Above is a STATter911.com post from September 14, 2008 about a weekend FBI raid at the office of Prince George’s County Fire/EMS Department Lt. Col. Karl Granzow Jr (see my September 13 story for WUSA-TV at the bottom of this post). While it didn’t receive wide news coverage at the time, it was clear to those who knew Granzow that this event and simultaneous raids at the home and office of developer Patrick Ricker had strong connections to the corruption investigation of County Executive Jack Johnson.
Today Granzow was sentenced to 18-months in prison for his role in a chapter in Prince George’s County history that many would like to forget. Granzow retired from PGFD in April of 2009.
Karl Granzow Jr. started out as a volunteer firefighter and became a career firefighter where he rose through the ranks. In his final post he ran the department’s management services command, which included fiscal affairs, fleet management, human resources, information technologies and occupational safety and health. In this role Granzow was involved in the planning and building of new fire stations for Prince George’s County.
It should be noted that at one time the Greenbelt Station project mentioned below was to include a new fire station.
Here’s something else we reported in 2008:
Sources say there had previously been concern within county government about Karl Granzow’s ownership of a small percentage of a firm connected to the development of the property. According to the sources, Granzow had properly disclosed his interest and his involvement was approved by ethics officials in the county.
Granzow’s late father Karl Granzow Sr. also was a top PGFD official who I had the pleasure of working with in the 1970s.
The sentencing for Pat Ricker is scheduled for Friday.
A former Prince George’s County fire official who pleaded guilty to extortion and tax evasion was sentenced to 18 months in prison Wednesday.
Prosecutors say 47-year-old Karl Granzow was part of the same corruption scheme that led to the arrest of former county executive Jack Johnson.
Granzow admitted to partnering with county developers to bribe public officials for development favors related to the Greenbelt Station development project.
U.S. District Judge Peter J. Messite also ordered Granzow, 47, to pay $10,000 and forfeit his financial interest in Greenbelt Metropark. After serving his jail time, he will spend three years under supervised release.
He and other co-conspirators, including developers Daniel I. Colton and Patrick Ricker, had ownership interests in Greenbelt Metropark, which worked to develop and build a mixed-use project near Greenbelt Metro—called Greenbelt Station—according to court documents.
Granzow, Ricker and others offered items to public officials—including airline tickets, rounds of golf and in-kind campaign contributions— for approval letters and votes favoring planned development for Greenbelt Station, according to the plea.
County residents, Messitte said, “are outraged at the extent and depth of corruption in this case.”
The defense team called the government’s assertion that Granzow was part of a “corruption scheme” involving the former county executive “misleading and inaccurate.” The conspiracy involving the Greenbelt project, Granzow’s attorneys said, was unrelated.
Granzow, who rose through the ranks of the fire department from a volunteer firefighter to the position his father once held, cooperated extensively with the government in its investigation since 2006, according to court documents. He initially contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2004, his lawyers say, to raise issues of public corruption.
Letters submitted to Messitte on Granzow’s behalf before the sentencing spoke to his family’s long history in Prince George’s. Among the 39 people who wrote in support of Granzow are Del. Ben Barnes (D-Prince George’s), former Prince George’s Sheriff James V. Aluisi and one of Granzow’s high school teachers and coaches.
Prince George’s County authorities are investigating a confirmed explosion in a parking garage near Prince George’s Plaza.
The explosion was reported at 12:19 p.m., in an underground parking garage in the 3300 block of East-West Highway.
About 200 people were evacuated from the building and many of them said they heard the explosion.
Prince George’s County Public Safety Director Vernon Herron said officials deployed their robot and made the determination that an explosive device did go off.
Herron said they are looking for a person of interest who was seen running from the area.
About four blocks of East-West Highway was quickly closed as a precaution but it was reopened shortly before 5 p.m.
Above are interviews with some of the firefighters from Engine 54, Ladder 4, and Battalion 9 who responded to the bomb inside a Nissan Pathfinder parked in Times Square on Saturday. The video below contains Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s remarks from his visit today with the FDNY members.
