Apartment Fires

[LGreene]

There seem to have been a lot of apartment fires lately, or maybe I'm just noticing them more. The fire in Chicago over the weekend clearly illustrates how the fire door leading to the apartment can protect the rest of the building occupants, as well as the lack of understanding about this from most apartment dwellers. If you haven't read about it, the residents of the unit where the fire began propped the self-closing door to their unit open to allow their cat a chance to escape. Of course, that allowed the smoke, flames, and gases to fill the corridor, trapping residents in their apartments. A resident rode the elevator to the same floor and when the doors opened, she was exposed to temps upwards of 1500 degrees, and she died.

I know that the lack of sprinklers and sensors for the elevator contributed to the problem, but the open door to the apartment was easily avoidable. One of the articles (http://www.myfoxchicago.com/dpp/news/metro/shantel-mccoy-fatal-fire-high-rise-lakeview-drive-open-door-sprinklers-upgrade-20120110) talked about a similar building nearby, where residents had been educated about their doors by the fire department: "The building across the street has been upgraded, and residents there say they’ve been instructed to keep their doors closed in a fire. 'We’ve also been told — we’ve had seminars with the fire department — to never to leave a door open. They’re fire doors,' neighbor Pat Gabelick said. 'But I’m sure these people didn’t have the info that we had.' "

My question is this...do any of you have ideas about how to educate the millions of people living in apartments about fire safety, including the need to close their door if there is a fire? Is fire department training common (I've never heard of it prior to this article)? Is there any requirement for landlords to give basic instructions to tenants? I think there is a need for this information to reach the tenants, but I don't know the best route.

 

[AegisFPE]

Is there any requirement for landlords to give basic instructions to tenants?

Apartments, timeshare properties, et al are Group R-2. IFC Section 408.9.3 requires distribution of an emergency guide to each tenant prior to occupancy. Section 408.9.1 prescribes the minimum content of the emergency guide.Transient sleeping units (e.g. Hotels/Motels) are Group R-1, where as a guest you should find evacuation diagrams, fire safety and evacuation instructions as required by IFC Section 408.8.

 

[LGreene]

Apartments, timeshare properties, et al are Group R-2. IFC Section 408.9.3 requires distribution of an emergency guide to each tenant prior to occupancy. Section 408.9.1 prescribes the minimum content of the emergency guide.Transient sleeping units (e.g. Hotels/Motels) are Group R-1, where as a guest you should find evacuation diagrams, fire safety and evacuation instructions as required by IFC Section 408.8.

Thanks! I'll check out the requirements for the emergency guide. I wonder if this guide actually gets distributed to tenants. It has been a while since I've lived in an apartment. Do fire marshals typically check this when inspecting multi-family properties?

 

[forensics]

Hmmmm ......

how about some sprinklers !!

 

[LGreene]

Hmmmm ...... how about some sprinklers !!

I agree that sprinklers would have been key in preventing this tragedy but the building was built before they were required. Speaking of sprinklers...can someone educate me? Do sprinklers completely remove the need for closed doors? I'm not asking code-wise...I'm asking functionally. In the same scenario with propping the door open for the cat - if sprinklers had extinguished the fire, would there have been so little smoke that it wouldn't matter that the door was open?

 

[Builder Bob]

I agree that sprinklers would have been key in preventing this tragedy but the building was built before they were required. Speaking of sprinklers...can someone educate me? Do sprinklers completely remove the need for closed doors? I'm not asking code-wise...I'm asking functionally. In the same scenario with propping the door open for the cat - if sprinklers had extinguished the fire, would there have been so little smoke that it wouldn't matter that the door was open?

Possibility that it could eliminate the need for closed doors - allowable tradeoffs in the building code allow for removal or reduction of fire rated construction with the use of sprinkler systems. Do I think that leaving a door open durring an apartment fire with automatic sprinklers or without automatic sprinklers a good idea -- absolutely not .

Fire Protection needs to be a balanced approach. To much emphasis on one thing is the same as placing all your eggs in one basket. However, not having all three components of a balanced approach is like having a pair of pants with one pocket missing off the back side ----- that approach is going to fail eventually with somebody losing --- usually not the contractor or the developer.

 

[VillageInspector]

To answer your question, a properly installed and functioning sprinkler system would have greatly reduced the amount of smoke, physical fire damage, saved the life of the victim AND the cat probably would have escaped as well. But what do we retired fire service guys know.

 

[beach]

But what do we retired fire service guys know.

Don't worry, there's one or two that will let you know!

 

[LGreene]

This news blurb passed through my email box today:

"On December 9, 2011, Ramapo Police responded to #124 Rt. 306 for a reported structure fire. Investigating officers learned that a lit candle fell off a table and ignited a tablecloth and a chair. The flames were extinguished by the apartment’s sprinkler system. The tenant, Feiga Tirnauer, 24, told officers that she and her three children were in the apartment when she noticed the flames and evacuated the apartment. The apartment is on the upper level of a two apartment structure. The lower apartment was also occupied at the time. The tenants there also safely evacuated. There was significant water damage to the two apartments. Orange and Rockland utilities shut the electrical supply to the unit and Kaser fire inspector W. Press ordered the apartments secured until an inspection of the electrical system could be made. Both tenants said they would stay with family in the area. Monsey FD was in command at the scene."

