Alex Wood
New Haven Register, Conn.
(TNS)
Apr. 11—NORWICH — The city’s main fire department was delayed by four or five minutes to the fatal blaze on Otis Street where a woman and her 8-year-old daughter died early Thursday because of a malfunction in the local dispatching system, an official said Friday.
Norwich police on Friday identified those who died as Carmen Vizcaino, 44, and her daughter, Skylynn Owens, 8.
Lt. Thomas Lazzaro, a spokesperson for the Norwich Police Department, said the city’s dispatch center received the 911 call reporting the fire at 12:57 a.m. Thursday. Lazzaro and Marc Benjamin, battalion chief for the Norwich Fire Department, said the first dispatch went out at 12:58 a.m.
The dispatch center, which is located in the Police Department, sends an alert to one of the local fire departments when those agencies need to respond to a call, Benjamin said. He said the alert opens an audio frequency so the fire department personnel can hear further communications.
For some reason, the audio frequency failed to open after the dispatch center learned of the Otis Street fire, Benjamin explained. As a result, he said, messages were being transmitted over radio waves, but were falling “on deaf ears.”
But volunteer with the East Great Plain Fire Department were returning from a call at the time and did hear the radio transmission in the fire truck, where the radio was “live,” Benjamin said. That is why they arrived first at the Otis Street fire scene, he added.
Benjamin said the Norwich Fire Department learned of the fire four minutes later, at 1:02 a.m.
That happened, he explained, due to an email system designed to alert people who ordinarily would not be part of the initial response once a fire has been confirmed. Those alerts would go to the fire chief, the department’s training officer, the building official and public utilities, among others, he said.
Benjamin said that alert woke up a fire department lieutenant, who alerted the battalion chief on duty.
In a news release, Norwich Fire Department Battalion Chief Michael Dziavit had said the East Great Plain Fire Department was the first to arrive at the scene around 1:08 a.m. Benjamin said the battalion chief who was on duty at the time told him he arrived in a command vehicle about a minute behind the East Great Plain volunteers with the Norwich Fire Department’s fire engines immediately behind him.
If the dispatch system glitch had not occurred, Norwich Fire Department personnel would likely have arrived four to five minutes earlier than they did, Benjamin said.
Benjamin said radio companies were at the fire station Thursday testing the system. As of early Friday, he said, he did not have a clear answer as to what had caused the problem.
Aside from the problem that caused the response delay, he said, the system worked fine on Wednesday and Thursday.
The reason an alert is needed to activate speakers in a fire station, Benjamin explained, is that leaving the speakers open at all times would result in those departments receiving numerous radio messages that have nothing to do with them, creating the possibility that important messages would be missed.
In addition to the professional Norwich Fire Department, the city has five volunteer fire departments.
Benjamin said Norwich has been working to upgrade its dispatching system for two years, adding that the new system should be operational soon.
Benjamin said there has been an “ongoing issue” with the dispatch center for years and he’s heard of other local fire departments having radios