Here is part of what Mayor Bloomberg had to say about the actions of the firefighters:
The reason I came here was to personally thank the FDNY for the important role that they played. I came here today to meet the members of Engine Company 54, Ladder 4, and Battalion 9. And I would just like to point out near the front door, if you look on the walls, you will see a lot of brass plaques. This Fire Department has a custom that one year after somebody dies in the line of duty, they put up a brass plaque in memory of that person, but mainly I think to tell the young recruits that come into these fire houses that somebody has paid a terrible price but they are the role models for all of us. Those are people that put their lives in danger and unfortunately didn’t come out. And there were 15 from this house who lost their lives on 9/11. And I wanted to thank all of them, and you see some of the young ones here, for their deft and professional response to the car bombing in Times Square.
Justice Department diagram of how the Nissan Pathfinder was rigged.
“I was able to shake hands with a lot of them at about two in the morning on Sunday morning. Members of this fire house responded when Police Officer Rhatigan saw a fire in the car and immediately notified his superiors that something was awry. The vehicle was parked haphazardly, the engine was running and the smoke emanating from the rear was white which is unusual for a vehicle fire. The fire officers on the scene then used thermal imaging cameras to detect the heat source, and once they saw that that the only heat was coming from the engine itself and the smoke had a different source, they worked hand-in-hand with the NYPD to evacuate the area and keep the public at a safe distance so the bomb squad could arrive and do its work. And then they stayed throughout the night to help secure the area.
“Our Bravest did exactly what they have been trained to do in such situations. They knew not to apply water or any other extinguishing agent. Their quick thinking and restraint preserved important evidence – evidence that could be very significant in the ongoing investigation of this act.
The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) along with the the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (COG) Fire Chiefs Committee unveiled the subway system’s new battery-powered, portable response and recon vehicles today. The emergency management types at WMATA have been telling us for some time about this new capability and their efforts to train area fire departments on the use of the new carts.
We have posted four videos showing and describing the Mobile Emergency Response Vehicles (MERVs). Below, are clips of the vehicle being assembled and a ride on the rails photographed by 9NEWS NOW’s Greg Guise. At bottom, is raw video of the press conference with Arlington County Fire Department Chief Jim Schwartz.
At top, is the story for 9NEWS NOW by Bruce Leshan. That story includes Vito Maggiolo video and 911 calls from an April, 2000 incident where a train filled with 250 pasengers was sent to check out a report of smoke in a tunnel. They became trapped by an electrical fire. Bruce also wrote the article that follows:
Firefighters from across our region are showing off a new battery-powered rail cart that could make all the difference if there’s another Metro crash.
The $20,000 carts were designed in Britain to speed firefighters to emergency scenes deep inside the London Tube. The DC region is the first in the U.S. to get them.
Firefighters say there have been many incidents when they could have used the carts in Metro.
“We can’t breath!” a desperate passenger pleaded to rescue workers 10 years ago, while hundreds of passengers were stuck in a stopped train in smoky Metro tunnel.
“It took about an hour for the firemen to get there,” Susan Little told 9NEWS NOW.
Firefighters say the 26 “Mobile Emergency Response Vehicles” will help them speed into crises far faster.
“The other day, they put it together and had it going down the tracks in one minute and four seconds,” said one Arlington firefighter, as he watched the cart zip down a rail line at a Metro Yard in Alexandria.
Firefighters have carts now, but you have to push them. Loaded down in turnout gear, it can take them an hour to get to a scene. With the cart, they can go twelve miles an hour and get to a scene in minutes.
After the Sarin gas attacks 15 years ago in the Tokyo subway, British security officials asked rescue workers to invent a vehicle to get passengers out from deep under London in the tube.
The carts were used extensively after the terrorist attacks on the London subway in 2005.
Arlington Fire officials say they sure could have used one in a drill that had a train stuck under the Potomac between Rosslyn and Foggy Bottom.
“In that one, it took 45 minutes to an hour to get to the victims,” says Arlington Battalion Chief James Daugherty, who’s been leading the project. “With a cart like this, five to ten minutes at most.”
