CONWAY — Firefighters battling a blaze that left a woman and her three children dead last week could not get the closest hydrant to work, hampering rescue efforts for about a minute, the Conway fire chief said Tuesday.
Chief Bart Castleberry said the local fire marshal captain had notified Conway Corp., which operates the city’s water system and other utilities, of a problem with the hydrant after inspections in October 2008 and twice in July of this year, but it wasn’t replaced until the day after the fire.
“It seemed to be, for the lack of a better word, frozen,” he said. “It just wouldn’t work.”
Even so, Castleberry said he doesn’t think the outcome would have changed had the hydrant worked.
Faulkner County Coroner Patrick Moore said Tuesday that one of the children, identified as 5-year-old Gwenneth Snodgrass, died of smoke inhalation and drowning.
“She was seeking shelter,” had gotten into the bathtub and turned on the cold water, Moore said. “The water was still running” when he examined her.
The child apparently was overcome by the smoke and “slipped under the surface of the water,” Moore said.
Her brothers - Christopher, 4, and Arley, 3 - were found on the bathroom floor, the coroner said. Their mother, Jennifer Cissell, 30, was found in the living room near the front door.
Moore said the children’s last names were Snodgrass, the same as court records show their father’s name. Neighbors had previously said their names were Snobgrass.
When a neighbor called 911 at 8:09 p.m. Dec. 21 to report the blaze, “you can hear fire in the background,” Castleberry said. Then, by thetime firefighters arrived at the small, wooden house near Central Baptist College, the blaze was “fully involved.”
“With the knowledge of those two things, I would think their [the victims’] survivability at that point had passed,” Castleberry said.
By “fully involved,” the chief said he means that a fire has “flashed” and is burning from floor to ceiling, and “temperatures ... as well as heated gases and smoke have reached the level that [a person] just can’t survive.”
Upon arrival, firefighters tried to get inside the house to battle the flames with water from a fire-engine tank - standard procedure until crews connect to a hydrant, Castleberry said.
“We listened to the tapes, and the crew that was manning the hydrant radioed the commander that they were having problems with the hydrant,” he said. “The fire ground commander immediately notified his crews inside that water would probably become a problem very soon.
“A little bit after that, you hear him order the evacuation of the interior crew, which means they’ve run out of water. ... In about one minute and three seconds, you hear the hydrant crews say you’ve got water on the way.”
The malfunctioning hydrant was within about a half block from the burning house. The next-closest one, which firefighters used, was about one block from the house, the chief said.
The Fire Department has historically notified Conway Corp. of hydrant problems by phone but in October agreed to start an electronic notification process starting with the new year this Friday, Castleberry said.
Richard Arnold, chief executive officer of Conway Corp., said Tuesday that officials there have “not been able to find any record that we were notified.”
“As I understand it, they had been doing that with a phone call, which wouldn’t leave any trail,” said Arnold, who also noted the plans for an improved notification system. “No one recalls havingbeen notified about it.
“It’s an anomaly,” Arnold said. “I don’t know why the communication didn’t take place or, if it did take place, why we didn’t respond.”
Arnold said Conway Corp. employees got the hydrant working after the fire. “It was hard to open,” so they replaced it, he said.
“Some are more difficult to open than others,” he said, and sometimes the difficulty can vary because of the amount of pressure on a line.
Castleberry said Conway Corp. has been “very good to fix” hydrants quickly in the past.
“Somehow this one just slipped through the cracks,” he said. “We didn’t necessarily have one contact person there. ... It just happened. They [Conway Corp. employees] hated it as bad as we do.”
In an unrelated development, authorities said Tuesday that a fire early Saturday killed two small children in Bee Branch in neighboring Van Buren County.
Deputy Van Buren County Coroner Joe Tsosie identified the victims as Jesse Adams, 5,and his sister, Patricia Adams, 16 months.
Their parents, Wesley and Dusty Adams, managed to rescue two other children. The two surviving children were taken to Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock and are expected to live, Tsosie said.
A Van Buren County sheriff’s office employee who did not want to be identified said authorities do not suspect foul play in the blaze and think a space heater may have caused the fire, reported at 4:02 a.m.
In Conway, records in Faulkner County District Court indicate that the prosecutor has asked the court to dismiss charges of domestic battery and obstructing government operations against Cissell’s husband, Christopher Snodgrass. The couple were living together at the time of the fire, but the husband was at a friend’s housewhen the blaze broke out.
Castleberry has said that authorities believe the fire was accidental. They believe it started “in or near the kitchen cookstove,” he said. “We do not necessarily think the stove was the culprit.”
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 11 on 12/30/2009