Pang Fire Investigators Not Given Complete Data The First 44 Minutes Of Fire-Dispatch Tapes Not Provided By Seattle Fire Department

The federal agency asked to investigate the Mary Pang Food Products fire, which took the lives of four Seattle firefighters in January, wasn’t given complete information by the Seattle Fire Department.

The first 44 minutes of fire-dispatch tapes - which included the initial “sizeup,” failures to detect a basement, and other critical events leading up to the fatal collapse of a floor - were not provided to the U.S. Fire Administration, Fire Capt. Raymond Risdon, head of the arson squad, said Monday.

Risdon said the agency got the same dispatch-tape information provided The Seattle Times, under the state’s public-records law. That tape didn’t start until five minutes after the floor fell into the basement inferno, and doesn’t reflect earlier communication problems.

J. Gordon Routley, the former fire chief who was lead investigator for the federal agency, said the King County prosecutor has told him he can’t talk about what information he was or was not given. He acknowledged he has heard only part of the fire tape.

Fire department officials also refused to comment.

The Times has sued the city of Seattle for release of the first 44 minutes of dispatch tape. King County Superior Court Judge Jim Bates has ordered its release and fined the city, but the city is appealing.

Gordon Vickery, a former Seattle fire chief and former U.S. Fire Administration chief from 1979 to 1982, said the Pang fire needs a lot more investigation.

“The tapes may be the key to the whole thing,” Vickery said. “It’s impossible to make an objective and complete report on this fire without having the … tapes.”

Also, Routley said, he did not recall ever seeing a two- or three-page arsonresponse plan that was written when investigators, acting on a tip, thought the Pang warehouse would be torched in mid-December.

That plan called for staked-out investigators to capture the arsonist while fire equipment quietly responded to the area without lights or sirens, positioned to fight the blaze after the arrest.

Only two paragraphs of the 48-page federal report dealt with the arson tip.

Kenneth Kuntz, program manager for the Major Fires Investigation Program of the Fire Administration, said he thought the department handled the arson tip appropriately.

Kuntz said there are not enough resources to station a fire truck outside every building that has been threatened with arson.

Fire department spokeswoman Georgia Taylor said many facts about the surveillance will be revealed after the trial of Martin Pang, 39, son of the owners, who is charged with murder and arson in the fire.

The failure to inform firefighters of the arson threat is a key issue in the fire.

The department already has made some improvements in following up on arson-threat information, Fire Chief Claude Harris said.

Since the Pang fire, four other buildings have been threatened with arson, and all four have been inspected. The dispatch center now routinely notifies firefighters when they are en route to a building that has been the target of an arson threat.

City fire officials used the announcement of Monday’s report to say their initial evaluation of the fire had been correct and the disaster might have been unavoidable because of the need to protect a witness.

Harris and Risdon said the reason the Pang tip was not pursued after the stakeout ended, 19 days before the fire, was to protect the key informant, Rise Pang, an ex-wife of Martin Pang. Rise Pang had given detailed information and drawn a map of the area where the fire was to be set.