In London, firefighters are actually drilled on driving the subway trains, so that if the operator is incapacitated in a poison gas attack, the rescuers can pull up in the cart and drive the train passengers to safety.
The carts were paid for with a $860,000 grant from the Department of Homeland Security.
We have a winner! The very first entry into our top stories contest for 2009 correctly guessed the top story of the year. Even though the rest of that person’s top five weren’t on target, it gave me hope for you people and this contest. Once again, Statter was wrong.
Many of you were blinded by our extensive coverage of PGFD and one man in particular, who at last look was still in the Prince George’s County Detention Center. You will have to scroll way done to number 14 to find his picture on this page. Other entries, including one from a person who should know better, focused way too much on our coverage of the District of Columbia Fire & EMS Department. Only one DC story made the list (but it was a big one at number two). In fact, only eight of the top 20 were local stories from the Washington, DC area. Remember that for next year’s contest. We are global in scope here at STATter911.com (yeah, right!).
To get a winner we had to go deep down to someone who guessed two of the top five. While he had the two top stories in reverse order, author and fire service veteran from Baltimore County Chris Hawley was the only entrant to get more than one out of five. The good news is the two Baltimore boys should have lots to talk about when this one buys lunch.
Our rankings are based on the number of pageviews between January 1 and December 31, 2009 according to Google Analytics. If a story had multiple postings we only counted the top one for our list.
The interesting thing is that the bottom two stories and the 21st story were just nine clicks apart. Their rankings kept changing up until the closing hours of 2009. In the end, a somewhat odd, but newer story from Montgomery County, Maryland moved up, knocking off one of my personal favorites from earlier in the year. Number 21 is the story of Alexandria Fire Department (VA) veteran Doug Townshend who, while off duty, rescued his brother Mike from a burning home. Click here for that story.
Click the Popeye cartoon to see what used to pass for a year-end review at STATter911.com.
By the way, I did this type of year end review, rather than the more humorous (at least I thought so) version of the two previous years, because I thought it would be easier to manage. I am writing this at 4:00 AM on New Years Day, so now I am not so sure. If you miss the old one, here it is (I am sure most of it is still true today anyway).
Obviously isn’t just us taking a look back at 2009 and ahead to 2010. Other fire service sites beat us to the punch. Paul Peluso at Firehouse.com says 2009 was the year of the video (look below for proof). FireRescue1.com has a host of characters writing lots of words under its year in review banner. Billy Goldfeder has a message for the new year at FirefighterCloseCalls.com. Paul Combs has a great thought in his December cartoon at FireEngineering.com. I am sure Bill Schumm will have something to help bring in the new year Firegeezer style and so will many others who share the FireEMSBlogs.com site with this rag. .
And Rhett Fleitz at The Fire Critic, who is a great inspiration and supporter to all of us who blog, has a contest that is better than mine. Rhett is looking for the Fire/EMS Blog of the Year 2009 (now you know why I said those nice things about him). Rhett’s is better because he is promoting it as the contest with the prize where you don’t have to sit across the lunch table from Dave Statter.
Thank you to all who entered our contest. Thank you to all who read and comment each day. Thank you to all who link to STATter911.com and carry our stories. Most important, a happy and safe 2010 to all of you and especially those out there protecting us each and every day.
So, drum roll please! We present our 20 most popular stories from 2009:
This was the story that dominated 2009 on STATter911.com. Not only did the posting on May 30 (our fourth posting on the topic) bring in 43 percent more pageviews than our number two story for the year, three other stories on the confrontation would have taken places two, three, and four. When you add up the clicks for the almost 20 stories we posted on this topic they account for about five-percent of the overall traffic on the blog for 2009.
There have been more than 700 comments (actually a lot more than that, but many we couldn’t publish). A couple of comments still arrive each week.
I think the reason for the high numbers, besides being a hot topic, is that we apparently reached way beyond our normal fire and EMS service audience on this story. It helps that the YouTube video above, which has more than two million views, has our link in its description.
