Smoke Alarm: Death of Home Rule
By Jeffrey Goldberg
The New Republic, January 20, 1997
I am reading an open letter slipped under my door by our neighborhood commissioner, a woman named Beth Kravetz. In the letter she reports on the local fire station at Tenley Circle on Wisconsin Avenue. The station is home to a pumper and a hook-and-ladder truck that cover a good stretch of predominantly white, mostly affluent Northwest Washington, D.C.
She writes that “true to the spirit of self-reliance,” a group is forming in the virtual suburb surrounding American University to collect donations for the firehouse: among the items needed are three shower heads, eleven pillows, forty gym lockers, three space heaters, a dishwasher, three wall clocks, five air conditioners and four refrigerators.
This is a trend in Washington. During the blizzard of 1996, it became apparent that the city lacked snow plows in adequate condition to dig out the streets. The realization that our truck shortage might extend to fire trucks is obviously more disconcerting. So across D.C., Washingtonians are taking matters into their own hands. In Georgetown, residents recently donated mattresses to their firehouse; in Chevy Chase, neighbors donated an extension ladder for their local engine company—the ladder is used to reach second stories of houses, which were unreachable by previously ladderless firefighters. Around the city, residents are preparing for a repeat of last winter, when they pooled their resources to clear their streets and alleys of snow.
I had assumed that this outpouring of private philanthropy was best explained by public sector incompetence of near-heroic proportions. To borrow from Nathan Glazer, Washington is the apotheosis of a city that has stopped doing the things cities do well—putting out fires, picking up trash—to do the things cities don’t do well, such as building an all-encompassing welfare and patronage state. But I was put straight by Alvin T. Carter, the Fire Department spokesman, who explained to me that the department doesn’t need the donations but accepts them in the spirit of community.
“It is not necessary for the community to do this,” he says. “But this is helping the neighborhoods make connections and build community involvement. The Fire Department is going through some tough fiscal times, and the community responds to the tough times by wanting to identify little things they can do. There are people who out of the goodness of their hearts want to contribute, and we’re trying to accommodate them.”
So the Fire Department doesn’t actually need donated refrigerators and ladders?
“It isn’t bad for us to have this material in reserve,” Carter says. It is the wealthier neighborhoods west of Rock Creek Park that do much of the donating, he explains; this frees up equipment purchased by the department itself for use in some of the poorer neighborhoods. Carter says the department can find within its $106 million budget the money to look after its firefighters, who work twenty-four-hour shifts and who therefore eat and sleep in their firehouses. “We differentiate between two levels of donations. We provide things like mattresses and refrigerators and ovens. But the department does not buy certain things for them, such as newspaper subscriptions and condiments.”
All of this is news to the firefighters at the Tenley station, who told me the department regularly fails to provide them not only with condiments, but with heat, light and working fire equipment. Until late November, a broken boiler forced the Tenley firefighters to place fans in front of their gas oven to blow heat through the house. I asked one of the firefighters why he and the others didn’t die from the fumes. “The house is very drafty,” he said, “so the wind kind of blows them right out.”
Even when the boiler is working, the Tenley station is in terrible condition. I visited recently, without official escort, and the firefighters were eager to catalog the station’s deficiencies—on condition that I not use their names. “When we complain too much,” one said, “they threaten to shut the house down.”
Big rat holes pockmark the firehouse grounds. There is a sinkhole, covered with metal sheeting, in the bay that holds the 29,000-pound hook-and-ladder truck. One firefighter said he is afraid the truck will soon fall into the sinkhole. The truck itself is 18 years old and looks fatigued. “This truck wouldn’t pass D.C. vehicle inspection,” this same firefighter said. “It has no bumpers, no marking lights. I’m afraid the engine won’t turn over one day.” On the day I visited the Tenley house, three of the city’s sixteen ladder trucks were out of service, and, on November 7, The Washington Post reported that five trucks were not working. Days later, Ray Sneed, president of the firefighters’ union, told me that not one of the city’s three heavy rescue vehicles was operational.
Half the lights in the Tenley house are broken, as are many of the windows. The house’s electrical system, firefighters said, does not meet D.C.’s fire code, and the fire poles don’t meet Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards. They are loose and uncloseted, and diesel fumes from the garage float into the sleeping quarters through the pole holes. (Carter told me that no pole holes were uncloseted, except perhaps at one firehouse in Georgetown, and that the Tenley station is “in good condition.”)
The fire department is one of several city agencies still under Mayor Marion Barry’s control, more or less. While Barry was in Asia on a recent trade mission, the city’s federally appointed financial control authority, which is quickly dropping any pretense that it isn’t actually running the city, appointed a retired general to fix the anarchic school system (see Erik Wemple, “Democracy’s Discontent,” page 20). But the fire department has yet to get its own general. A number of the firefighters I spoke with, most of whom are black and many of whom long ago moved their families to the suburbs, say they wouldn’t mind new, federally appointed leadership. The department may avoid a takeover, but only if it avoids tragedy. A fire last June at the Treasury Department was illhandled, but it led to no loss of life. But it would take, of course, just a minor tragedy at a Senate office building or at the White House to spur a takeover.
For the moment, though, the department remains understaffed and poorly equipped; Carter says new firefighting equipment should arrive in the city ” as early” as 1998. Material shortfalls will be made up, for now, by community groups like the one in my neighborhood, which are engaged, in essence, in an act of doubletaxation. “We support it like a volunteer firehouse, and then we pay taxes on top of that to pay for it,” Kravetz says.
One of the things you learn when you move to upper Northwest D.C. is to donate money to the Bethesda-Chevy Chase Rescue Squad, a volunteer ambulance operation in the neighboring suburbs. I asked a firefighter at the Tenley fire station if, in his own emergency, he would prefer to receive help from BCC, as it is known, or from the D.C. Fire Department’s ambulance service.
“BCC, definitely,” he said. “The only problem is, they only have ambulances, not fire apparatus, so in a fire it’s D.C.” The firefighter, who lives in a suburb himself, smiles. “That’s too bad for you, I guess.”