON, Pa. — A 911 dispatching error could have turned tragic at a double-block fire Monday night, West Hazleton Fire Chief Bob Ward told county officials Tuesday.
The fire devastated the upper story of 9-11 E. Oak St. A dispatching error by Luzerne County 911 resulted in the West Hazleton Fire Co., which was 2½ blocks away from the fire, being one of the last to respond, delaying its response time by up to six minutes.
Ward said that long of a delay in response time could have proven fatal. This time it did not.
No injuries were reported in the structure fire. All residents of the double home are displaced and receiving aid from the American Red Cross.
“We were never dispatched,” Ward said. He explained the 911 dispatcher attempted to send a typed-out page to the fire company. The fire company, however, receives voice page dispatches; only the borough’s ambulance company receives the typed-out pages.
“Hazle Township informed the county that they didn’t hear our tones and that’s when the county realized they made a mistake and activated the voice pagers,” Ward said.
The Hazle Township Fire Department is located several miles from the fire and had to travel down busy roadways in order to get to the scene.
Upon arrival, it was thought that a woman was trapped inside the burning structure.
“We did a primary and secondary search and came up empty-handed,” Ward said. “It was later revealed that she was already out.”
Phillip Veet, the deputy director of Luzerne County 911, characterized the incident as an honest mistake by the dispatcher and said no disciplinary actions will be taken against the person.
“The actual incident was the dispatcher did not drop the tones,” Veet said. “At some point he realized he hadn’t dropped tones and alerted West Hazleton.”
He indicated that 911 will be conducting an internal investigation to streamline communications to prevent this scenario from happening again.
“We’ll be taking a look at anything we can put in place to make sure these things don’t happen,” Veet said. Ward met with representatives of 911 on Tuesday.
The cause of the fire is under investigation.
One of the people displaced is Diane Ball, who lived on the first floor of 11 E. Oak St. for more than a year. Ball said she heard noises coming from the upstairs apartments and went to see what it was.
“If I wouldn’t have come out to see what the noise was that I heard, there would have been a lot more damage,” she said.
Although there were functioning smoke detectors on the first floor, there were none on the second, Ball said.
Ball said she called the property owner when repairs were needed. “He wouldn’t get them done. The building wasn’t hardwired for the smoke detectors.”
The fire chief said “there was a hardwired system in there but they were all disconnected.” Ward said a hardwired smoke detector system — which will alert all residents of an apartment building when one alarm goes off — is required by the national building code and property maintenance code.
The Luzerne County Office of Recorder of Deeds identified the owner of the property as Michael Hanley, who purchased it on May 29 from Jose Pieriere and William Cate. The office could not provide an address for Hanley besides the Oak Street address. Hanley is Cate’s brother-in-law.
Cate said when he sold the home to his brother-in-law that “the smoke detectors were up in the second floor and the batteries were in.” Hanley could not be reached for comment.
Copyright 2007 The Times Leader
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News