As much grief as I get for carrying too many negative stories on the blog, the only reason the world knew about this one is because I was trying to do a good deed and post some positive news. On Wednesday, October 7 there were two sprinkler demonstrations scheduled in the National Capital region. One at Gallaudet University and the other at the University of Maryland (at MFRI). My goal was to get to both of them, but the Maryland one was the priority because of the release of a study about Prince George’s County’s mandatory residential sprinkler law. I never made it to DC and no one said anything to me about a problem during that demonstration.
As I was about to leave work the following evening I was feeling guilty the DC sprinkler video didn’t get any play in my story the day before (there had been a photographer on the scene from LNS, the local news service run by my station and two others in Washington). I pulled the video up with the intention of editing something for the blog and possibly WUSA9.com. Of course, as I watched the video, I immediately realized there was a little bit more to this demonstration.
This entry had 128 comments. More comments came in after Chief Dennis Rubin, when talking about what he saw, used the term “comedy act”.
Firefighter Will Gregory exits the home with his PPE on fire. Photo by Brian Haney, The Daily Record.
This was a late entry for the year. It came about because FirefighterCloseCalls.com first put out the story of the close call based on the newspaper article by Brian Haney at The Daily Record in Dunn, NC. Figuring that there might be more than one photo, I called Mr. Haney and he told me he had shot 210 images from that fire. Brian sent a bunch to STATter911.com and gave us permission to use the photos.
Until a day or two ago, this was in the number three spot for the year. In my heart I wish it was number one. I was blogging away on the Friday afternoon that Ladder 26 wrecked trying to keep up with the developments from Boston. Later in the evening when we learned that Lt. Kevin Kelley was the firefighter killed, it didn’t take long to find his appearances from Firehouse USA on the web. How can you not smile when you watch these?
While I get a lot of stories and videos from your tips, this is one I found all by myself. Going through fire related YouTube videos on a Sunday evening I happened upon this clip. I usually don’t run controlled burning type training exercises, but this one looked different. After picking my jaw off the floor upon seeing the unusual PPV via the leaf blower, I decided this was one worthy of a wider audience.
You have to admit this one was different. The 160-foot Spirit of Washington squeezed the 72-foot John H. Glenn Jr., putting a big gash in the Glenn’s hull and sidelining the boat for many months. The collision also crushed a small FBI boat at an adjacent dock.
This is a rather simple story of a rescue in that it was popular despite there being no video of the event. Firefighters saving the day when it looks like that might be impossible.
Here’s how WZZM-TV’s Lambrini Lukidis described the story:
Kelysse LaBelle is full of energy today. But when fireman Scott Campau rescued her from the bottom of Fisherman’s Landing in Muskegon last week, Kelysse was purple, her eyes were gray and lifeless.
“The stroller was actually sitting up-right on its wheels on the bottom of the lake and she was unconscious,” said Campau.
“She wasn’t breathing, no heart rate,” said Battalion Chief Ken Chudy who lead the team on the call. “She was lifeless when we pulled her out of the water,” said Fireman Kevin McMillan also assisted by firemen Chad Horn and Scott Hemmeslbach.
Eight Prince George’s County firefighters were hurt when an explosion occurred while they were investigating a natural has leak at a shopping center in Forestville.
Truly one of the great stories of the year. John and Joel Rechlitz received national attention for their off-duty rescue of a young boy from a burning car. Their efforts didn’t stop after the rescue. The firefighters remained close to D.J. Harper and his family. Click here.
In December, 2008 Continental Flight 1404 ran off a runway and burst into flames at Denver International Airport. This was the audio as the airport tower controllers directed firefighters to the scene.
The fireground audio provided by Erie County Fire wire was very difficult to listen to as these two men responded to a call for help inside the burning building on Genesee Street.
Layoffs and budget cuts were THE story of 2009. We saw a lot of stories like this one, but for some reason the Flint fire got more attention than the others.
What more can I say about this frequent subject of STATter911.com stories. In the interview Jerry Engle told us all about an arson ring involving firefighters. Later in the year Engle and another former volunteer from Riverdale were both charged with the fire Jerry told us about. If you haven’t read enough about him, click here for our Jerry archive.
