IG Report: Move Faster When Firefighters Die

In response to an MSNBC.com investigation in February, Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) asked for an investigation by the federal inspector general, who issued his report this week.

From Bill Dedman at MSNBC.com:

Federal investigators should respond quickly when a firefighter is killed on the job, should spread the word promptly about equipment safety issues and may need increased legal authority to compel fire departments and unions to cooperate with investigations, according to a report this week by a federal inspector general.

The report was prompted by an MSNBC.com investigation, which revealed in February that 15 firefighters have died since 1998 in fires where a motion sensor called a PASS alarm, or Personal Alert Safety System, either didn’t sound or was so quiet that rescuers couldn’t find a downed firefighter quickly. Nine of those deaths came after managers at the Centers for Disease Control blocked an investigation by their own fire safety engineer into possible failures of firefighting equipment. Documents showed that the engineer was told by his manager in 2000 to “minimize your fact gathering during investigations.” [emphasis mine]

[snip]

The inspector general did not contradict any of MSNBC.com’s findings: The CDC usually takes more than a month to send investigators to the scene of a fatality; doesn’t investigate if the firefighters union or fire department refuses to cooperate; has cut back on the number of firefighter deaths it looks into, and destroys information that could help identify patterns of problems with safety equipment, training or tactics.

These problems are caused by a lack of resources and oversight, not by any wrongdoing or desire to cover up problems, said the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Daniel R. Levinson.

Read the entire article here.

Also read: Bill Dedman’s earlier reports on the No Go Team and the failure of PASS alarms.

As I wrote in Firefighters Die, No One Cares in February, this issue matters to me as the mother, ex-wife, and sister of volunteer firefighters. Our firefighters, especially the volunteers, deserve better than a shrug from the agency tasked with investigating their deaths and preventing future ones.