Response to deadly fire appropriate, city says

Thursday’s fire was deadliest in Kettering in 25 years.


A “Mobley Memorial Fund” has been established at Fifth Third Bank, and donations can be made at any branch location. A GoFundMe.com account also has been set up, and a donation drive is scheduled from 1-4 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 21, in the Indian Riffle Elementary gymnasium, 3090 Glengarry Drive.

A fire crew response time of less than five minutes from dispatch to arrival was appropriate during a blaze last Thursday that resulted in four deaths, the most fire fatalities in a single Kettering incident in at least a quarter century, a fire official said.

The first crew arrived at 1963 Craig Drive 4 minutes and 41 seconds after dispatch, according to the fire department. Six minutes and 39 seconds elapsed from the 911 call, which came in at 3:50 a.m., to the crew’s arrival at the fully engulfed home.

“That’s a reasonable amount of time for the guys to wake up, get dressed …. one, they may need to confirm the address of the location, the route they’re going to take, and then get into their fire gear and respond to the scene,” said Jon Durrenberg, a Kettering fire battalion chief.

The fire resulted in the deaths of four family members: Alicia Mobley, her two sons Shaun Mobley Jr. and Jacob Mobley, and her father Forrest Carroll. No cause has been determined.

The tragic incident has caused the surrounding community to plan events or otherwise reach out to help the Kettering family, which has three surviving members in Alicia Mobley’s husband Shaun Mobley and their two daughters.

Funeral services for Carroll (76 years old), Alicia Mobley (36), Shaun N. Mobley Jr. (4) and Jacob Mobley (2) will be held at 11 a.m. Thursday at First Baptist Church of Kettering, 3939 Swigart Road, beginning with a viewing and a burial to follow.

Durrenberg said the Kettering Fire Department will review the incident, as it does in all major responses.

“That’s a process we look at on any critical call,” he said. “We go through a quality assurance process from top to bottom to make sure we did what we needed to do. Beyond taking care of that immediate incident on Thursday morning, after that our first concern was our personnel and their mental well-being. That day and later on Saturday, we got all those crews together and took care of their mental health … and make sure everybody was coming away healthy from that, because it was such a critical, stressful, tragic incident.”

According to the department’s review of emergency broadcasts, the first crew from Station 34, located at 2700 Patterson Road, was dispatched at 3:52 a.m., roughly two minutes after the 911 call, which was made by a neighbor. The Craig Drive address is about 0.4 miles from that station.

Durrenberg said the first crew woke up, prepared and arrived at the scene at 3:57 a.m., or 4 minutes and 41 seconds after the call to dispatch came to the station. The National Fire Protection Association and Ohio State Fire Marshal have non-binding standards that indicate an appropriate response time to structure fires in between 5 and 6 minutes.

The initial crew included two full-time firefighters and one part-time firefighter. Station 34 changed to 24-hour staffing by full-time members in September, Durrenberg said. A total of nine Kettering crews were dispatched, and all were on scene by 4:18 a.m., Durrenberg said. At least 18 members of the Kettering fire department were initially dispatched.

“It was a tremendous, tremendous amount of fire come from that house and the exposure on the south side of the home,” Durrenberg said.

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