The chief of the Asheville Fire Department on Monday outlined some of the changes that will be made in the coming weeks following the death of a fire captain last year.
Fire Chief Scott Burnette reviewed some of the changes during a presentation for the City Council's Public Safety Committee and released the department's 522-page internal report on the July 2011 blaze that killed Capt. Jeff Bowen, according to The Citizen-Times.
The internal report details what happened during the fire and provides 160 recommendations in areas including training, span of control and deployment strategy.
Burnette said his department is changing its incident command structure, adding group supervisors who will report to the incident commander instead of having individual company officers report.
He said that the department also plans to switch from 17 fire companies to 16 to increase the number of supervisors and support.
"Rather than having very little support and a lot of units to do the work, we're going to restructure that so we have adequate units to do the work, but we've also got adequate support personnel to support those units," he said.
Burnette said that the department already has implemented some of the recommendations made in a NIOSH report made public last week, including training for out-of-air emergencies.
Firefighters also have completed a new state certification course for rapid intervention.
