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Thanks to Lee and his crew, Estrada may have the opportunity to get back to work as a firefighter, which he says he wants to do — no matter how hard it is for him to watch the YouTube video of the fire, captured on a cellphone by a passerby. The video shows the entire incident from the moment Estrada approaches the warehouse with the hose to the moment he's loaded into the ambulance.
It's a dramatic video to watch — so much so that the videographer was able to sell the clip to Most Daring, a TV show on truTV that aired most recently on Sept. 9. It's so dramatic that many of the comments on the thread following the YouTube video assume the firefighter had been killed. "That guy is for sure dead," commenter humzilla707 wrote. "Blow it up full screen you will see."
Estrada is less bothered by the video itself (or that it was sold for profit) than he is hurt by some of the comment squabbles on that thread. Many posters noted that more than one firefighter was standing in the collapse zone. Some questioned what the department leadership was doing at the time. Still others accused anyone making suggestions based solely on the video of "armchair quarterbacking" without complete information.
When executives from San Francisco's firefighters' union learned that the fire department wouldn't be issuing a full safety report, they asked the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) to conduct an independent investigation. Union officials hope it will provide the department with training recommendations based on lessons learned from the Revere Avenue fire. NIOSH officials started their investigation in August, and expect to have recommendations early next year. Gardner said department heads voluntarily complied with and welcomed the safety audit, even if they didn't initiate it.
But union president John Hanley says a department that cares about its members would have initiated its own full-blown safety investigation — especially since two firefighters were critically injured after a roof caved in during an arson fire on Felton Street just three months before. The department hadn't seen so many serious firefighter injuries in such a short period of time since the mid-1990s.
"There's no doubt that our injuries have increased," Hanley said. He says that the union is very concerned, and hopes that the federal report will shed some light on the causes: "What we want to know is whether this is a temporary spike, or if this is just going to be the way business is done nowadays."
In the last three years, the landscape of the department has changed dramatically because it started offering promotional exams again after nearly a decade without. But few are willing to discuss the possibility that this turbulent history had the unintended consequence of making the risky job of a San Francisco firefighter even riskier.
Following a host of discrimination lawsuits starting in the 1970s, the San Francisco Fire Department promoted firefighters from 1988 to 1998 based on a federal court order that required the city to hire at least 38 percent minority and 9 percent female firefighters. After the expiration of that order, several years of litigation kept promotional exams on hold until 2006, when the department finally offered its first captain's exam in more than 10 years.
According to Hanley and Kevin Smith, president of the San Francisco Black Firefighters Association, the department had decimated its upper ranks by that time — which meant that, starting in 2006, there was a massive influx of new blood to higher ranks. The most recent lieutenant's exam, administered about a year ago, was the first the department had offered in 11 years.
It's impossible to ignore such a glaring piece of context: When the department held off on offering promotional exams for so many years, it backed itself into a corner. Now it's paying the price, experiencewise. Of 200 lieutenants currently in the San Francisco Fire Department, 183 — 92 percent — were newly appointed to their positions, while 62 percent of those promoted had 15 years or fewer of experience. Many veterans had retired before the exams to avoid the possibility of demotion, so the newly appointed had few experienced lieutenants around to guide them.
In addition, Smith, Hanley, and other department sources say that serious flaws in the most recent lieutenant's exam meant many of the more experienced firefighters did not end up high on the list for promotion. "Don't get me wrong," Hanley wrote in a recent union newsletter. "I'm not saying that these people with one or two years' experience are not qualified, but something happened with this recent lieutenant's test where experienced firefighters did not receive a promotion."
Smith agreed with this in a recent interview. "The result is that we have individuals in the department who are suffering, like the senior firefighters, who weren't as successful on this exam as they would have been on an exam that was a more accurate measure of what they're capable of doing," he said. "And possibly there are some people out there now who need more training."
Sources in the department wouldn't comment on whether the recent spike in firefighter injuries could be attributed to a new wave of recently promoted officers. Smith said that kind of accusation would be irresponsible. Gardner insisted that the officers at the Revere Avenue fire had nothing to do with problems at the scene, despite his confirmation that most of the lieutenants had indeed been recently promoted. Hanley simply wouldn't discuss it. No one in the department wants to say that the firefighters, or the public, for that matter, are at any increased risk. "We just want to put our best foot forward," Smith said.
Hanley believes the department can't do that without owning up to and learning from mistakes at fire scenes. Numerous incident reports from the Revere Avenue fire suggest that new officers at incident command — the official body in charge — could use more training. Audry Lee, the assistant chief in charge before Gardner arrived, recommends in his report "continuous training for new officers in Incident Command and management of personnel," among other things. "Practice increased communication of dangerous situations to all crew members," another lieutenant at the scene wrote.
