Florida man’s house burns; plea for help rebuffed

PLANTATION, Fla. – A Florida man ran barefoot from his home to the closest fire station, about four houses away. Banging on the door, he hollered: My house is on fire!

But Neville Morrison, 67, was turned away by an emergency medical technician, who insisted he call 911 by phone and not report the fire in person, fire officials said.

“I said, ‘I have no phone,’” Morrison recounted. “I said, ‘You can see the blaze coming out of the roof of my house.’ He told me twice to call 911, and then he closed the door with me standing outside.”

Once a neighbor called 911, it took crews eight minutes to get to the scene, a half-mile distance by street. Much of the house was destroyed, and Morrison’s family of five was displaced.

The Fire Department has launched an investigation into the Nov. 15 incident. “Obviously that’s not the way we do business,” fire spokesman Joel Gordon said. “Now there is an investigation going on.”

Gordon declined to name the paramedic. “The individual has been counseled already and spoken to,” he said. “It was a mistake, an obvious mistake. It appears to be a moment of bad judgment.”

Gordon said the EMT, a longtime employee with a clean record, should have kept Morrison at the station while he called dispatch himself, so volunteer crews could be mustered. “That’s not what transpired,” he said.

Morrison said he discovered the fire when he heard his cat meowing, opened his bedroom door, and found the room ablaze. He called to his wife and daughter to get out. The blaze was too much to fight with a garden hose, so he bolted to the Broward Boulevard station, hoping to hasten a response – and because his phone was in the burning room.

After he was sent away from the station house, a second paramedic started to follow him on foot.

They didn’t get far. A lieutenant overheard Morrison’s plea, and reached for his radio to alert crews. At the same instant, a neighbor was calling in the blaze, as was a passerby on Florida’s Turnpike.

The volunteer crew had to wait for at least three members to arrive at the station before engines could roll. From the time of the first 911 call, it took them seven minutes, 58 seconds to cover the distance to Morrison’s house. The department typically averages six minutes to get to a fire.

Gordon said the response time is not part of the investigation. “It’s not ideal for us, but it’s not out of the ordinary,” he said. “On occasion this does happen and we get them longer than that.”

But time was no factor anyway. “The fire was so bad, whether it would have been three minutes or eight minutes, it wouldn’t have made a difference,” Gordon said.

The house was destroyed. No one was injured, but two cats died. Morrison and four others – his wife and three children ages 24, 18 and 16 – were relocated to a hotel by the American Red Cross.

The cause of the fire is unknown, Gordon said, because it’s hard to determine a point of origin with such extensive damage.

But Morrison remains bitter.

“Your house should not have to burn to the ground when you are four houses away,” he said.