In op-ed, widow of Worcester firefighter urges department, city to make changes to save lives of first responders
City officials say a task force to study firefighter safety is in the works.
Kathy Spencer planned to be at a ceremony next week marking the two decades that have passed since her husband and five other Worcester firefighters were killed in the line of duty.
That is, until fire Lt. Jason Menard entered a burning, triple-decker home on Stockholm Street Nov. 13.
The four-alarm fire took the life of the father of three, the Worcester Fire Department’s ninth firefighter death dating back to when Spencer’s husband, Lt. Thomas Spencer, lost his own life in the Worcester Cold Storage and Warehouse Co. fire on Dec. 3, 1999.
“While I am filled with sympathy and compassion for (Menard’s) family, I am also filled with anger and fear for the department,” Spencer wrote in an op-ed published in The Worcester Telegram & Gazette Nov. 22. “Anger that this is the third firefighter that has been killed since my son joined the department in 2010 and fear, selfishly, that it could have been him.”
Things need to change, she went on.
“Something needs to be done to prevent these tragedies which are happening so much more frequently in our city,” Spencer wrote.
City officials agree — and they intend to find answers.
Also on Friday, City Manager Edward Augustus Jr. announced plans to form a task force to study firefighter safety, the Telegram & Gazette reports.
“We appreciate the spirit with which (Spencer) wrote that letter and we understand the motivation. We all are asking ourselves the same thing: How do we prevent this from ever happening again?” Augustus told the newspaper.
He said the task force was not a rebuttal to Spencer’s points. Officials spoke about the formation of the group before the piece was published, Augustus said.
“We’re exactly on the same page, and so there’s nothing to rebut because we’re all asking ourselves that,” he said. “We have the responsibility to do something about it. We’re working on a process to try to come up with additional ideas and strategies that can help not have it happen again.”
In her piece, Spencer names a few possibilities, including training and “systemic examination of the department to — not to place blame — identify and support the clear failures in the system.”
She urged departments to collaborate with one another. She noted that the city’s Abandoned Buildings Committee, which she served on in the wake of her husband’s death, affected “change in how firefighters identify and fight suspected fires in these buildings.”
No firefighter has died battling a blaze in an abandoned property since 1999, she wrote.
“Blaming triple-deckers or other unique structures is not enough,” Spencer wrote. “Firefighter deaths do not happen with such regularity in other cities in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts which have similar multifamily dwellings.”
Fire Chief Michael Lavoie said firefighters in the department undergo a rigorous and extensive internal training program, one that is six weeks longer than the course offered by the state Fire Academy, according to The Telegram & Gazette.
He also told the newspaper, however, that fires have become more intense over the last few decades, as homes have become better insulated and furniture is now made with plastics.
“We have to figure out how, how to properly attack this now,” he said.
Both state and federal agencies are reviewing the Nov. 13 fire.
While officials are still developing a charge for the task force, they said the group would study how the city inspects buildings through its code enforcement.
Augustus said the city would seek to get the task force up and running within a couple of weeks, according to the newspaper. Officials would hope to hear back from the group in a few months.
Instead of attending next week’s memorial ceremony, Spencer wrote that her family and she will instead be at mass in her husband’s childhood church.
“I am known for speaking my mind and that ceremony, a time for reflection and grieving, is not the event for voicing my opinion, but I feel the need to speak up in a different form,” she wrote.
In other parts of her op-ed, Spencer reflected on the road ahead for Menard’s widow, Tina, and the couple’s three children.
“She has no idea the strength she will need in the coming years, but I am sure she will find it,” Spencer wrote.
While coping strategies become part of everyday life, the pain of the loss still endures, she wrote.
“Truth be told, each passing year without Tom in our lives feels like the first day and something must be done to stop another generation from living the way my children, and all the children who have lost their fathers have,” Spencer wrote. “The cycle has to stop.”
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