BY JEFF BRANSCOME
Spotsylvania County’s fire and rescue department is investigating a delay in responding to a fire that destroyed a Lake Wilderness home on Saturday.
It took 10 minutes for three career firefighters from Station 7 to arrive at the house after a 911 call at 11:16 a.m., Deputy Fire Chief Monty Willaford said.
The house off Orange Plank Road is about two miles from Wilderness Station 7.
“Certainly, it was not as quick as it should be,” Willaford said of the response time.
A volunteer crew from a station in the Five-Mile Fork area showed up at about the same time as the paid personnel, he said. A volunteer fire chief who happened to be in the area was the first on the scene.
Twenty-five pets died in the fire, but no people were injured. The cause of the fire has not been determined.
The firefighters at Station 7 initially thought they were supposed to respond with a tanker–which provides water for fire engines–after receiving a call about the fire. They hadn’t yet left the station when they realized they needed to bring an engine instead.
That confusion caused the delay.
“We’ve been investigating to determine if that was a human-error issue or if it was a mechanical issue due to the radios,” Willaford said.
Spotsylvania dispatchers called for a tanker and an engine to respond from Station 7 at Orange Plank Road, but all three firefighters heard only the call for the tanker, Willaford said.
The county staffs its firehouses with full crews of at least five people during weekdays. Each crew normally responds to calls with an engine and an ambulance or an engine and a tanker.
But Station 7′s three-person crew had only enough manpower for one vehicle. Protocol required them to respond with an engine, Willaford said.
Since early November, career personnel have been paid overtime to staff Station 7 and three other rural stations from 6 p.m. on Fridays until 5 a.m. on Mondays because of a shortage of volunteers.
“It was a temporary measure to try to provide some level of coverage versus just having stations not staffed,” Willaford said.
Those overtime costs from November until the end of the fiscal year on June 30 would be more than $800,000, County Administrator Doug Barnes said.
A house fire in February 2010 that claimed the life of a 42-year-old Chancellor woman focused attention on problems within the county’s emergency response system.
A subsequent state study recommended a host of changes, including additional hires.
The Board of Supervisors in November approved a plan to hire 50 people–and convert two part-time jobs to full-time–by April 2013 to provide 24/7 fire and rescue coverage.
But the seven-member board, which now has four new members, has put that plan on hold to consider other options.
Jeff Branscome: 540/374-5402
Email: jbranscome@freelancestar.com
