Emergency medical technician staffing at the sex offender center on McNeil Island often has not been at proper levels for at least two years, a new state auditor’s report shows. Auditors found the state Department of Social and Heath Services is not requesting money in the next budget cycle to fund four firefighter positions required to meet state rules.
- PUB DATE: 1/19/2017 1:56:25 AM - SOURCE: Olympian

A two-alarm fire caused an estimated $400,000 in damages at a Gig Harbor house late Tuesday, according to the Fire Department. Crews were called about 7:45 p.m. to the home in the 9600 block of Kopachuck Drive Northwest by a neighbor who spotted smoke coming from the wall and ceiling of the front porch.
- PUB DATE: 1/19/2017 1:45:53 AM - SOURCE: Tacoma News Tribune

Maine firefighters are missing out on a training opportunity at the National Fire Academy this year because the state is not in compliance with a decade-old federal ID law regulating state-issued driver’s licenses. Maine is among 23 states and five U.S. territories not in compliance with the Real ID Act, and the Legislature in 2007 passed a law prohibiting the state from complying with law amid concerns that it would create a de facto “internal passport.
- PUB DATE: 1/19/2017 12:00:00 AM - SOURCE: Bangor Daily News

A high-rise building in Tehran engulfed by a fire collapsed on Thursday, killing at least 30 firefighters and injuring some 75 people, state media reported. The disaster struck the Plasco building, an iconic structure in central Tehran just north of the capital's sprawling bazaar. Iran's state-run Press TV announced the firefighters' deaths, without giving a source for the information.
- PUB DATE: 1/19/2017 12:00:00 AM - SOURCE: New York Daily News

Martin Pang, the arsonist who set the deadliest blaze in the Seattle Fire Department’s history, will have to pay nearly $3 million in restitution and other legal costs when he’s released from prison, according to an opinion published Tuesday by the state Court of Appeals. Pang, who is serving a 35-year prison sentence for setting a massive warehouse fire in January 1995 that killed four firefighters in the Chinatown International District, filed a motion in King County Superior Court in August 2015 seeking relief from his legal financial obligations, known as LFOs.
- PUB DATE: 1/19/2017 12:00:00 AM - SOURCE: Seattle Times