A second person has died in an apartment fire in Waukesha
WAUKESHA, Wis. (AP) — A second person has died after a fire ripped through a Waukesha apartment building earlier this week.
Firefighters and police identified the latest victim as 51-year-old Kimberly McQuade. Kevin McQuade, 50, was the first victim of Tuesday morning’s fire at the four-unit building. Three others are recovering from injuries.
A GoFundMe post says the two were husband and wife.
“Unfortunately my father did not survive the fire and my mother was released in critical condition and airlifted to St Mary’s Burn Hospital for life. We would later make the decision to let her go as well their daughter, Katrina McQuade, said in the post.
At a news conference on Wednesday, firefighters and police said an error in a dispatch system delayed the response to the blaze.
Police Captain Dan Baumann estimated a response time of about 5 minutes because a computer-assisted system that provides audio and visual alerting to fire stations did not work as expected.
A dispatcher had to manually override the system to sound the alert to the stations and relay it by radio.
Baumann said a preliminary investigation shows some coding in the system may have caused the error, but an investigation is ongoing. It is led by a division police commander, a battalion fire chief and an assistant administrator from the city’s information technology department.