The fire chief and Mayor may take liberties with the facts but the community of firefighters is fully aware of the horrific strategic and tactical decisions, plus a lax safety culture, and how they contributed to the outcome.
Janet Wilmoth gave an interview to the Post & Courier and stated:
Janet Wilmoth, editorial director for Fire Chief magazine, has known the six-member city panel for years and expects that the group will deliver an honest report that pulls no punches.
"I think they are going to tell the story like it is, and it is not going to be pleasant," she said. "Those nine firefighters should not have died, and we are lucky they didn't lose more."
The city is now trying to use the 19 minute window as an excuse. They claim so much occurred in the time span, with rapid fire development, that no department could have managed the fire. This is blatantly false.
Rather, it serves to focus on the lack of training, command structure and a complete lack of command training. The size of the fire didn't overwhelm the commanders. Instead, because there was no system in place to organize firefighters, it became freelance, run in the building, attack the fire mode. No risk analysis could be performed because no one had training in it.
Once the fire took hold because of poor decisions the outcome was sealed. This doesn't mean rapid fire development, coupled with 19 minutes, will always equal disaster. In fact, most often it does not. Large fires are fought daily around America. The difference, in many cases, is leadership, command, and a grasp of the fundamentals of firefighting principles and tactics by department command staff.
Paul Grimwood, a good friend of the author's, stated today in an interview with the Post & Courier:
Paul Grimwood, who served 35 years with fire departments in London and New York and is now an author and consultant on firefighting tactics, disagrees. He said commanders likely could have taken actions that would have saved lives if they had paid attention to signs of problems that night. He said a controlled evacuation should have been called long before the maydays were heard.
"There were clear fire behavior indicators; possibly some structural collapse warning indicators; and an obvious failure by on-scene commanders to act on the fact that an excessive number of firefighters had deployed inside the structure whilst the interior fire was rapidly developing, but their water supply was failing," he said.
Roger Yow summed up the entire question about accountability:
Roger Yow, a former Charleston fire captain and president of the local firefighters' union, said firefighter accountability was practically nonexistent. "That's why it was hours before they even realized it was nine guys."
Why is the fire chief still allowed to wear the uniform?
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