Officials: Response to fatal Ohio fire appropriate

12/18/2013

KETTERING, Ohio  — Firefighters’ response time to a blaze that killed four people at a house in southwest Ohio was appropriate, fire officials say.

The Kettering Fire Department said the first crew arrived at the burning home less than 5 minutes after it was dispatched. Six minutes and 39 seconds elapsed from the time of the 911 call to the arrival at the fully engulfed home one week ago Thursday, according to the Dayton Daily News. The call came in at 3:50 a.m.

National and state fire officials consider an appropriate response time to structure fires as between 5 and 6 minutes.

Jon Durrenberg, a Kettering fire battalion chief, said the department will continue to review the response and aftermath.

“That’s a process we look at on any critical call,” Durrenberg said. “We go through a quality assurance process from top to bottom to make sure we did what we needed to do.”

He said the department also checks up on the firefighters. A total of nine Kettering crews were dispatched to the scene.

“That day and later on Saturday, we got all those crews together and took care of their mental health,” Durrenberg said, adding that officials want to “make sure everybody was coming away healthy from that, because it was such a critical, stressful, tragic incident.”

Investigators are still trying to determine what caused the fire, the second-deadliest in Ohio this year. Six people were killed in September in a mobile home fire in Tiffin, in northwest Ohio.

The Kettering fire killed Alicia Mobley, her two sons Shaun Mobley Jr. and Jacob Mobley, and her father, Forrest Carroll. Funeral services are planned for Thursday.

Shaun Mobley Sr. and their two girls escaped from the burning house. Mobley said earlier this week that his wife awoke him to say there was a fire, then went to get their sons while he went to help their daughters get out.