New Reports Reveals Findings In A Firefighter Killed On Duty
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – A new report is casting a critical eye on a just abolished Philadelphia Fire Department policy.
Fire stations "brown outs," were formally eliminated on Thursday, but an audit by the city controller lists troubling new information about the response time on the night a firefighter was killed.
Inside this burning home, early on the morning of December 9, 2014,firefighter Joyce Craig perished in the smoke and flames. A City Controllers audit is now claiming one of the 1st responding units that tragic day took longer than it should have to arrive. Calling it "one of the most egregious cases of slow response," the audit reveals "ladder 8 did not arrive on scene until over eighteen minutes after they were dispatched to the fire."
"We will continue to look into and try to investigate what happened," Mayor Jim Kenney said on Thursday.
The delay was even more puzzling because, as the audit shows, Ladder 8 had what should have been a straight 1.9 mile trip from its station to the scene.
There is no reason that it should take 18 minutes," said Local 22 President, Andrew Thomas. "No acceptable reason it should take 18 minutes to get to a location."
The audit says investigators were looking into statements that "Ladder 8 became lost en-route to the fire. Firefighters on duty that morning may have been unfamiliar with their community."
The report questions if the department's "Firefighter Rotation Policy" resulted in 4 firefighters not totally familiar with the neighborhood being assigned to ladder 8. Mayor Kenney announced the rotation policy, which brought involuntary transfers from station to station, is no longer in effect.
As to getting final answers about what did happen the morning firefighter Craig died, auditors say the fire department has refused to publicly release its own investigation, which sources say was completed months ago.
