The Taoyuan City Fire Department should be reprimanded over its investigation into the deaths of six firefighters after a fire at a bowling alley in Taoyuan’s Sinwu District (新屋), family members and labor rights advocates said yesterday, adding that important questions about the cause of the tragedy remain unanswered.
“The department still has not given any clear explanation to family members and frontline personnel about what really happened and what went wrong,” said National Association for Firefighters’ Rights secretary-general Cheng Ya-lin (鄭雅菱), who along with about a dozen family members and supporters held a protest outside the Control Yuan in Taipei.
Six firefighters were killed in Sinwu last year after the burning sheet-metal roofing of a three-story building caved in.
Cheng said it remained unclear whether the firefighters had been able to receive wireless commands to retreat, while the retreat of the fire truck to which their hoses were attached was also contentious.
While the approaching blaze posed a danger to the truck, the corpses of the firefighters were found within 10m of the entrance, suggesting they might have been able to find their way out if their hose had not been cut off, she said, adding their presence in the building also raised questions about the fire department’s safety protocols.
“Fires in sheet-metal-roofed buildings are very dangerous because it is extremely easy for roofs to soften and collapse at high temperatures, sometimes taking only half an hour in the absence of steel reinforcements,” she said, adding that textbook case studies typically advise firefighters to avoid entering such buildings except to save lives.
“There was no one trapped in the Xinwu case and the fire’s source was located deep at the back of the building. We want to know why they were still sent in,” she said, adding that the fire department has continued to order firefighters to enter metal-sheet roofed buildings even when no lives are in danger.
The father of Chen Feng-hsiang (陳鳳翔), a firefighter who died in the blaze, said that firefighters’ corpses had to be identified via DNA testing because they had been allowed to burn for hours after the building collapsed.
“There is nothing to say if our son was truly sacrificed for the common good, but what remedial measures were taken?” he said. “We are not trying to blame individuals or agencies, but we hope that a review will awaken them to their weaknesses and avoid similar things happening.”
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