By Matt Gomez
Mountain View Telegraph
Albuquerque Journal (New Mexico)
Copyright 2006 Albuquerque Journal
The Tijeras fire department didn’t hear about a blaze that destroyed a mobile home in the village and nearly claimed the lives of its two inhabitants until almost six hours after the fire.
Why that happened remains unclear.
The Tijeras department’s radio system should be encoded to receive pages about activity in its district, village Fire Chief Dave Bezy said Monday. But the paging system wasn’t enacted on Oct. 12 when the mobile home on Primera Agua caught fire, he said.
“We never heard anything about the fire,” Bezy said. “I did not hear about it until 8 o’clock the next morning.”
Two Bernalillo County sheriff’s deputies responded to the fire after one spotted smoke and called a second deputy to assist.
The Bernalillo County Fire Department reacted to the situation quickly, and “arrived on the scene within minutes,” a news release from the sheriff’s department says.
“There was some discrepancy because the village of Tijeras did not show up with the (county) fire department,” Tijeras Mayor Gloria Chavez said at an Oct. 16 village council meeting. “The reason ... is because the (village) is not encoded. (Bernalillo County Fire) Chief Bett Clark notified dispatch twice to encode the village and why the ball fell, I don’t know, but we were never encoded.”
During the council meeting, Bezy said that appropriate paperwork to have the village encoded had been filed, and Clark had taken the steps to have the village encoded, but it never happened.
“In the process, (Clark) was very upset, she was really screaming mad that we’ve been having this problem for a long time, and maybe this is what it’s going to take to stop the problem,” Bezy said.
Clark said Wednesday that when county fire units were responding to the fire, workers at dispatch asked if the Tijeras department should be notified. She said one of the county’s fire commanders responded “yes,” but he happened to be in a radio dead spot in the mountains and the radio response was not heard at dispatch.
She said that the Tijeras department often does not respond when paged.
“Since this incident has happened, (County Communications Director) Bud Lake did send out a directive to the dispatchers saying that if (there was an incident) in the village of Tijeras, encode the village of Tijeras and ... probably 98 percent of the time they do not respond,” Clark said.
Lake confirmed Wednesday that the village fire department has not been responding to recent pages from Bernalillo County dispatch.
“I think, since that fire, we’ve paged them four times and they’ve not responded any of the four times,” Lake said. “In the last couple of years, they have responded to some things but it’s been self-dispatched. In other words, calls that they’ve generated themselves ... they would call us and say, ‘We’re responding on this ... ‘“
The paging system allows village firefighters to leave their radios on all night without listening to everything going on in the county, Bezy said. Once the system is set, the only thing the firefighters will be clued into is activity going on in District 14, which the village fire department covers, he said.
“If we’re encoded to something in our village, a tone goes off on our radios,” Bezy said.
Bezy said he wasn’t sure why the village department wasn’t paged Oct. 12. He said it could have been just a simple mistake at dispatch, or that dispatch workers were too busy and forgot to push the button that would alert the fire department.
“As far as the fire, there were plenty of people to put the fire out — no problem there, everybody did their job,” Bezy said. “But it would’ve been nice if they notified us, we could’ve helped them, assisted them, be part of the family.”