Posted on 07/18/2007 9:24:27 AM PDT by Abathar
BRAINTREE, Mass. -- The Braintree Fire Department is investigating how firefighters participating in a training exercise ended up tearing apart the wrong house.
A Braintree family invited the fire department to conduct a training exercise at their home that was slated to be torn down. But instead of going to 6 Harrison Ave., firefighters ended up a few blocks away at 30 Coolidge Ave.
"My brother called me. He got a phone call and then he called me to come out and look at it," the Coolidge Avenue homeowner's son, Jeffrey Luu, said.
The firefighters were practicing ventilating burning buildings by tearing holes in the roof.
After waiting for the fire department to arrive, contractors ended up demolishing the Harrison Avenue home.
"How can you make that mistake? I don't know," Luu said. "I want to get the assessment of the damage. I just want to fix the house."
The Coolidge Avenue home was vacant after an electrical fire about 14 moths ago. The homeowners were planning to renovate the home.
The town apologized to the family. Fire officials were unavailable for comment, but released a statement that read, "The matter is under internal investigation."
Similiar post here http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1867755/posts
You can get a pretty sweet tax break on a teardown by allowing firefighters to use it for training before the demo.
Oh Poo, I searched the wrong words again...
I know, we own a lake and let the local fire department use our water to fill their trucks if there is a fire in our area. We have the draw pipe set up and a gravel drive for them to get to it. We get to write off much of the maintenance of the lake for that reason.
Don't feel bad, there are whole dissertations devoted to search behavior; part of my dissertation focused on information search in the workplace. You didn't use the 'wrong words,' they were right for you; it's an inflexible search mechanism.
ps - saw your homepage. I'm envious, tho not as envious as I would have been if I were still in Seattle and hadn't moved to Iowa. : )
Oops!
That’s gotta suck
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