A blogger unknowingly opens a hornet's nest. Video from one of the most controversial fires in Prince George's County, Maryland history.
Click here for May, 1994 story by reporter Miriam Hernandez
About every day I check the site Firefighter Spot to see what new videos Jason Thomas has posted. What I found today was the clip above that Jason found on YouTube (uploaded on Tuesday by someone who uses the name DCFDfirefighter100). Jason asks on his blog, “Anyone familiar with this job?”.
Jason, you are about to find out there are a lot people familiar with this one. It is from May of 1994 and is among the most controversial fires in Prince George’s County history. For PGFD that’s saying something.
Here is what I know about the fire. A 19-year-old pregnant woman, her two-year-old son, and a four-year-old girl who was a family friend, died in the burning home at 5206 Emerson Street in Edmonston, Maryland. The woman’s four-year-old daughter escaped the blaze.
The woman called 911 saying her son had set the couch on fire with a lighter and that she was trapped inside the with the two children. While I don’t have the exact times, that conversation with 911 happened shortly before the arrival of Prince George’s County firefighters. That information was relayed to firefighters.
What made this fire so controversial within PGFD is that the first units on the scene were ordered by a chief officer not to enter the building and were told to fight it from the outside (you can hear and see some of that on the video). There have been very bitter feelings about this fire ever since.
I believe this is the first time I have seen the complete raw video since 1994. The video is the one most requested by STATter911.com readers. The requests surged again as I finished my career at Channel 9 last month and began posting and writing about old stories from the archives. While I didn’t find this raw video in the archive room, I found a story done at the time of the fire by my friend Miriam Hernandez (now with KABC-TV in Los Angeles).
I had Miriam’s story ingested and started writing about the fire. But I got cold feet. I wimped out and never posted the story (though it did appear in the STATter911.com video player for a bit).
It is not that I am afraid of controversy. I just didn’t feel like dealing with it. It was not the way I wanted to end my career in broadcasting. I didn’t want to handle the comments and all of the finger pointing (and I still don’t want to).
Now that Jason has posted the video and asked the question, I feel somewhat obligated to provide an answer and share it with the STATter911.com audience (as I have done with other Washington area videos Jason has discovered).
