By DAN TELVOCK
Spotsylvania County Fire and Rescue Chief Chris Eudailey is launching an internal investigation of a fatal house fire in which the victim pleaded for help over the phone as rescuers searched other areas of the house.
The investigation comes more than a month after the Feb. 5 fire on Spotswood Furnace Road and two weeks after The Free Lance-Star requested recordings of radio dispatches and 911 calls from the scene.
Eudailey said such an investigation has never happened for a fire incident in his 21 years with the department.
He said this review will help him determine why it took volunteer rescuers 20 minutes to find 43-year-old Sandy Hill, even though she had been on the phone with a 911 dispatcher trying to direct firefighters to her second-floor bedroom.
Hill was unconscious by the time rescuers reached her. The Geico employee and local actress was pronounced dead at Mary Washington Hospital.
Hill's roommate, Christine Brown, got out of the house on her own without injury and called 911 at about 12:54 a.m.
A search team entered the house at 1:01 a.m., four minutes after the call was dispatched ( TRANSCRIPT | AUDIO ) and one minute after the first fire engine arrived at the scene near Riverbend High School.
Brown's 17-year-old daughter was rescued through a master bedroom window on the first floor in about 13 minutes.
During this time, Hill was upstairs on her cell phone telling a dispatcher that she was in the back bedroom to the left of the stairwell. That information was relayed several times to the fire-and-rescue volunteers.
The fire started in a downstairs hallway in the 2,000-square-foot, two-story home, said Fire Marshal Brian Seay. The occupants were renting the four-bedroom, two-bath Cape Cod home, built in 1953.
The cause was a small electric coil heater sitting on a box, Seay said. He said the fire was small and contained to the hallway, but there was heavy smoke damage throughout the home.
The battery in a smoke detector downstairs was dead, he said.
The Free Lance-Star sent recordings of the dispatch and 911 calls to three fire-and-rescue experts. Two said they couldn't call the rescue effort flawed, based on the recordings, but all said what they heard raised enough red flags to warrant an independent review.
Carl Maurice, a Spotsylvania resident who spent 32 years with the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department, is the only expert who listened to the recordings and also viewed the exterior of the house.
"If someone presented this scenario to me in theory, I would have expected the victim to survive," Maurice said. "The question everyone has to ask is 'Why didn't she?'"
Kevin Dillard, the administrative chief and spokesman of Chancellor Volunteer Fire and Rescue Department, initially sent an e-mail a few hours after the fire praising the 45 volunteers involved for an "awesome job."
But this week, after learning more about the response, Dillard said he thinks an investigation is warranted.
Dillard said he knew few details when he sent the e-mail. Only after after some volunteers criticized the response two weeks ago did he begin to realize "serious" problems related to the response, he said.
For example, thermal imaging cameras that could have helped locate Hill and the teenager were available at the scene but were not used.
Dillard said a ladder was never deployed to Hill's bedroom windows, and the crews seemed to be confused with the layout of the house and where Hill was trapped.
Dillard said ventilating the house to remove smoke came late in the process because there was a delay in announcing that the fire had been extinguished.
Eudailey said he has asked County Administrator Doug Barnes for a separate, independent review, and "I would not rule that out, yet."
Meanwhile, Eudailey said two career firefighters and two volunteers will review the incident. He said he wants the review team to meet this week and inform him how it plans to conduct the investigation and how long it will take.
Dillard said he supports the review.
"We are going to take responsibility for this," he said. "No one wants to make those same mistakes again."
Dan Telvock: 540/374-5438
Email: dtelvock@freelancestar.com
Dispatcher: Emergency Interruption. She's going to be by the door. She's trying to call for you.
Command: Engine 10, you copy? She's by the door?
[A firefighter reports that the 17-year-old in the house has been rescued then the conversation returns to the search for Hill.]
Firefighter: Second floor, no results. We're going to the first floor again.
Command: Direct. She's reported to be in a bedroom by the door, if that helps at all.
Dispatch: We can hear the firemen banging on the door.