From:fire-ems

Four firefighters and their supervisor sat in a Jamaica firehouse Wednesday afternoon and did not respond to a potentially fatal fire because none of those firefighters had been trained to drive a fire engine, officials said yesterday.

The incident has triggered an internal debate at the top levels of the Fire Department, sources said. Some high-ranking officials, speaking on the condition that they not be named, said it was unconscionable that the firefighters at Engine Co. 303 sat idle; other department officials said the firefighters only followed procedure and could have gotten into severe trouble if they had violated that procedure.

"If you drive a rig and you're not trained and you kill two people, how does the department explain that?" Capt. Peter Gorman, president of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association, said yesterday.

The Fire Department would not discuss many details of the incident, but a spokesman confirmed that the company officer, a member of Gorman's union, had made the decision not to answer the alarm at 3:29 p.m.Wednesday.

"We're investigating what occurred here," said Michael Regan, the department's deputy commissioner for public information. He declined to discuss the matter further.

The department did say that the initial alarm of a fire on 159th Street, from a 911 call, was for what is known as a 10-45 Code 3, which department regulations classify as "victim suffering serious injuries which may lead to the decease of the person." The company officer refused to answer the alarm because the engine driver, who carries the title of chauffeur, had been injured sliding down the firehouse pole responding to a prior alarm earlier that afternoon, according to department and union sources, who asked not to be identified.

When the alarm came in for the fire on 159th Street, Engine Co. 303, at 104-42 Princeton St., was in the process of swapping a firefighter for a chauffeur at nearby Engine Co. 275, which had two qualified chauffeur on duty, the sources said.

The fire at 107-33 159th St. apparently was started by a boy playing with matches. The youth fled to a neighbor's house, where he was found after firefighters in another unit responded, the sources said. He was burned, but not badly, they said The fire caused minor damage to the building.

Gorman, the union president, said he would like every firefighter to be qualified to drive the huge rigs, but he said firefighting is more complicated than that. The drivers of engines, which pump water, must be knowledgeable about fire hydrants and water pressure regulators on their rigs; ladder company drivers must learn how to elevate ladders on their rigs without risk of tipping over the vehicle because of an unequal distribution of weight, Gorman said.