Dispatch System Error Delayed Response to Fatal WI Fire

Official with the City of Waukesha said an error with the dispatching system caused a response delay to a fatal apartment fire earlier in the week that left two people dead.

The Waukesha police chief said Wednesday crews were delayed in their response time by about five minutes because of a software malfunction, WISN reported.

"We are comprehensively exploring every aspect of the response to this tragedy in detail from the time the call was taken until all the responding units arrived on scene. We are doing everything in our power to determine the cause of any delays to ensure that it does not happen again,” the city said in a statement on Facebook.

Due to the system failure, dispatchers had to manually override the alerting system in the stations and relay the information over the radios.

Fire Chief Steve Howard said, “Any delay is not acceptable and that's why we're going to make the effort to work as a team to look at why this happened and prevent it from happening in the future."

Official say their investigation shows some coding may have contributed to the error but will continue their investigation to determine the cause.

The apartment fire earlier in the week left two dead and injured multiple people. Two occupants were forced to jump to safety from the second story to escape the fire.