Knight Chair in Investigative & Enterprise Reporting
Investigative reporter interviews
Melvin Claxton, Detroit News
By Quynh Tran
The November 2000 four-day series, “Out of Service,” revealed how inadequately Detroit's fire department protected its citizens. After nine months of investigation, Melvin Claxton and colleague Charles Hurt found rampant negligence and mismanagement that lead to more than 20 citizen deaths between 1996 and 1999.
Based on complaints from firefighters and their union, the reporters knew about the poor conditions, but no one had documented the fire department's failures. People did not know that broken equipment could be the reason for the fire fatalities.
“One interesting thing about fires is that people never blame the fire department,” said Claxton. He could not find any lawsuit against the fire department in which it was blamed for fire deaths. For the reporters' investigation to hold up to scrutiny, the team needed to make a direct connection to show that the city's complacency, poor firefighter training and lack of manpower had all led to the fatal fires.
However, the fire department's long-standing gag order restrained firefighters from speaking with the media, and fire officials repeatedly withheld requested documents. It took months to convince many firefighters to speak, and most would do so only if it was off the record.
Yet Claxton found a retired dispatcher's name in the fire department annual report who agreed to help with the investigation. She told them of internal dispatcher records which were not standard fire department records. The revealing documents included details about each engine, including its condition, all malfunctioning equipment and when it was sent out on fires. But gathering the data was tedious. Trucks were routinely reassigned to different fire houses and renamed, so the team sometimes had to visit as many as six stations to get the maintenance records for a single truck.
The dispatch unit was responsible for sending trucks to fires, but dispatchers had no knowledge of the condition of a fire truck before it was sent out on fires. To solve this problem, about six years before, dispatchers developed their own system independent of the fire department that included a daily list of in- and out-of-service trucks. Because the dispatchers' internal records were not recognized by the fire department, officials initially refused to release the records to the reporters, claiming they were “non-official records.”
After filing a Freedom of Information Act request for the dispatchers' thousands of pages of records, the team built a database that focused on the fatal fires (about 35 per year), which showed that the department frequently matched untrained firefighters with broken-down equipment, including trucks, aerial ladders and pumper engines. For example, while the city had 24 ladder trucks on any given day, only five or six may have been operational.
In half of the cases, Claxton said, stations did not have the required four men to a truck. Cooks doubled as firefighters, so when they were out shopping for food, the station was left with fewer men. While departments in Chicago operate with six men, Detroit runs with fewer than three men on average, forcing many fire stations to remain closed.
Even on the job, more than half the cases involved unqualified drivers — so-called “star men” — nicknamed for the star after their names. Without required specialized training, drivers or “engineers” smashed fire trucks into cars on the way to fires and, more importantly, could not hook up the pump to the hydrant once they got there. One week after the series ran in the Detroit News, six children died in a fire when unqualified engineers could not operate the pump.
Without a burn tower to use in training for real fires, Claxton and Hurt also learned that firefighters who were trained in the last six to seven years had no real experience fighting fires until they got on the job. They “make believe” fires during training.
Claxton and Hurt physically visited all of Detroit's 71 fire companies and initially did not inform the fire commissioner or other top officials about the investigation. They interviewed approximately 300 firefighters, as well as dozens of federal and state officials. Once they went to the officials, the city clamped down and issued orders that they were not to see records. But the team had already seen every record in every fire house. “The dispatchers' records confirmed the work we had done,” said Claxton.
The team also requested the broadcast tapes documenting conversations between dispatchers and fire trucks. Claxton said that people frequently mistakenly request the 9-1-1 tapes, which only state to the effect “there's a fire in a back building. We're burning to death. Send a truck.” The broadcast tapes would reveal much more — “I'm at the scene. My ladder doesn't work. I can't rescue people” — the real problems firefighters face. However, the fire department had destroyed most of the tapes and only provided tapes from two of the investigated fatal fires. The ones that Claxton and Hurt received evoked Nixonesque tactics of deleted sections.
To show that city officials should have known about the poorly functioning trucks, the investigators found letters from fire truck manufacturers sent to the city stating the trucks couldn't be fixed or warned that the trucks shouldn't be on the road. When fire trucks could not be fixed, they were sent back to the manufacturers. For example, the reporters discovered that Ladder 7 truck, Detroit's frontline engine, was purchased from a small New Jersey fire department that had sold it as scrap.
Yet the fire commissioner did not know what was going on. Claxton said that, given the amount and disparate sources of information, city management did not realize the impact of the reports and ignored them.
The investigation required about one month of preliminary research including interviews with potential sources such as disgruntled workers, reviews of basic records and planning for a summary of the project. An extensive outline that asks “Why are we doing this” and a list of questions became a road map for the project.
For investigations of large organizations such as a fire department, Claxton recommends focusing on these three main areas:
Manpower training- How are personnel trained?
- Are there sufficient numbers of firefighters?
- How is the equipment maintained?
- How do decisions affect the operation of the department?
- Where was the money spent — did they fix trucks?
- What happened when they had reports — is there a mechanism to move complaints to solutions?
Often you come across many things that are interesting, but they are not part of the story, Claxton said.
He also cautions reporters against inserting opinions into an investigative story, but allows some “editorializing.” For example, the reporter can write “It was a senseless act. ...” but include evidence and illustrate why the act was senseless.
Claxton acknowledges that lengthy and expensive investigative pieces may lead to prizewinning work and recognition, but they also take away funds from other general assignment beats and day-to-day reporting. “This is a sacred profession,” he said upon receiving the Roy W. Howard prize for public service reporting for the series.
Claxton received a 1994 Pulitzer winner for the “Virgin Islands Crime“ series, which documented the relationship between the islands' rampant crime and corruption in the criminal justice system.
Tran is a former journalism student in the College of Media at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.