State of readiness

Charles Hurt / The Detroit News Detroit City Airport’s new fire truck, right, replaced the old rig, which sometimes wouldn’t pump or start.

Airport left unprotected by faulty rig

Truck that was city’s air disaster defense is now a backup

By Melvin Claxton and Charles Hurt / The Detroit News

    During the citywide power failure June 13, a small electrical fire broke out at the base of the Detroit City Airport control tower.
    The airport’s fire station was alerted just after 9 p.m. But the three-man firefighting crew couldn’t respond in its new $900,000 fire truck. That truck was nearly a half-mile away on the other side of the airport, its generator being used to power the airport’s terminal during the blackout.
    The task of putting the fire out fell to the airport’s back-up truck, a vehicle with problems so severe that department officials once considered carting it to a fire on a flatbed truck.
    The airport fire was minor and firefighters put it out with hand-held extinguishers. That was cause for relief because firefighters had little faith in the truck’s ability to handle anything more serious at the airport, which handles an average of 335 takeoffs and landings a day.
    Before January, the back-up rig was the airport’s primary fire truck. But the protection it provided the aircraft and passengers was always uncertain. Over the past three years the truck’s problems multiplied. There were days it wouldn’t pump water, or go faster than 30 mph, or even start.
    The truck’s reputation for breaking down was so established, that when fire officials wanted to use it to help fight a tanker fire on Interstate 75 in May, they discussed hauling it there because they weren’t sure it could make the five-mile trip on its own. In the end, officials decided against using it.
    The 11-year-old truck’s history of problems date back to the early 1990s. In a one-year period starting in July 1996, the truck’s crew made 86 separate requests for repairs, according to maintenance records. Many of the problems, including several that hampered its ability to put out aircraft fires, took months to fix or were never addressed.
    Two years ago, the truck broke down during a mock airplane disaster at the airport, forcing postponement of the drill required by the Federal Aviation Administration. Fire crews had to tow the truck back to its quarters and extinguish the controlled fire by shutting off the gas.
    The truck’s condition was deemed so fragile that fire officials once limited live-training exercises, fearing the activity would aggravate its problems, firefighters say.
    Much of the fire truck’s problems can be blamed on poor maintenance and the repair shop’s inability to fix the rig. Unfamiliarity with the truck landed three mechanics in Detroit Receiving Hospital’s emergency room March 25, 1998, department records show.
    Mechanics inadvertently pressed a button that blasted 200 gallons of dry, firefighting chemical into the garage, Sgt. Paul Castone, the truck’s driver, said.
    On another occasion, a city’s mechanic visited the airport fire station to inspect the truck’s pump, which wasn’t working properly. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of the problem.
    “Seemed a little sluggish,” reads the July 9, 1998, journal entry. The mechanic suggested that firefighters operate the pump “more often and call in again if (they) still have troubles.”
    Another log entry noted that mechanics had been unable to perform maintenance because of a “lack of air and electrical schematics.”
    The truck’s journal is littered with other entries about problems the shop wouldn’t — or couldn’t — fix. Chief among those were heat shields that had been missing for years and are meant to keep the truck’s controls from melting in the 1,475-degree heat of a jet fuel fire.
    The truck was measured for new shields more than two years ago by a department mechanic but never got them.
    In June 1999, city officials finally bought a replacement truck. But that rig remained out of service for six months because airport and Fire Department officials made one critical mistake.
    They bought a truck that was too big for the fire station. The station’s doorway had to be raised 18 inches and widened two feet for the truck to fit. During the six months it took airport officials to alter the garage door, the new truck sat out of service in a hangar across the airport.

Contact the reporters at churt@detnews.com and mclaxton@detnews.com.