Review faults tactics in fatal fire

The Clearwater Fire Department's training and ability to fight high-rise fires are questioned after it is criticized for bungling basics in a fatal fire.

By JENNIFER FARRELL, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published October 16, 2002

CLEARWATER -- City firefighters responding to a deadly condo fire in a waterfront high-rise violated department guidelines and failed to follow basic firefighting techniques, a St. Petersburg Times review has found.

The tactics that June morning were so flawed, it raises serious questions about Clearwater's readiness to combat high-rise fires, according to two veteran fire commanders -- former chiefs from Miami and New York -- who studied the department's operations at the newspaper's request.

That assessment is a far cry from the city's own findings, released along with a 600-page report about the June 28 fire in Dolphin Cove condominiums that killed two elderly residents and badly injured three firefighters.

Among the contributing factors, Chief Rowland Herald said, were the building's lack of sprinklers, faulty door closers, flawed radio communications and residents' failure to call 911 promptly.

The Times review, however, found that firefighters -- who took 28 minutes to hit the fire with water -- didn't follow fundamental, accepted rules of firefighting and violated their own guidelines.

-- Department high-rise guidelines call for firefighters to set up a staging area two floors below a fire to develop a game plan and coordinate their attack. Firefighters went directly to the fire floor, only to be met with thick smoke that clouded their search for the fire.

-- Accepted practice is for firefighters to tap into the building's internal water system, known as a standpipe, in the stairwell below the fire, then drag a hose upstairs. Instead, firefighters tapped into another standpipe down the hall from the fire. That pipe had no water; a ground level valve had been turned off.

-- Had firefighters carried a hose up from the stairwell in a lower floor, they could have hit the fire with water in accordance with accepted practices, from the inside out. That way, the water drives smoke and heat away from the building's interior. But at Dolphin Cove, the crew on the fire floor couldn't get water, abandoned firefighting efforts and instead started evacuating residents.

-- Department guidelines ban firefighters from taking elevators to fires on or below the sixth floor. This fire was on the fifth floor, but firefighters rode elevators anyway. Three were trapped briefly when elevator doors wouldn't open on the fire floor.

The Times asked the two retired commanders to review the city's report and audio recordings of the communications that day. They concluded the department's failure to follow fundamentals and its own guidelines created confusion and indicates the department is understaffed, poorly trained and lacking leadership.

Ed Donaldson, a 27-year firefighter who was head of Metro-Dade County Fire Rescue almost nine years, described the operation as "the product of a department in disarray."

"They violated some very basic principles," he said. "You can't do that."

Clearwater's Fire Department is shorthanded, which only enhances its need for intense training, Donaldson concluded.

"These kids had the commitment, not the training," he said. "When you're undermanned, it's difficult to run smooth. A lot of things get out of kilter in a hurry."

Tony Quatrone, a former New York City battalion chief who supervised firefighting efforts in Manhattan skyscrapers, described the scene at Dolphin Cove as "chaos" and "total, total confusion." He, too, thinks Clearwater is understaffed and was poorly commanded at Dolphin Cove.

"They're so undermanned, it's crazy," he said. "I don't know how they operate."

Worst of all, both experts said, was the delay in getting water on the fire. Had crews gone to the right spot and applied water at once, the fire would have been manageable, they said. Instead, firefighters concentrated on evacuation.

"If you don't put water on the fire, you're going to lose control," Quatrone said. "That's what they did. They lost control."

Clearwater's fire chief, city manager and mayor say their department is well prepared. They are skeptical of analysis done at a distance by experts for the Times.

"We are not understaffed," Mayor Brian Aungst said emphatically.

Said City Manager Bill Horne: "I do believe our department is prepared well enough to minimize the loss of life and injury. We're also committed to becoming better and better at performing our jobs."

Whether the city is sufficiently prepared to fight fires in a high-rise is critical for Clearwater, which has scores of high-rises and a higher percentage of residents 65 and older than any big city in the country.

