By Jane Prendergast and Gregory Korte
The Cincinnati Enquirer

A 200-page internal investigation into a firefighter's death last year says the Cincinnati Fire Department needs more than $6.7 million in equipment upgrades and new staff.

Cincinnati firefighter Oscar Armstrong, III, who was killed while fighting a 3-alarm fire in Bond Hill. (Photo provided by Cincinnati Fire Division)

The report was commissioned by Fire Chief Robert Wright after the March 21, 2003, death of Oscar Armstrong III during a house fire in Bond Hill. His was the first on-duty fire death in Cincinnati in 22 years.

While the report did not fix blame for Armstrong's death, it points out inadequacies that contributed and should be corrected to prevent other firefighters from being injured or killed.

The report examined the response to the fatal fire in detail and pointed out broader concerns about department operations.

Among them: Firefighters aren't consistently trained after their initial recruit training at the fire academy, even after they're promoted into new positions; firefighters' gloves are too restrictive, making it difficult for them to press buttons on their radios to call for help; and the department doesn't routinely review "close-call'' incidents.

The report says the Fire Department needs more than $4.4 million in equipment upgrades and $2.3 million a year in additional staffing.

It recommends hiring 12 captains to assist district fire chiefs; four safety officers, also at the rank of captain; and eight new trainers. Two major recommended purchases: kink-resistant hose and gauges to measure water flow.

In a 2003 training session, Lt. Marc Monahan is dragged up a set of stairs by fellow firefighters. Since the death of Oscar Armstrong, the training bureau has increased the tempo and intensity of the training that focuses on rescuing firefighters. But an internal investigation into Armstrong's death found that the Cincinnati Fire Department needs more: $6.7 million in equipment and staff. (Glenn Hartong/The Cincinnati Enquirer)

Councilman David Pepper, council law committee chairman, called the report "startling."

"It's incredibly thorough and impressive," he said. "It's also a wake-up call about things that need to be thought through differently. We'd be making a critical error to have this report sitting on a shelf.''

Wright said he needed to meet with City Manager Valerie Lemmie and City Council members today to talk about the report before discussing it publicly. Lemmie has not yet made any recommendation about how to implement any of the report's suggestions.

"Clearly, they're not all going to be implemented at once,'' said Meg Olberding, an assistant to the city manager. "With that kind of budgetary impact, there's just no way. They've got to be prioritized."

"There's nothing like a critical incident to make you sit up and look at something from every angle,'' she said. "The Police Department did the same thing with the Justice Department investigation.''

Mayor Charlie Luken said the city could look for Homeland Security grants or other funding sources.

"We just don't have 6 million bucks," he said.

Joe Arnold, president of the Cincinnati Fire Fighters Union Local 48, said he knows the money isn't available.

"But I do think they can sit down with us and try to get a timeline of when these things can be done.''

Many of the recommendations are things the union has been talking about for years, he said, chiefly more and better training.

"The days of robbing Peter to pay Paul have to be over,'' Arnold said. "It's just not working.''

The report lists many mistakes made in the fire on Laidlaw Avenue in Bond Hill. Armstrong, the first man on the hose line, died when the fire got so hot it flashed over, engulfing everything in the room. The fire's cause, the most common fire cause in Cincinnati from 1997 to 2001: food left on the stove.

According to the report:

• Armstrong and two others went into the burning house holding a hose with no water. The fire apparatus operator had turned on the water, but didn't know the hose lay in kinks in the side yard. A captain went to fix it, but left his crew without a supervisor.

• Armstrong's uniform pants were almost 11 years old and hadn't been inspected in 35 months, six times longer than national standards suggest. His helmet, gloves, boots and hood had never been inspected.

• The dispatcher did not immediately report that everyone was out of the burning house. Had the firefighters on scene known that, they might not have attacked the fire so aggressively.

• Firefighters disobeyed an order to stay out of the house and went back in to get Armstrong.

The report is dedicated to Armstrong, 25, who left behind two sons and a pregnant fiance. She has since had their baby girl.Without his sacrifice, the document says, it "would have taken many years to accomplish the mission of this report.''

Pepper said many council members - and probably most citizens - assumed that the Fire Department had the resources it needed.

"It's not up to what you would think the Cincinnati Fire Department - the oldest professional fire department in the country - would have," he said. "I don't know how we got to a point where these things weren't happening, but now that it's on our watch, we need to make sure we learn from these things."

The report will be presented today to City Council's Law and Public Safety Committee.

Report's criticisms

• Firefighters' protective equipment is not routinely inspected, cleaned or repaired, as it should be at least once every six months.

• Firefighters, after they graduate from drill school, don't get enough refresher training; there's no specialized training after promotions to teach new supervisors; firefighters frequently work without training in higher-level assignments.

• Without hose gauges that measure flow, the firefighter controlling the water can't be sure it's actually coming out.

• No procedures exist about engine company functions or how to perform ongoing size-ups at an incident scene.

• The department has no computer database listing who is trained and when; information is kept on handwritten log pages.

Report's recommendations

The committee says the Fire Department needs more than $4.4 million in equipment upgrades and $2.3 million annually in additional staffing.

Among the recommendations:

• Hire 12 captains to assist district fire chiefs. Cost: $98,556 each, totaling $1.18 million a year.

• Hire four incident safety officers, also at rank of captain: $98,556 each, totaling $394,000 a year.

• Hire eight new trainers: $662,000 a year.

• Buy kink-resistant hose: $1,077,020.

• Buy gauges to measure gallons-per-minute water flow: $183,600.

• Buy glow-in-the-dark exit markers for hose: $7,395.

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E-mail jprendergast@enquirer.com and gkorte@enquirer.com