United States (Connecticut) - The first thing that should have happened to firefighters Steven Velasquez and Michel Baik if they were running low on air to breathe is that their face masks should have vibrated. And maybe their face masks did. "It means get out of where you are now," says a veteran firefighter. "You are low. Move now. You don't know if you have five minutes or more. If you are like me, and it's a hot, humid day and you're in a place with poor ventilation, you gulp down air and you'd better move out."

One of the threshold questions investigators will have to answer as they parse through the self-contained breathing apparatus the Bridgeport firefighters were wearing Saturday when they climbed into a third-floor attic to search for hot spots and trapped residents is: Did this equipment work properly? And if it did, why didn't Velasquez and Baik survive the house fire? Was the attic so filled with smoke that they couldn't see their way out?

Attic fires in homes as old as this one involve balloon construction. What starts out as a small blaze can flash over and spread lightning fast inside the walls and wires of a building and rage out of control in a matter of minutes.

Firefighters within the department don't want to speculate about why two of Bridgeport's bravest are dead. They intend to wait out the investigation, several say, before making any remarks out of "respect for the families."

Unlike many workplace fatalities where questions spiral into more inquiries, sometimes with no clear answers, investigators looking into the death of these firefighters should be aided by inspection reports maintained either by the Bridgeport Fire Department or an outside agency it contracts with to inspect and keep tabs on its equipment.

Every cylinder has a serial or tracking number the department can access to identify that specific unit. According to National Fire Protection Association code, fire departments are required to have tracking and inspection systems to keep tabs on every self-contained breathing apparatus. The NFPA standards, updated in 2007, require departments to have "records for maintenance of each individual SCBA regulator, reducer, harness, cylinder" and for all "valve assemblies and facepieces."

In many ways, SCBA are like aircraft and automotive parts. They have to have either a manufacturer's serial number or some other unique identifier as well as a paper trail that shows their date of manufacture, when they were put into service, inspected, tested and/or repaired, as well as the name of the person or company that did that work.

Only days ago, the NFPA released a nationwide analysis of firefighter fatalities that shows that 82 firefighters died in the line of duty last year. How does that 2009 statistic compare to previous years? The NFPA says it's a "sharp drop from the 105 on-duty deaths that occurred" in 2008 and "the lowest annual total since 79 deaths in 1993."

To be sure, that will be cold comfort for the Velasquez and Baik families struggling to make sense of their deaths. Saturday these two firefighters went to work, and although they appreciated the dangers of their occupation, or calling, they expected to return home to their families at the end of the day. The only bit of comfort they can expect to get now are answers.

What happened and why -- the sooner the better. Investigators owe them that much.

Written by Connecticut Post