Other than acknowledging that his firefighters violated guidelines by riding elevators in Dolphin Cove, Chief Herald has not second-guessed them publicly. The department, he said, conducts critiques after major events and follows up with necessary training. He said the department's training division receives consistently high marks on internal evaluations.

"Understand that firefighting is not an exact science," said Herald, Clearwater's chief since 1998. "It's a dynamically evolving event. There is no one way to get the job done."

Nonetheless, the chief announced plans last week to seek an independent review from the U.S. Fire Administration, an arm of the Federal Emergency Management Agency whose goal is to reduce fire deaths.

The decision, made at the urging of rank and file, came amid questions from the Times.

Last week, City Attorney Pam Akin took the unusual step of issuing a gag order for all city employees concerning Dolphin Cove. City Manager Horne confirmed the gag order came after officials learned the Times had scheduled an interview with Lt. Tom Allegretti, head of the first engine crew to reach the fire.

John Lee, the president of the firefighter's union, was interviewed before the gag order. He says that mistakes were made at Dolphin Cove and that the breaches in protocol raise serious questions about the department's readiness to fight such fires. He welcomes the federal review.

"We want the training and the manpower to do the job," he said. "To me, we need to be honest. There's no training. People are going to die. It's already happened."

He added: "We know it's going to find some flaws. ... We're okay with that. All we want is a fair shake."

It started in a fifth-floor kitchen, with a burner left on low.

Charles Zetterberg woke up to a crackling noise shortly after 5 a.m. He didn't call 911 immediately. After trying fire extinguishers, he and a neighbor tried the hoses in the hallways but got no water because they didn't pull out all the coils.

From statements to investigators and recorded radio transmissions, the picture that emerges is firefighters who were desperate for water, confused and lacking coordination.

By the time the first crew arrived, the fire had burned at least 22 minutes. It would smolder and swell 28 minutes more before water finally arrived.

Firefighters rode elevators directly to the fire floor, some thinking they were responding to an alarm, not a fire. They stepped off the elevator to heavy smoke. Soon people were everywhere. Firefighters couldn't see the source of the fire.

One radioed his commander on the ground, asking for more crews to help get residents out. He also asked where the fire was. But the acting district chief, Lt. Mel Acton, was confused. He radioed back that the fire was on the first floor.

Outside, another firefighter corrected him, telling crews the fire was on the fifth floor.

The dispatchers who had fielded 911 calls failed to tell firefighters which condo was burning until eight minutes after the first crew arrived. At that point, firefighters already had tapped into the fifth floor center standpipe, only to discover it dry. Seconds later, a voice shouted: "Give us some water. We need some water. Command, we need some water."

Outside, a ladder truck crew stationed at the fire window also called for water. But it had hooked up to a broken fire hydrant.

As firefighters inside and outside pleaded for water, the acting commander assured them it was on the way -- a crew on the ground had already charged the standpipe system. But no one checked to see if all the valves were open -- and the valve on the center standpipe had inexplicably been turned off.

In the hallway, temperatures continued to climb. Frustrated, Lt. Allegretti radioed: "We have no water. We're backing off this floor. It's too hot right now."

Down the hall, firefighters Karen Jackson and Dave Hogan were ushering Zetterberg's 81-year-old mother, Jean, toward the elevator.

It was then, investigators say, that fire exploded down the hallway, felling 75-year-old Robert Kelly, who had broken away from a firefighter helping him out. He died of smoke inhalation.

The fireburst also knocked Jackson to the floor and overwhelmed Mrs. Zetterberg. She suffered smoke inhalation and burns over 43 percent of her body, and died the next day.

Hogan ran down the smoke-filled hallway, colliding with other firefighters and saying he was burning. Jackson lay in the hallway by the elevator, burned and disoriented. She was dragged to safety by firefighter Steve Colbert, who also suffered burns.

