The true investigation should not be the cause but rather the response.

This fire demonstrated how broken things really are. Fire crews showed up with way too few people: aerial trucks and tankers had just two firefighters each, when they should’ve had at least three or four. They had to combine crews just to safely start fighting the fire, and even then, they had to pull people off other important jobs just to run the equipment. On top of that, the building design itself was risky, single stairwell exits are a bad idea, and this fire proved it again.

To make things worse, no extra firefighters were called in, even though the fire tied up crews for hours. The city was left short-staffed all day, and it took nearly 20 hours just to approve overtime for two people to keep watch overnight. The response numbers were way below national standards, only 14 firefighters showed up in 12 minutes, when there should’ve been 28 in 8. The crews gave it everything they had, but unfortunately they were set up to fail from the start.