I will eventually have my house (at least the basement and kitchen) retrofitted with sprinklers.

 

[cda]

"""There was significant water damage to the two apartments"""""

This is what gives fire sprinklers a bad name,

Should read something like" the fire sprinklers saved the building from significant damage, if not complete destruction.""

As for informing apartment dwellers, are city is fifty per cent population of apartments

We do not have so called high rise units, but mainly breezeways

I do not remember a fire where a door has been proper open, but sure it will happen one day

No we have not done that type of message, our biggest Problem is kitchen fires, which we have tried to address

 

[FM William Burns]

What....how did I miss this one???? Anyway I saw this in another forum in LinkedIn.

Lori,

My question is this...do any of you have ideas about how to educate the millions of people living in apartments about fire safety, including the need to close their door if there is a fire? Is fire department training common (I've never heard of it prior to this article)? Is there any requirement for landlords to give basic instructions to tenants? I think there is a need for this information to reach the tenants, but I don't know the best route.

Most of the issues we see associated to open doors in Apartment buldings are noticed in senior living buildings (need for community style living). Our FD has a program we do with Hotels, Motels, Dorms, Senior Living and Apartment buildings. We share the "science" of fire berhavior with them and they learn as adults the how's and why's their behavior can possibly kill others. We try to get proactive building owners to realize the benefit and offer incentives for tenants attendance. Sort of like we do with Industry and Business.....have programs on Pay Day and no checks issued until after the programs. The key is to know the audience and their motivation and needs. The building tenants and owners soon realize their roles in fire prevention and you have to have teachers who want to share and make their students learning experience fun while being educational. There is plenty of information on the USFA and NFPA sites under "Education" that you can print off and use. Send me your email address and I can send you some of my outlines to follow.

 

[tmurray]

My question is this...do any of you have ideas about how to educate the millions of people living in apartments about fire safety, including the need to close their door if there is a fire? Is fire department training common (I've never heard of it prior to this article)? Is there any requirement for landlords to give basic instructions to tenants? I think there is a need for this information to reach the tenants, but I don't know the best route.

I seem to remember when I went to school we had fire drills on occasion. Our teachers would always inform us to make sure every door was shut. If they don't get that drilled into their heads by then I think they may be a lost cause.

 

[LGreene]

Send me your email address and I can send you some of my outlines to follow.

Thanks FMWB - my email address is lori_greene@irco.com.

I saw an update on the Chicago situation yesterday. The lawyers are planning to name the people who left their door open in the lawsuit.

Mother of woman killed in high-rise fire sues building management

BY LISA DONOVAN Cook County Reporter ldonovan@suntimes.com January 17, 2012 7:12PM

A fire in high rise happened at 3am. Shantel McCoy died in the fire at 3130 N. Lakeshore Drive. Chicago Sun-Times

Updated: January 17, 2012 8:59PM

The mother of a 32-year-old woman killed in a lakefront high-rise apartment blaze earlier this month has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against building management, saying her daughter would be alive today had a sprinkler system been in place to douse the flames.

JoAnn McCoy, whose daughter Shantel perished in the Jan. 8 fire, also claims building management “failed ... to warn [the victim] of a fire” and “allowed [the victim] to use the elevators when defendant knew or should have known it was not safe to do so.”

Early the morning of Jan. 8, Shantel McCoy was returning home to her apartment building at 3130 N. Lake Shore Drive — takeout food in hand — and boarded the elevator to the 12th floor unaware that a neighboring apartment had caught fire.

When the elevator door opened on the 12th floor, McCoy was hit by a wall of heat as high as 1,500 degrees, fire officials told the Sun-Times. One breath would have been enough to kill her, officials said.

Messages left for representatives at 3130 N. Lake Shore LLC and Planned Property Management Inc. were not returned early Tuesday night.

The 21-story building wasn’t equipped with a sprinkler system. Nor did it have a hard-wired alarm or communications system to disable elevators and alert residents of the roughly 300 apartments.

The building is one of 759 pre-1975 residential high-rises exempt from the sprinkler requirement that were supposed to make other, less-costly life safety improvements by Jan. 1.

But fire officials told the Sun-Times another issue may have played a role in the deadly blaze: A door to the 12th floor apartment where the fire started had been propped open by a fleeing couple because their cat refused to leave.

The couple’s decision to use a rug to prop open the door apparently doomed Shantel McCoy as she made her way home.

Had the door been closed, the fire would almost certainly have been contained to the unit where the fire originated until responding firefighters had a chance to arrive on the scene and make it up to the 12th floor, Deputy District Fire Chief Joseph Roccasalva said at the time.

Automatic door closures on units leading to a common corridor have been required in Chicago buildings at least four stories tall since 1957. The 21-story building at 3130 N. Lake Shore Dr. was equipped with them, but the fleeing couple told fire investigators they propped their door open, Chicago Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford said.

