Above is video from Austin H taken at a house fire on May 31 of last year in Uintah City, Utah. Somehow the video and the controversy surrounding the house fire didn’t catch my attention when it occurred. What did catch my attention was coming across this unfamiliar video while looking for something else yesterday and hearing some pretty scathing comments from citizens.
The issue was the inability of the firefighters to get water on the fire. I have in the past, both on STATter911.com and in my talks about social media, played videos from people I call “citizen water supply officers”. Often they don’t have a clue about what they are looking at and are mistaken in their assessment of the operation (here’s a classic example of that from Corpus Christi, Texas).
But sometimes the citizens are right and they catch you when you are having a very bad day. That appears to have been the case with this fire from Uintah. This is a reminder that all of your screw-ups, no matter how good you are 99.9 percent of the time, will be captured by the neighbor with a cell phone and they will live forever on the Internet.
In this case it appears Chief Mike Marz did a decent job in handling the fallout from the incident. He explained and admitted the problem and vowed to make improvements. I am sure the chief realized he wasn’t going to improve the situation by trying to deny or avoid dealing with something that everyone can clearly see.
Uintah City Fire Chief Mike Marz helped battle the house fire. When he watched the video, he tried to explain what was happening.
“We had to back up the truck because the section of the hose we pulled off was just a hair short,” he said.
After the truck was moved, the water shut off.
“Someone else had jumped in the truck and had knocked the main switch, which shut the truck down,” he said.
Marz said bystanders were sprayed because the valve on the hose was still open.
“We can make sure we place the truck better,” he said.
Marz and 10 other firefighters make up his department, and they’re all volunteers. He said they go through more than 180 hours of training, but mistakes still happen.
“We can always improve, and that’s always our goal,” he said.
