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Dispatch system could have saved lives in ’03 Loop blaze, lawyers say
By FRAN SPIELMAN
The Chicago Sun-Times (Illinois)
Chicago firefighters racing to the scene of a burning high-rise will soon be armed with the building details they need to hit the ground running, under an enhanced dispatch system that might have saved lives at a deadly Loop high-rise fire in 2003.
The number of floors, number and location of stairwells and standpipes, capacity of fire pumps and information about stairway locking systems are just some of the details that will be forwarded to firehouse computers along with the original fire dispatch.
A hard copy of the information will be ripped from the firehouse printer before units roll out.
“Over the last several months, we have been collecting life safety data from over a thousand buildings. This information will now be used to provide vital information to our first responding companies,” said Fire Commissioner Cortez Trotter.
“When a company gets a run in the firehouse, the printer will now provide not only the time of the alarm and location, but other information that is invaluable in sizing up a situation and being able to hit the ground running when units arrive,” Trotter said.
The building information might have been invaluable at the Oct. 17, 2003, fire that killed six people at 69 W. Washington, according to attorneys representing fire victims and survivors.
There was a 90-minute gap between the time firefighters arrived on the scene and the time the bodies of six victims were found.
The delay stemmed, in part, from confusion about how many stairwells there were and precisely where victims were when they placed frantic 911 calls.
All six of the victims were trapped inside a smoke-filled stairwell by doors that locked behind them.
A top-to-bottom stairway search was not conducted until the fire was extinguished.
“We’re learning that the Fire Department showed up without the knowledge of the building they needed, and then that information learned by certain people was not communicated to those who needed to know it,” said attorney Dan Curtin.
“Any change ensuring that firefighters have more knowledge before entering a building can only help.”
Ordinance ripped as ‘joke’
Apparently because of pending lawsuits, Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford refused to make a direct connection to the 69 W. Washington fire.
But, Langford said, “It’ll cut down time and confusion that might occur in being familiar with what the building has. It allows them to have this information before they get to the scene, rather than having to ask on the scene in what could be chaotic conditions.”
In December 2004, Chicago aldermen finally got around to making the city’s older buildings safer, but it was not the sweeping sprinkler mandate that victims’ relatives had in mind.
Ignoring renewed concerns raised by a five-alarm fire at the LaSalle Bank Building days before, aldermen forged ahead with Mayor Daley’s plan to give older commercial high-rises 12 years to install sprinklers and allow residential buildings to make cheaper “life safety” improvements by 2012.
Although victims’ families denounced the ordinance as a “joke,” it required the owners of 1,691 buildings more than 80 feet high to supply the information that will now be given to firefighters on the way to fire scenes.
As of Jan. 27, 1,350 of those buildings had filed the so-called “life safety data,” a compliance rate of 85 percent.
Fire Prevention inspectors are now going to the remaining buildings to encourage compliance and provide what Trotter calls “on-site assistance” in filling out the forms.
A Cook County commission concluded that the communications breakdown at 69 W. Washington was so “obvious and terrible” that firefighters sent fleeing employees back up a smoke-filled stairwell, possibly to their deaths, apparently unaware of “at least 10" calls to 911 reporting that people were trapped by stairwell doors that locked behind them.
‘Back to school’
The first call came in at 5:15 p.m. -- 95 minutes before the six bodies were found.
Three high-ranking fire officials calling the shots that day insisted that none of the 911 calls about trapped employees ever reached them and that, had they known, they would have immediately dispatched rescue personnel.
To prevent a repeat of those mistakes, Trotter ordered Chicago firefighters “back to school in high-rise firefighting,” with an unprecedented number of drills.
Trotter also bolstered the initial response to high-rise fires by 60 percent and assigned 10 of those firefighters exclusively to fire rescue.
The changes were widely credited with preventing fatalities at the 2004 LaSalle Bank Building fire.
The sprinkler ordinance gave older residential buildings a deadline of Jan. 1, 2006, to have a licensed engineer evaluate whether they measure up to the city’s fire safety point system and, if not, make needed improvements.
Those improvements must be completed by Jan. 1, 2012.