Fire investigators are looking into the cause of a house fire early this morning Syracuse, NY. A teenager had to jump from the third floor to escape the fire. Some firefighters suffered minor burns but are expected to be fine. Firefighters had difficulty fighting the fire because of high winds. There was also some damage to the home next door.
===Dispatcher error delays fire call
It usually only takes city fire crews two or three minutes to get to the scene — but Wednesday morning it took them an extra critical minute or two.
"The bells hit like they normally do, but there was no voice over the house speakers," says Syracuse deputy fire chief Jeff Daly.
There was no voice dispatch — and crews didn’t know right away where the fire was.
Onondaga County’s 9-1-1 commissioner admits a mistake by one of his dispatchers prevented the voice dispatch from going out immediately to the four stations getting the call.
"You literally don’t know which way to turn going out of the station — left or right, other than that you’re still going through your routine, getting your gear on all that kind of stuff," Daly says.
While Station 17 wasn’t the only one to get the alarm in the morning, it was the closest one to the fire, except nobody there knew it.
"Fire continues to grow as it burns, so any delay causes us to work harder,” Daly says. “I wouldn’t call an extensive delay — and not all the companies were really delayed, so we are actually fortunate this wasn’t worse."
Daly says the chief at Station 17 called dispatchers to find out if there was in fact a fire, at which point the dispatcher discovered the mistake that muted the microphone, and the location finally went out by voice.
9-1-1 commissioner John Balloni says his office is looking into disciplinary action against the dispatcher who made the mistake. He says the dispatcher violated policy by having the headset off and laying near the boom microphone, which automatically becomes muted in this kind of scenario.
Syracuse, New York – (WSYR-TV) –
