By Annie Linskey
The Baltimore Sun
Copyright 2007 The Baltimore Sun Company
All Rights Reserved
BALTIMORE — Mayor Sheila Dixon today fired Battalion Chief Kenneth Hyde Sr., the head of the city’s fire academy, amid the continuing investigation over the death of a city fire recruit, but said Fire Chief William J. Goodwin Jr. would remain in his job.
“I cannot express to you how angry and shocked I was after reading the preliminary report,” Dixon said this afternoon. “It’s a black mark on an otherwise outstanding fire department.”
Dixon said the preliminary investigation report will be made public tomorrow and that the remainder of the investigation will be turned over to the Howard County Fire Department for an independent review.
Goodwin attended the news conference, and it was unclear whether he offered to resign.
Hyde was one of three senior department members who had been suspended without pay over the course of the department’s internal investigation. The other two officials &mdash Lt. Joseph Crest, the lead instructor, and Lt. Barry Broyes, head of the Rapid Intervention Team — remain suspended.
Details about the Feb. 9 training fire on South Calverton Road in Southwest Baltimore in which Racheal M. Wilson died have put a spotlight on irregular practices in the department’s training academy.
Fire officials have admitted that some standards set by the National Fire Protection Association for training fires set in dwellings located off training grounds were violated. Union leaders have cited numerous errors, including multiple fires being set — standards limit the fires to one &mdashno pre-fire “walk-through” of the rowhouse, inadequate water supplies and improperly trained firefighters at the scene.
Though Goodwin will remain in his job, Dixon had earlier backed away from a previous statement in which she offered her support of the fire chief.
At her weekly news conference yesterday, the mayor declined to say whether she still had confidence in Goodwin’s leadership.
“At this point I’m reviewing information, and there are a lot of concerns that I have,” she said. “It is very clear that [in] the Fire Department and the training department in particular that there were many, many mistakes that were made.”
Documents released yesterday by the Housing Authority of Baltimore City reveal that the South Calverton Road rowhouse used in the live-burn exercise might not have been stable. Last year, housing officials cited the owner, who has since died, and declared the house “not fit for human habitation.” In December, a housing inspector wrote that there was “debris throughout the interior” and an addition in the rear was “deteriorating.”
The housing agency now owns it.
National safety standards say that loose debris should be removed from a building before it is set on fire and that any holes in the floors and walls need to be patched before an exercise. The Fire Department will not say whether any repair work was done on the house.
Leaders of two union locals representing fire officers and firefighters have been the most vocal critics of how the fatal exercise was run and have repeatedly expressed concerns about the internal investigation. Both union heads stopped short of saying Goodwin should resign.
Wilson died of thermal injuries and asphyxia, the medical examiner’s office said earlier this week. She was 29 and had two young children. Her family said that she was covered with burns and was in pain before she died at Maryland Shock Trauma Center.
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