Fire Department

About 20 years ago, students tudying to be paramedics at Anne Arundel Community College practiced in the back of an old ambulance at the nearest fire department. Instructors removed the rear doors so they could watch. As ambulances became more expensive, fire departments were less likely to take the vehicles off the street for such use. Until last fall, the Anne Arundel County Fire Department gave students a 20-minute presentation on an ambulance before returning it to duty. For many students that was their only exposure to an ambulance before they went out on emergency calls, said Michael O'Connell Jr., an adjunct faculty member and commander of the training division for the county fire department.

A 29-year-old recruit with the city Fire Department died during a training exercise yesterday as she tried to extinguish a blaze set by instructors in a vacant rowhouse in Southwest Baltimore, according to fire officials. Racheal Wilson, mother of an 11-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter, was inside a three-story dwelling when she collapsed about noon and was taken to Maryland Shock Trauma Center. She died shortly after she arrived, fire officials said. Details of her injuries were not released yesterday.

Six Baltimore fire recruits stood on the back of a firetruck holding a coffin containing the body of Racheal M. Wilson, a member of their academy class. They passed the coffin to six more recruits, and then to six more, who stood in front of New Psalmist Baptist Church. The recruits, wearing crisp blue uniforms, then filed into the church, passing their dead classmate's two children and her fiance, and listened as the fire chief took to the pulpit and acknowledged that the academy, the instructors, and ultimately the city had failed.

The day before a fire cadet died in a live-fire training exercise in a city rowhouse, another cadet and a fire lieutenant were injured in a similar controlled burn in East Baltimore, fire officials acknowledged yesterday. It took several days for the Fire Department to confirm the earlier exercise, and a spokesman declined to provide additional details. A recruit, Daniel Nott, suffered a first-degree burn on his cheek and a firefighter, Lt. Sam Darby, was burned on his hand, fire officials said.

Mayor Sheila Dixon said yesterday that she is "disturbed" and "upset" by reports that fire commanders ignored safety standards in a live-fire training exercise in which a recruit died, and she plans to announce changes in the department as early as today. Backing away from a previous statement in which she supported Fire Chief William J. Goodwin Jr., she declined at her weekly news conference to say whether she still has confidence in his leadership. "At this point I'm reviewing information, and there are a lot of concerns that I have," she said.

With no clowns or marching bands to get in the way, Travis Francis stood on the side of the road in Towson yesterday and got a close-up view of what he had come to see: dozens of gigantic, bright red firetrucks, sirens wailing, gauges and dials gleaming. For a 4-year-old boy, this was the perfect parade. "I want to drive," Francis said, as the first of more than a hundred fire and rescue vehicles -- some antiques, some modern -- rolled by his family on Bosley Avenue. Picking his favorite was easy.

Three members of a family - two of them children - were killed after a blaze swept through a Baltimore apartment complex early yesterday morning. The deadly fire, which witnesses said began before 3 a.m. in one unit and quickly spread throughout the small apartment building at 1903 N. Forest Park Ave. in Franklintown, also displaced about a dozen other families. The victims were found by firefighters in a basement apartment and identified by a family member as Raheem Muhammad, 28, and her son, Royelle Riley, whose 10th birthday would have been today.

The Baltimore City fire exercise that killed a cadet had another potential casualty: the reputation of one of the nation's most highly regarded departments, its heroic image captured in real-life and fictional accounts. Now the department revered for rescue operations such as the 2004 water taxi accident and immortalized in the movie Ladder 49 finds itself in turmoil, its normally insular world vulnerable and exposed. As the investigation into the fatal Feb. 9 fire brings in a review from the outside, the city Fire Department is emerging from two difficult weeks.

Mayor Sheila Dixon dismissed the head of the city's fire training academy yesterday but let the fire chief keep his job after an investigation into the death of a recruit during a training exercise revealed safety violations that have sullied the department's credibility. Addressing her first crisis as the city's chief executive, the mayor said that 25 regulations established by the National Fire Protection Agency were not followed Feb. 9 when instructors set fires in an abandoned rowhouse and sent cadets inside.

A former treasurer of the Riviera Beach Volunteer Fire Company has been charged with stealing more than $50,000 through a check-writing scheme, Anne Arundel County police said yesterday, making him the first member of the Pasadena firehouse to face prosecution amid a wide-ranging investigation. Police have yet to serve an arrest warrant for Kelly T. McColl, 40, who was charged March 31, but they continue to investigate accusations of mismanagement of company funds under former Chief Kenneth B. Hyde Sr. Sacked in February as head of the Baltimore Fire Department's training academy after a recruit's death, Hyde is still acting as chief despite being demoted, several sources said.