Clearwater fire officials said Dolphin Cove suffered a "flashover," a rare kind of explosion in a confined space that causes the very air to catch fire.

At 5:55 a.m., 50 minutes after the fire started, water was applied to it from a truck outside Zetterberg's window. About the same time, firefighters inside finally hooked into the stairtower standpipe and shot water from that position -- a smart first strategy, according to accepted practice.

It took six minutes to knock down the fire.

"Placed in an untenable situation," Donaldson said of the firefighters, "they did some heroic things."

But the former Miami chief had little praise for those in charge at Dolphin Cove, calling command a "deep hole" into which information disappeared.

"You never heard command directing traffic," he said. "His role is to know what's supposed to happen and try to make sure what is happening conforms as much as possible with good procedure. Command did none of that ever throughout the whole thing."

Quatrone criticized commanders for not taking charge, leaving firefighters inside the building essentially to operate alone.

"They had no control of what their men were doing," he said.

Donaldson and Quatrone agree the firefighters should have gotten water on the fire as soon as possible, any way they could. Even if it meant starting with the 350 gallons from a fire truck parked outside the building.

"If (they) had gotten water on the fire," Quatrone said, "this would have never happened."

As for the flashover phenomenon, Donaldson suggested another explanation: "Creating an environment that was too hard to work in to explain away deficiencies in their operation.

"I doubt there was a flashover, period," he said.

The fire at Dolphin Cove has soured the already-strained relationship between the city and the firefighters union.

Stunned by the number of injuries and their close brush with death, firefighters have demanded better equipment and more staff. But city officials said the union, bitter about failed pension negotiations, was posturing for contract talks.

Firefighters say legitimate staffing concerns have been dismissed, leaving the city exposed to disaster during the next big fire.

Jim Carino, a 25-year department veteran, has been pushing for more staffing since the late 1980s, when call volumes began a steady increase. A year ago, after Sept. 11, he warned city commissioners about the dangers of short staffing in high-rise fires.

"Developers continue to propose high-rise buildings," he said then. "Our fear is that we will be unable to meet the challenges of high-rise emergency."

After the fire, in a taped interview aired on C-View, the city's cable TV channel, Mayor Aungst and Chief Herald trumpeted staffing increases, saying the department had added 26 street level firefighters since 1998.

In fact, the city has added only 16 firefighters. His 26 number, Herald acknowledged last week, included two fire inspectors plus eight positions that won't be filled until the city starts building a new station next year.

"Maybe that was an oversight," Aungst said last week of the mistaken higher number. "The (new station) got held up, as you well know, so they got held up."

Carino, interviewed before the city's recent gag order, called the department's high-rise guidelines "unrealistic."

"There's no way we can move the equipment and the personnel in there that we need with the staffing that we have," he said. "There's a lot of assignments that get missed."

Carino praised his fellow firefighters' heroism at Dolphin Cove but did not dispute they violated accepted practices.

"We're in trouble for lots of reasons, and they need to identify it," he said. "Turtling up is not the thing to do."

The next high-rise fire could spell disaster, Carino said. "We're destined for failure. We're destined to die. We can't handle it."

Saying his department is well-prepared, Chief Herald cited a series of high-rise training exercises in the two years before the Dolphin Cove fire.

There were classroom sessions with videos and power point presentations. Firefighters also toured the firefighting features of a Sand Key high-rise and drilled in the basement of a vacant hospital. Three months before Dolphin Cove, they trained on the second floor at Clearwater Mall and practiced with high-rise equipment.

The mayor, meanwhile, said he has no doubt Clearwater firefighters are well-prepared, fully trained and equipped to protect the public and themselves.

"We have a very professional Fire Department," said Aungst. "I'll stand by that."

-- Times staff writer Caryn Baird contributed to this report. Jennifer Farrell can be reached at 445-4160 or farrell@sptimes.com.

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