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3.7.09

This event just took place; the victims of discrimination and endangerment being the persons served by my company and staff present.

I work in residential rehabilitative housing. The house that was victim homes eight clients, pets and has an apartment on the ground floor (basement) which is also occupied by a person served by my company. There are usually one to three staff on duty at all time; we are staffed 24 hours.

Last night at about 2 am the fire alarm went off at our house. We're linked directly to the fire department so they responded right away. They didn't know why the system went off and reset it (making our alarm company unable to figure out which sensor went off).

At noon the fire alarm went off again. The fire department responded once more and once more reset the system. Again our alarm company could not tell what had triggered the alarm.

At about 6 PM the fire alarms went off a third time. We evacuated our clients to across the street, including the woman who lives in the basement apartment. I called our on-call supervisor to report that the alarm had gone off three times in less than 24 hours. She told me to ask the fire department to check which alarm had gone off so we could clean it as sometimes dust will collect and set off the alarm. When I approached the fire chief to tell him this he replied that I should tell my supervisor to call the alarm company and not to tell him how to do his job.

I relayed this message and called the alarm company myself. Our fire panel was also now making a high pitched buzzing sound that could not be shut off. There was a yellow light on for the ground floor that said "trouble". The alarm company, again, could not tell what had set off the alarm as the FD had once more reset the system. I was told that the alarm company would send sometime to fix the panel and that they would over-ride the alarm calling the FD directly for the ground floor only until it went off again and we could have someone come find the problem.

A little after 7 PM my coworker and I had just sat down to play cards with a client when we heard a loud banging noise coming from the downstairs. I had just gotten in from telling the woman downstairs to be extra careful and to call the FD in the event there was an actual fire and went back downstairs to investigate the noise. The stairs go down to a laundry area and has two locked doors- one going to the woman's apartment the other to our boiler room and storage area. There was water seeping through the bottom of the wall from the area where the apartment or the boiler was. I called my co worker and we banged on the apartment door to make sure her bathroom or kitchen hadn't flooded. It hadn't. I went upstairs and paged our on-call. My coworker unlocked the boiler room door and encountered steam/smoke (she couldn't tell at that point). She came back upstairs and told me, we gathered the clients and pets and evacuated the house (yes, we also told the woman down stairs and had her evacuate with us).

I'll spare everyone the time consuming details of dealing with a large bureaucratic company and having to wait, make a million phone calls and wait some more for the ability to make any decisions or to find out who else to contact. Long story short our responding electrician found out the following:

The ground floor alarm system had not been turned off by our alarm company; it had been turned off by the fire department who [b]did not notify staff they were doing so[/b]. Furthermore, the fire department told our electrician that they did not check the boiler room because staff told them we didn't have the keys to the room (when the FD responds they must check ALL fire detectors; we were never asked for keys to the boiler room by the FD). Also since the FD had wrongly reset the alarm system 3 times it resulted in them having to come back, instead of being able to find the root of the problem after the first incident).

If the FD had checked the boiler room when they responded the first time they would have known why the alarm was going off- steam from the boiler. However they did not do this. Instead, to cover their mistake, they lied and said we said we did not have the keys.

***

Those are the facts. The rest is my opinion.

If this had been a "regular" residence would the FD have turned off the alarms? By turning off the alarm this means that in the event of a fire on the ground floor no one would have known until it was possibly too late. Our house is 4 floors in total- it could take a while for smoke to make its way to a detector still hooked up. Meanwhile, the woman living on the ground floor could have been seriously injured/killed. No. The FD would not, in my opinion, turn off/override a system in a residence, especially without notifying the people who lived there.

By not check the boiler room the FD endangered everyone in and around that house. My co worker could have suffered serious burns upon trying to figure out where the water leak was coming from. I also don't think it's a far fetched thought to ponder that the pressure building up in the boiler and causing the steam and leak could have resulted in an explosion. So maybe the house wouldn't have been blown to bits, we probably would have been okay on the first floor, but what about the woman whose apartment is directly next to it?

The FD also created undue stress for all our clients. Had they done their job the first time we wouldn't have had to repeatedly evacuate the house and wait outside for almost an hour the last time before getting the okay to go back in. Many of our clients have been homeless, the worry that something was wrong with their house and not knowing what was distressing. Also had this been a typical early March day in Boston it would have been freezing outside, luckily it was strangely warm today.

Finally (and this part is a bit selfish) by the FD lying (saying staff told them we didn't have the keys) if someone had been hurt my coworkers and I would have been the responsible party. [b]WE[/b] would have been the ones found to be endangering our clients, most likely loose our jobs, possibly face legal ramifications, have our reputations ruined as service staff and also have felt horrible had someone gotten hurt on our watch.

My coworker and I are outraged. We want to write up something about this and submit it to the town paper where this took place (which is also the town I live in... don't I feel safe now :P). I don't really feel a letter in a paper is enough though.

Who do we contact to file a complaint about this? This is discrimination. If the discrimination isn't clear enough to the larger community the endangerment should be. There is also the point the FD lied to cover their tracks. Oh and neglect. It was neglectful of them not to do their job completely the first time.

So all you mad, wonderful and hopefully outraged Icaristas, who do we contact? This far exceeds the relational aggression and down nose talking we usually face from the FD and PD when they respond to our homes. This isn't a few too many questions about our clients' "history" or an off handed "her again" eye roll by responders. My clients do not feel safe. They feel violated. They know they were violated.

Please, any info/advice you can give me will help. I am going to be out of town Mon-Fri but my coworker and I would like to try and do something ASAP, file a report or something, to get the ball rolling and to make sure this doesn't get swept under the rug.

Oh and also... this is why Boston needs Icarus.