Death during violent robbery is ruled a homicide The state medical examiner's office has ruled that the death of a prominent Baltimore-area businessman found face down and bound with plastic ties in his Canton vending machine business July 29 was a homicide, a city police spokesman Detective Kevin Hagan said. Constantine "Dino" Frank, 54, of Baldwin suffered a stroke during a violent robbery at Precision Vending in the 1000 block of S. Lakewood Ave. and died 12 days later at Johns Hopkins Hospital, police said.

Maryland will get $6 million of federal stimulus money to go toward port and transit security and firehouse construction, an announcement government officials made Wednesday in Baltimore amid the backdrop of an unspecified terrorism warning issued this week. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the money earmarked for the state will create jobs through construction projects and is part of a $510 million federal government effort to improve security at some of the country's major ports.

Firefighters and police officers walked through the Rodgers Forge community in Baltimore County on Wednesday night, offering to check homes for safety issues and providing information on emergency preparedness. They will return Friday, Monday and Sept. 21 as part of a new Safe Neighborhoods program. "Our goal is face-to-face meetings to provide information and match the needs of this community," said Lt. Lynn Mullahey, the county Fire Department's public education officer. Prompted by two recent electrical fires, the Rodgers Forge Community Association, which represents about 1,200 homeowners, volunteered to serve as a pilot area for the safety initiative.

Water main break floods W. Saratoga St. A water main break Sunday afternoon in the 600 block of West Saratoga Street heavily damaged the north side of the street, said Kurt Kocher, a spokesman for the city's Department or Public Works. He said the 40-inch wide transmission main ruptured about 1 p.m., closing West Saratoga west of Greene Street. The force of the break raised the street about 8 to 10 inches and created an enormous hole. Kocher said residences and businesses may experience low water pressure and temporary outages.

A burglary suspect pronounced dead by medical technicians after he was shot in the head by police lay for about 30 minutes on the floor of a Northwest Baltimore convenience store before officers noticed he was alive, city police said Monday. A spokesman for the city Fire Department, which oversees emergency medical personnel units, said it was the first misdiagnosis of its kind he could recall in the past five years. Department officials are conducting an internal investigation into the incident, according to Chief Kevin Cartwright, the spokesman.

As if on cue during an event to mark the Baltimore City Fire Department's 150th year, sirens shrieked and ladder trucks raced up North Gay Street just minutes after the fire chief stepped up to the podium. "That noise is a working fire going on," James S. Clack, chief of the city's Fire Department, told the crowd of onlookers, firefighters and officials who gathered Saturday at War Memorial Plaza downtown. "If it gets any bigger, we might all have to leave." Speeches praising the department's dedication and perseverance would be interrupted twice more as a fire under way on Belair Road went to two alarms, then three.

THE PROBLEM : Should no stopping signs remain outside an inactive fire station in Waverly? THE BACK STORY : This Watchdog is ripped from the headlines. Last week, an article in The Baltimore Sun described the century-old Waverly firehouse, which has been closed since June because of a leaking roof, a pigeon infestation and other problems. Firefighters assigned there have been transferred to a nearby station. So, if the firehouse is closed, a Watchdog spy wants to know why city workers are still enforcing the no-stopping signs for a Fire Department driveway on Greenmount Avenue, across the street from the firehouse.

The Baltimore Fire Department, in turmoil over budget cuts, has begun charging a fee to prospective firefighters, becoming the only city agency to charge job applicants. The fee, $10 for city residents and $30 for nonresidents, was added for the recruiting period that ended this week to offset costs associated with the recruitment process, said Chief Kevin Cartwright, a department spokesman. Those costs include a new written examination that puts less emphasis on experience, which fire officials hope will attract more city residents.

A former Baltimore fire chief said the city's plans to scuttle two Baltimore fire companies in a budget-cutting move would jeopardize the safety of firefighters and residents. "This is at a point where you are going to have to do less with less," said former Chief William J. Goodwin Jr., who left the department in 2007 amid controversy over the death of a cadet during a training exercise. "All of these ideas, they've been tried before. They've been proven ineffective or deadly." "I don't see how this will do anything but save money," Goodwin said.

Four-alarm fire forces Cockeysville residents to flee A 4-alarm fire late Thursday night extensively damaged at least one three-story garden-style Cockeysville apartment building and forced the evacuation of numerous residents, said a spokesman for the Baltimore County Fire Department. No injuries were reported. The fire, reported at 11:40 p.m. at the Milestone Manor Apartments in the 200 block of St. David Court, went to four alarms in a matter of minutes and brought firefighters from at least a dozen stations.