By Tony Plohetski
Austin American-Statesman
Copyright 2007 The Austin American-Statesman
All Rights Reserved
AUSTIN, Texas — At 1:45 a.m. Thursday, a man called 911 to say that he had seen “like, a lot of smoke” pouring out of Bert’s Bar B-Q near the University of Texas.
Dispatcher Eric Mackey, who took the call, asked the man a couple of questions about the color and odor of the smoke. Then he told the caller it was probably from the restaurant’s barbecue pit and that owners may “cook their brisket at night,” according to a two-minute audiotape of the conversation obtained Tuesday.
Mackey didn’t send anyone to investigate further.
About 45 minutes elapsed before other callers began dialing 911 about heavy smoke pouring from the building. “That’s not brisket!” one caller said to Mackey.
By the time the first firefighters arrived, it was too late.
Investigators later determined that an electrical malfunction started the fire that engulfed the building at 610 W. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. and that the restaurant was a total loss.
“We roll on the majority of calls that come in,” said Jim Evans, chief of staff for the Austin Fire Department. “We stress to err on the side of caution, and this is clearly an example of when we did not.”
Mackey, a firefighter and dispatcher for nearly 27 years, declined to comment. He remains on the job pending the outcome of an internal review of the incident.
Gary Johnson, whose father began Bert’s Bar B-Q in 1970 and now runs the business with his family, said he learned about the first 911 call from the Austin American-Statesman on Tuesday.
“That’s kind of shocking, actually,” he said. “I don’t know what to say about that.”
Austin fire dispatchers have wide discretion about whether to send fire engines when they get reports about strange or smoky odors or when callers report seeing smoke, Evans said. Department officials said they could not say Tuesday how often dispatchers receive such calls and decide not to send firefighters to investigate.
The department has no written procedures for how the city’s 28 fire dispatchers - all but two of whom are former firefighters - handle such calls. Evans said the department has recently begun drafting such guidelines.
“We depend on the dispatchers’ experience and knowledge,” Evans said.
Last year, about 1,700 of 24,055 fire calls concerned odors or smoke - and some were from barbecue restaurants, Evans said. About 130 of the 1,700 were actual fires.
During Mackey’s conversation with the unidentified man, he said, “A lot of barbecue places, they fire up their smokers at night and they cook their grills all night long.
“If there is not a lot of wind at night, it is probably just laying and hanging in the area,” he said.
“I don’t know if that is what they do, but it does smell like smoke,” the caller said.
The day after the fire, the man called fire officials to tell them about his conversation with Mackey, Evans said.
When a second caller dialed 911 about 45 minutes later, Mackey repeated that he suspected the smoke was from cooking meat.
“Well, could they be smoking their brisket?” he asked.
“No!” the man replied. “That’s not brisket. It smells like something is burning.”
Evans said he thinks the fire probably was smoldering when the first 911 caller reported seeing and smelling smoke.
Johnson said his late father, Bert Johnson, started the business about 36 years ago after leaving his state job. He went on to open four other barbecue establishments before he died in 1989. The restaurant on MLK was the last one to remain open.
Most of the family’s restaurant memorabilia - autographed pictures of everyone from politicians to UT football coaches - was destroyed in the fire.
“That’s what really hurts us,” Gary Johnson said. “We are just really trying to figure out where we go from here.”