By Mark Ferenchik
The Columbus Dispatch
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Columbus firefighters face enough dangers without needlessly risking their safety.
So they’re talking to Columbus development officials about creating a system to mark city-owned vacant homes to alert firefighters about hazards when responding to a fire or other emergency.
“Our biggest concerns are the homes owned by the city and set to be demolished, the most-dangerous homes,” said Battalion Chief Mike Fowler, spokesman for the Columbus Fire Division. “We do not want our guys to risk their lives and get hurt in a home that is going to be torn down.”
No specifics have been worked out, but it could be something like a placard with an X through a box to mark that a house isn’t safe to enter or a slash through a box to warn that there are hazards but that firefighters could enter, said Jack Reall, president of International Association of Fire Fighters Local 67 in Columbus.
For example, thieves might have cut holes in the floor to get to ductwork they could sell as scrap metal.
Firefighters still would work to determine whether someone was in the house, Reall said. “We’re going to do what we need to do to make sure there’s nobody in there.”
Columbus has about 900 parcels in its land bank, many of them vacant lots. The city said 16 percent, or 144 homes, await demolition.
Dana Rose, the city’s code-enforcement administrator, said he wants to set up a meeting with fire officials to discuss implementing a system.
Fowler said the addresses of dangerous and vacant city-owned houses could be entered into the Fire Division’s dispatching system so that firefighters on runs could determine whether homes are slated for demolition.
There has been no one incident in Columbus that prompted this, Reall said. But the idea has been discussed nationally after six firefighters in Worcester, Mass., died while searching an abandoned warehouse for two homeless people in 1999, he said.
And as the city continues to acquire more vacant homes -- Columbus has more than 6,000 vacant and abandoned homes in total -- firefighters need to know about the potential dangers, Reall said.
“I don’t think I’ve been on a fire in the last couple of months that you didn’t have a hole in the floor somewhere.”
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