By Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross
The San Francisco Chronicle (California)
Copyright 2006 The Chronicle Publishing Co.
All Rights Reserved
Were the three children who died in a recent Richmond townhouse fire the victims of bureaucratic foot dragging?
That’s the question being asked by East Bay firefighters, who say fire engines close to the blaze weren’t called to assist because they were on the wrong side of the city limits.
At the center of the issue is Richmond’s failure to renew an agreement with Contra Costa County that essentially calls for the closest fire station to respond to a blaze, regardless of where the fire is burning.
Had the “automatic aid” agreement been in place when a Hilltop neighborhood townhouse caught fire June 2, nearby fire crews from just outside the city limits could have responded.
“We have always been worried about this exact thing happening,” said Supervisor John Gioia, whose district covers west Contra Costa County and who has pushed to reinstate the automatic aid agreement.
Richmond Fire Chief Michael Banks says the City Council dropped the agreement for budgetary reasons in 2002, well before he was promoted to chief. At the time, Richmond officials thought their fire crews were answering calls in unincorporated areas of the county much more often than county crews were helping out in the city. The unincorporated areas are overseen by the Contra Costa County Fire Protection District.
Whatever the case, there have been repeated overtures from the county in recent years to get the automatic aid accord between Richmond and the county restored — including a county proposal to help pick up the extra costs for Richmond sending crews outside the city — but to no avail.
As result, late the afternoon of June 2, when the call went out that a townhouse was on fire at 908 View Drive, a three-member crew from Richmond Fire Station 68 on Hilltop Drive — about 1.2 miles from the scene — was called.
Because the crew had already left the station on another call, it arrived in about two minutes — a minute or two faster than usual, Richmond fire officials said. However, backup crews — several miles away on Richmond’s Valley View Road — didn’t arrive until 5 1/2 minutes after they were called, Banks said.
As it turned out, there was a county station nearby. Engine Co. 69, at 4640 Appian Way in El Sobrante, was just a mile from the fire, and county fire officials say firefighters would have arrived in just three minutes if called.
Richmond fire officials and neighbors described a chaotic scene at the blaze, in which a woman caring for her three grandchildren managed to get out but the children didn’t.
The children — Devieonne Portis, 9, Jerimiah Cradle, 4 and Isis Cradle, 2 — died of smoke inhalation, huddled under a blanket in an upstairs bedroom.
From the description Richmond Fire Capt. Laura Barnaby gave to The Chronicle’s John Cote, firefighters needed all the help they could get.
“We’re flying by the skin of our teeth,” Barnaby said. “This is the fire we’ve been dreading, where maybe an extra company or extra staffing on each rig could have made a difference.”
Officials of both the Richmond and county fire departments say they have been in talks for some time about trying to restore the automatic aid agreement.
“We here feel strongly the best response model is where the closest resources are dispatched regardless of jurisdictional boundaries,” said county fire department spokeswoman Emily Hopkins. “Unfortunately, because of situation we have now, that didn’t happen in this particular case.”
Supervisor Gioia said, “Whether (the absence of automatic aid), in fact, contributed to these deaths, I can’t tell you. But it underscores the importance of reinstating it immediately.”