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Since 1996, fires have killed at least 200 people in Detroit. Many of the victims were children and the elderly, unable to reach safety on their own. Detroit's older neighborhoods, notorious for their abundance of crumbling homes and abandoned buildings, have been especially hard hit. In these communities, faulty electrical wiring, poorly maintained furnaces and dangerous space heaters have proven a highly combustible mix.

But our investigation had nothing to do with the factors that make the city fire prone. To most of our readers - fed a steady diet of fire stories in print and on television - that would have been old news.

Instead, our nine-month investigation was narrowly focused on the department charged with battling fires. Ours was a simple goal: We wanted to know if Detroit firefighters were adequately equipped and trained to put out fires and protect the city's nearly I million residents they serve.

What we found surprised us and - judging from letters, e-mails and phone calls - shocked and angered our readers. Not only was the fire department unprepared to handle fires, its failures could be directly linked to at least 21 fire fatalities in the past four years.

The department's problems were systemic and pervasive. Some problems had existed for more than a decade but were never addressed.

In each of the 21 deaths we documented, fire department records showed that fire officials were aware of the equipment and manpower problems that hampered firefighting efforts beforehand, but did nothing. Even after glaring mistakes, fire officials took no action to fix problems and continued policies that placed the lives of residents and firefighters in peril.

Wall of secrecy

Because of the large number of fires - at least 12,000 in 1999 alone - we decided very early in our investigation to confine any detailed analysis of fatal blazes to those that occurred in the last four years. This allowed us to work with a manageable universe of a couple of hundred fires.

For each fatal fire we attempted to answer three simple questions. Did the fire equipment work? Where there enough firefighters? Did the policies of the department hamper firefighters in any way?

This simple approach allowed us to maintain the sharp focus needed in an investigation of a large, complex organization like the fire department. With a $150 million budget, 71 fire companies and 1,800 employees, the department was clearly large and complex.

From the very beginning, there were significant obstacles in getting the story. For decades, fire officials have operated behind a wall of secrecy, protected by a standing gag order that forbids firefighters from speaking to the media. It took months to convince many firefighters to talk to us. Even then, most would only do so off the record.

In addition, record keeping in the department isn't centralized and follows no standard format. We had to visit all 71 fire companies in the city, reviewing logs and handwritten journals in each, to determine staffing levels and the condition of fire trucks and equipment.

Further complicating matters, fire trucks are routinely switched between stations and renamed, making it difficult to trace the maintenance history of these rigs. It sometimes took visits to as many as six firehouses to get maintenance records for a single fire truck.

At every turn, fire officials set up roadblocks. They repeatedly refused to produce documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act, claiming the documents didn't exist or had been destroyed. Among these critical records were broadcast tapes - recordings of the conversations between firefighters and dispatchers during fires.

The tapes typically are excellent sources of information about the problems encountered by firefighters at the scene. Fire officials were able to produce tapes for only two of the fatal fires we looked at. They claimed the other tapes were destroyed after 90 days in keeping with department policy.

Quantifying the problem

While our series illustrated many of the fire department's problems through anecdotal accounts, the project was heavily dependent on numbers and statistical analysis.

After spending months gathering data from every fire company in the city, we worked with a newsroom researcher to create databases in Microsoft Access.

These computer files allowed us to analyze attendance records, maintenance reports and fire truck response times. We used this information to determine whether the condition of the fire trucks, the number of firefighters and the state of the equipment dispatched to fatal fires met National Fire Protection Association standards - the benchmark for fire fighting across the country.

We utilized a wide variety of fire department records in creating our databases and putting this story together.

Among the records we used:

* Dispatch tickets. We used these records to determine which rigs were sent to fires, the time they were dispatched and the time they arrived at the scene. By comparing this information with maintenance records and firehouse journals, we were able to determine the condition of each fire truck at the time it was dispatched.

* Run books. The run books kept in firehouses list every run made by trucks stationed there. This information was used to confirm the accuracy of dispatch tickets. We reviewed the run books of every truck in the city.

* Maintenance sheets. These weekly reports show what preventative maintenance or repairs were done on trucks and what repairs are needed. These sheets, along with maintenance logs at firehouses, were vital in confirming the condition of fire trucks. They also provided the dates when the repair shop and fire officials were informed of problems.

* Out-of-service reports. These reports, produced daily by the fire department's communications division, show which fire trucks are out of service on a given day. We compared this information with maintenance records to determine the problems that grounded the fire trucks, when the problems were first reported and how long it took the fire department to fix them.

* Daily attendance records. These records were used to determine the number of firefighters on duty each day, the number out sick or injured and the number detailed to headquarters to do clerical work. We found that on some days, when companies had to be closed for low manpower, fire officials were still sending firefighters to headquarters to do clerical work.

Department failings

Our investigation revealed a fire department riddled with problems. We found that fire officials repeatedly and knowingly sent broken equipment and too few firefighters to put out blazes and rescue people, sometimes with tragic results.

In addition to the 21 deaths we were able to link to faulty equipment or bad decisions by fire officials, we found dozens of other cases where there was significant property loss because of the department's failings.

The full impact of the fire department's shortcomings was most clearly seen at an apartment building fire last year. Four people died and a 7-year-old girl was left paralyzed in that fire when an aerial ladder that hadn't worked in weeks was sent to rescue them.

In another incident, four children died when the fire company just blocks from the scene was temporarily closed and fire trucks had to travel four times the distance to try and save them.

The scope of the Detroit Fire Department's problems was sweeping. Among our findings: The city lists more than 2,000 of its 34,000 fire hydrants - the primary source of water for battling fires - as out of service. But the actual number of broken hydrants could be far greater. That's because the firefighters who inspect the hydrants only do visual checks. They rarely, if ever, turn hydrants on to see if they work. And because broken hydrants are rarely marked, firefighters waste precious time searching for working ones.

The fire department is so short-staffed that firefighters who cook must take the rig and other members of their crew grocery shopping with them. There are so few firefighters in some stations that if the cook leaves, there are usually not enough firefighters left to operate the truck if it is called to an emergency. Firefighters sometimes miss fire calls because for more than a decade the fire department hasn't had an alarm system that rings bells and flashes lights to alert them to emergencies. Firefighters have rigged their own systems using falling pipes, baby monitors and pizza pans.

The building that houses the fire department's training academy is so rundown that the city's public works department assumed it was abandoned and approved it for demolition.

The fire department has operated fire trucks that couldn't go faster than 20 mph, leaked diesel and couldn't carry water. Even the truck's manufacturers chastised the city for poorly maintaining the vehicles, accusing fire officials of operating "death traps."