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CHICAGO (AP) -- The fire department failed to gain control of the public address system during a high-rise blaze that killed six people, many of them trapped in locked stairwells, an investigation concluded.
The city's report on the Oct. 17 fire also said the lack of a rule requiring immediate top-to-bottom searches of the stairwells helped lead to the deaths, the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times reported Wednesday. The report was to be released Wednesday morning.
The broke out on the 12th floor of the 35-story Cook County administration building. All the victims died of smoke inhalation and were found in the upper floors of the high-rise; many of them had been in one of the smoke-filled stairwells.
The report also faulted building managers, saying they ordered tenants to evacuate the building into the locked stairwells contrary to their training in the city's high-rise evacuation procedures.
``A number of things didn't go the way that every agency and all involved would have wanted it to go - from the first telephone call to the evacuation announcement to the locked stairwells until these people were located,'' Cortez Trotter, executive director of the city's Office of Emergency Management and Communications, told the Sun-Times.
Trotter said the original evacuation order was made before firefighters arrived. Once fire officials were at the scene, however, they did not take control of the public-address system, losing the opportunity to stop employees from evacuating by way of the locked stairwells.
The victims were not found until 90 minutes after the fire broke out, after firefighters had brought it under control.
The city's report, based on interviews with fire department and other city employees, was designed to examine the city's response to the fire.
Officials have said that firefighters followed department procedures by conducting primary and secondary searches on floors closest to the fire. Firefighters also went to specific floors where they had gotten calls for assistance, but there wasn't a top-to-bottom search of the building's stairwells until the fire was brought under control.
The cause of the fire has not been determined, but lawyers representing victims of the fire suspect a fluorescent light fixture malfunctioned
