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The Detroit Fire Department, with all its warts and glory, is about to get its Hollywood moment.
“BURN,” the documentary on the DFD that won the audience award at Robert DeNiro’s Tribeca Film Festival in April, premieres in Detroit Friday night, at the Fillmore.
The Los Angeles-based filmmakers, Brenna Sanchez -- who grew up in Detroit -- and Tom Putnam, spent months in the city starting in September 2009. Their film is an intimate portrait of firefighters at work and home, as well as an examination of Detroit from an unusual angle – fire.
I’ve written about the DFD over the years, and I helped the filmmakers by answering questions and finding statistics. But I’m not writing today about the film, which I haven’t seen.
I’m writing about something “BURN” wasn’t able to cover – the enormous changes the fire department has undergone since Sanchez, Putnam and their crews wrapped up filming in January.
"A whole other movie has happened," Sanchez told WRIF's Drew and Mike Thursday morning.
Since early July, the department essentially has become a guinea pig in an unusual urban experiment.
Under pressure from the state to balance its budget, the Bing administration has significantly scaled back the fleet of rigs, laid off and demoted firefighters, reduced their pay, cut their pensions and raised their health-care co-pays – all while the firefighters do more work.
Department members who dropped in rank because of the layoffs took a pay cut for the demotion on top of the 10-percent reduction that everyone suffered.
“I’m making what I was 15 years ago, but doing three times the work," said one firefighter, who had been a sergeant before July.
The experiment consists of seeing whether the shrunken department, staffed by a seething workforce, will be able to put out all the fires every day of the year in the place that burns more, proportionally, than virtually every other major city in America.
Fire Commissioner Donald Austin, one of the featured personalities in “BURN,” and the fifth head of the department since filming began, has acknowledged that he has to live within the budget restraints.
At a community meeting this summer, he said: “I go to bed every night praying I don’t wake up to a disaster.”
A week ago tonight, that scenario almost happened.
A house on the East Side exploded and injured four firefighters, none critically, which was a minor miracle considering some of them were inside the dwelling when it blew. The fire spread to two other homes.
One of the crew members, gasping for breath, called into the central dispatcher.
"House explosion..Injured firefighters...Send us what you got, central."
In a posting on his Facebook page afterward, another firefighter, who was not in the explosion, wrote: “You almost got that nightmare call last night, commissioner. By the grace of God you skated again.”
That incident, on Lamont Street, near Ryan and E. McNichols, illustrates the problems the scaled-back department faces every minute of every day.
Engine Co. 56, stationed nearby, arrived on the scene first, and its crew was alone when the home blew up. Because of cutbacks and lingering building problems, a couple of the rigs that normally would have been sent to the fire from relatively short distances were either out of service or located in more distant stations. So it took them longer to reach the scene, a common occurrence with up to 20 units sidelined every day.
Extra units were dispatched. Ladder Co. 17 was one of them, but because its mechanical aerial is broken – equipment problems are common in the DFD-- the chief had to call for another truck.
In that same neighborhood, two nights earlier, several fires broke out, damaging or destroying a handful of mostly abandoned homes. Such mini-Devil’s Nights -- in which one neighborhood sees several fires in rapid succession -- have occurred several times in the past few months. Crews speeding to one fire sometimes call in burning structures that they pass while en route to their assigned blaze.
In fact, shortly after the Lamont explosion last Thursday, rigs from across the city descended upon the area around Chene and Gratiot to fight multiple blazes. Because the department is spread so thin, some units traveled from far outside their usual districts. That also happens nearly every day.
Firefighters say the longer response times are giving fires time to expand, and they are seeing more blazes that have spread to adjoining homes.
The Detroit Fire Fighters Association has filed a lawsuit against the city, charging the cuts endanger residents and fire personnel. Their lawsuit says two people died and one was injured this summer in fires located near shuttered stations.
Even the vacant stations have proved to be a problem for the city: At two engine houses, scrappers broke in and created serious damage harvesting valuable metal.
This great experiment with the scaled-back DFD can be followed in real time by anyone with a mobile phone. A free app, Scanner911, can be downloaded and used to listen to the department’s radio traffic.
It’s fascinating to eavesdrop. It’s a story, though a sad one, a narrative of the city slowly consuming itself, night after night, neighborhood by neighborhood.
Like "BURN," the disembodied voices on the radio serve as a reminder that human beings are caught in this increasingly treacherous daily drama that passes for normal life.
Borrowing the term the commissioner used, it too frequently seems like the whole thing is a disaster waiting to happen.
“We’ve been right on the edge of disaster a couple of times, but we haven’t crossed the line yet,” a firefighter said last week. “It’s going to happen one of these nights.”
To listen to the DFD radio traffic surrounding the house explosion on Lamont, click here.
For information on Detroit showings of "BURN," click here.