A touching tribute to firefighters who were lost 50-years earlier. The incident is believed to be the first time the term BLEVE was used to describe the rupture and rocketing of a flammable liquid container during a fire.
It took teamwork and a lot of guts as a dispatcher and engine company worked to save a woman trapped in an apartment fire started thanks to a neighbor’s meth lab. Video shows Chad Meyer from Engine 26 basically walking through fire to bring out Nikki Cain.
This entry from Montgomery County had to be one of the more unusual stories of the year. A firefighter’s date spent the night at the firehouse and got lost on the way to the bathroom.
What this means is that, even though Kyle Wilson died in a house fire in April, 2007 and the report was released nine-months later, firefighters are still interested in learning from this tragic situation. Enough people searched, found and apparently read that entry in 2009 to make it part of our top 20.
A man was arrested Saturday on suspicion of setting a small fire at the temporary home for the remains of thousands of World Trade Center victims, police said.
Police announced the arrest nearly 12 hours after the fire, which was set following a break-in. Charges against the 26-year-old were pending, police said.
The smoldering flames in a section of the facility’s chapel on Manhattan’s East Side were quickly extinguished.
Firefighters got a call at about 9 a.m. to respond to Memorial Park, a weatherproof tent on Manhattan’s East Side where the city is storing the remains of 9/11 victims who have yet to be identified.
The fire damaged a wooden bench, while mementos — pictures, notes, flowers — honoring the dead disappeared.
“Anyone who would set fire to the inviolable Memorial Park chapel is craven and contemptible,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a statement.
Fire marshals and police were investigating.
Nazli Parvizi, the mayor’s community affairs commissioner, sent 9/11 families an e-mail informing them of the incident. Sally Regenhard, whose son perished at the World Trade Center, forwarded the statement to The Associated Press.
Parvizi told the families that about an hour before the fire started, a break-in was discovered in the chapel. Memorial Park is near the city medical examiner’s office, which created special photo IDs to be used by families to enter the site.
Authorities were unsure whether the mementos had been stolen or burned, “but little remains inside the chapel,” said Parvizi, adding that the structure showed some smoke damage.
The Washington Post reports the FBI raided two Prince George’s County, MD government office buildings on Saturday as part of a probe into a very large new development planned near the Metro stop in Greenbelt.
Grand jury subpoenas have been distributed and it appears one of the people investigators are interested in is a part-time employee of the Prince George’s County Fire/EMS Department. Among the places raided by the agents is 9201 Basil Court in Largo. That building is the headquarters for the fire department and another agency.
Two law enforcement sources said agents used a search warrant to enter the offices of J. Michael Dougherty, the county’s director of finance. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the raids.
A government source, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said agents also raided a government building that houses offices of the fire department and information technology systems.
The scope of the FBI investigation was not clear. However, the source with knowledge of the subpoenas said they sought information about contacts with prominent lobbyists and developers. They included Michael Arrington, who has been a lobbyist for one of the partners in the Greenbelt project, and developers Patrick Ricker and Daniel Colton, the source said.
Colton, who was released from prison in 2004 after serving three years for bank fraud, and Ricker did not immediately return calls seeking comment. Arrington said he was unaware of a probe and had no comment. Dougherty also could not immediately be reached.
The subpoenas also sought information about former County Council member Thomas R. Hendershot, who in December was hired as a temporary, part-time employee with the fire department. Hendershot declined to comment yesterday.
Before leaving office in 2006, the New Carrollton Democrat pushed zoning legislation that benefited the development. Although the property around Greenbelt station was zoned for industrial use, Hendershot’s 2001 legislation allowed mixed-use development as long as it is of “high quality and sophistication.”
County Executive Jack B. Johnson (D) did not return a call for comment. James Keary, a spokesman for Johnson, said FBI agents “positively did not” go into his offices yesterday. He said he could provide no other information about the raid, but said that neither Johnson nor his top aides have engaged in any wrongdoing.
“This is, what, the third fishing expedition?” he said, referring to other investigations in the county that have not resulted in indictments. “They have not yet caught even a minnow.”
From WUSA9.com
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