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The Personal Alert Safety System, or PASS, is designed to be the last line of defense for a firefighter. But a recent MSNBC.com investigation reveals that the US Centers for Disease Control, the US agency charged with investigating firefighter deaths, ignored warnings in 2000 from a fire safety engineer who said the devices apparently had failed in two recent fires.
It took five more years to discover that the PASS alarms can fail if they get too hot or wet. By then, 15 firefighters had died and their alarms either didn’t go off or emitted a sound so low that searching firefighters couldn’t hear it a review of CDC investigation reports shows.
