From the Chicago Tribune: Poor communications and an insufficient number of radios contributed to the line-of-duty deaths of two Chicago firefighters last December, according the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s report on the incident.

The NIOSH report also pointed to the lack of a system to alert the fire department to hazardous buildings as among the "contributing factors" that cumulatively put firefighters at risk.

The report said few of the firefighters who were sent into the vacant, dilapidated building had radios, and that supervisors outside the building had no idea what the firefighters inside were seeing.

NIOSH's Tim Merinar said fire-department supervisors should have taken a more defensive approach and ordered more firefighters out of the building once it was clear that no one was trapped inside, as firefighters had feared when they arrived at the early morning blaze.

The fire department received the report in July and has already implemented some of the agency's recommendations, department spokesman Larry Langford said Thursday. Read the entire article here.