A group of Detroit firefighters sought treatment at Detroit Receiving Hospital this evening after breathing fumes and smoke from a fire today that was apparently set by a thief stealing copper wiring from a vacant Detroit school. All are expected to recover, but could suffer lasting damage to their lungs from poisons in insulation that was being burned off to get to the copper wiring inside, Detroit Fire Department Capt. Steve Varnas said.
“I’m sure every one of them lost time off their lives,” Varnas said.
Police arrested a 42-year-old homeless man who was in the rafters of the shuttered Hanneman School at McGraw & Gilbert. He wasn’t authorized to be in the building and may have been scrapping, according to Detroit Police Department spokesman James Tate.
“He said there were other individuals there, but no one else was taken into custody, no one else was seen at the time,” he said, adding the suspect wasn’t taken to the hospital, because he wasn’t sick.
A man spotted on the roof told investigators the noontime fire originated in a pile of copper wire he had stripped from the school to steal. He had set the fire to burn off the insulation so he could get to the copper.
But the vacant school was sealed up so tightly with metal shutters over the windows that the firefighters who went inside to battle the fire were overcome by the fumes, Varnas said.
“It was so confined and so closed up and such a large pile of wires,” Varnas said. He said the firefighters made it out of the building OK, but later become physically sick. “After they got back to the engine house, it got worse,” he said.
The firefighters involved include four from Engine 4 on Livernois between Michigan Avenue and Warren who were treated for smoke inhalation, three firefighters from Engine 31 at Grand Boulevard and McGraw and two firefighters from Squad 2 at Cass and Alexandrine, Varnas said.
Four other firefighters from Engine 17 later went to the hospital about 5:30 p.m., Varnas said.
However, a spokeswoman at Receiving Hospital said the hospital only has record so far of six firefighters having been treated and that all are in good condition.
The large number of firefighters involved led the city to call additional firefighters into work, Varnas said.
“The city is strapped right now,” he said. “If they have a big fire, they’re in trouble.”
By TAMMY STABLES BATTAGLIA
Free Press Staff Writer
