Photo: Steve Neavling, Motor City Muckraker
One thing for sure: A mock plane crash at Detroit's Coleman A. Young Municipal Airport on the east side shows the city needs to address a lot issues before a real disaster.
Steve Neavling of Motor City Muckraker reports:
A long-planned mock crash landing at Detroit’s city airport was nothing short of a disaster Tuesday, raising serious questions about the city’s preparedness for a real catastrophe.
The chain of blunders began shortly after 9 a.m., when the alarm at Coleman A. Young Municipal Airport never alerted central dispatch of a “plane crash.”
Eventually realizing that dispatchers were never alerted, an airport official said at 9:14 a.m., “I guess my alarm box at the tower is not working.”
As a mobile aircraft fire simulator was set ablaze, another 18 minutes passed before dispatchers sent firefighters to the east-side airport, an unconscionable amount of time for any emergency, let alone a fiery plane crash.
“We have heavy fire from a fuselage from a plane,” the first arriving firefighters radioed to dispatchers at 9:35 a.m.
Complicating matters, firefighters had trouble communicating because some of them didn’t know how to access the airport channel on their radios.
Neavling writes that airport firefighters lack a functioning rig, so they used handheld hoses
The city concedes it has a lot to improve on, Neavling reports.