Shantel McCoy, who died of carbon monoxide intoxication and inhalation of smoke and soot, apparently had no chance.

The cause of the blaze remains under investigation.

JoAnn McCoy’s legal counsel says the names of the couple haven’t been released in publicly available law enforcement reports, and he doesn’t know their names.

“We don’t have their names, but I assure you as soon as we do they are going to be named as defendants in this case,” Joseph Curcio, an attorney for JoAnn McCoy, told the Sun-Times

A Philadelphia native, Shantel McCoy had come to Chicago in March to pursue her career in marketing, her mother said last week. Shantel McCoy worked for Wirtz Beverage Group here as a sales coordinator and analyst.

The family is seeking in excess of $50,000 in damages.

 

[LGreene]

Here's another one:

Chicago officials deny antiquated fire code caused woman’s death

By Christopher Davion and Kristina Betinis

18 January 2012

Shantel McCoy, 32, was killed in a high-rise apartment fire early in the morning on January 8th. The Chicago woman died in the building’s elevator at approximately 2:00 a.m. while she was returning to her apartment after buying food.

Unaware of the blaze that raged on the 12th floor of the building, which had by the time she returned engulfed the entire floor, McCoy was immediately overwhelmed by smoke, toxic fumes, and flames when the elevator doors opened.

Seven additional building residents and two Chicago firefighters were injured in the fire, which began in an apartment unit on the 12th floor of the 21-floor building and quickly spread through the apartment’s open door.

Basic features of modern fire codes would have saved McCoy’s life. Unlike buildings built after 1975, this high-rise’s elevators do not stop working when a smoke detector is activated, nor is there a building-wide alert system. The apartment building, located at 3130 North Lake Shore Drive in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood, was outfitted with neither a sprinkler system nor a building-wide fire alarm system. Residents living above and below the 12th floor where the fire started confirmed that they did not hear any fire alarms going off at the time.

Commercial residential buildings in Chicago built before 1975 are not required to have sprinkler systems installed. Because the costs to retrofit older buildings with a sprinkler system were deemed too expensive by building owners, older buildings such as 3130 N. Lake Shore Drive were exempted from the 2004 city ordinance requiring that pre-1975 commercial buildings have sprinkler systems installed. More than 750 residential high-rises are exempt from having these basic fire safety systems.

This exemption was given by the city on the grounds that older apartment buildings would be evaluated for cheaper safety improvements as part of a “building fire safety plan” that was initially required to be implemented by January 1, 2012. Last December, Chicago’s city council voted unanimously to extend the deadline for building owners to have installed the required building safety measures to January 1, 2015. As a result, at the time of the fire on January 8, the building was not required to have updated its fire alarm system or a fire-safe elevator system.

The 2004 ordinance was passed in response to the 2003 fire in the Cook County Administration Building that killed six people who had become trapped in the stairway after automatic door locks prevented them from getting to safety. The six had been ordered by firefighters to return to their floors above the fire after they attempted to evacuate the building.

McCoy’s family stated that she had moved to Chicago last March hoping to find work after being laid off from her previous job at an accounting firm in Philadelphia. Her tragic and completely preventable death is a direct result of the city’s decision to serve the interests of property owners at the expense of the health and safety of the population.

Despite the absence of basic fire safety measures in the building and their central role in McCoy’s death, city officials have heaped blame for her death on the couple in whose apartment the fire began.

Deputy District Fire Chief Joseph Roccasalva emphasized that the fleeing couple’s decision to prop their apartment door open to let their pets escape “doomed” Shantel McCoy. Chicago businessman and alderman Tom Tunney, who co-sponsored the ordinance that extended the building fire safety deadline, said that McCoy’s death was “unrelated” to the extension and absence of modern building fire precautions, noting, “The important thing is this door did not close.”

Tunney said he had “no regrets” about championing the three-year extension sparing building owners from implementing safety measures.

Charles Buckman, an elevator industry specialist commenting on McCoy’s death, said that if the national engineering code had been observed, fire sensors would be installed on each floor and the elevator would not have been operating normally.

About the lack of elevator safety measures in the building he said, “In this case, somebody committed murder.”

 

[That Inspector Guy]

I do Fire Inspections in all apartments in my community once every two years. We have several garden-apartment style complexes with several buildings that each may have as many as 30-50 apartments per building. I have a high population of foreigners, mostly indian and asians. One of my biggest pet peeves is the lack of operating smoke detectors in their apartments- Many cook with oil (which obviously sets off the SD's) or the batteries go low, and they disconnect them due to the low-battery "chirp." Sometimes when I am in these apartments (always escorted by an agent of the property owner) there are english-speaking children present. If I find any violations, and the child is old enough, I make it a point to have the child explain to mom or dad about the problem. I do tell them that if oil cooking sets them off, to open a window and ventilate, but to never disconnect detectors. I also tell them to buy new batteries twice a year. I also battle with the property owners about who is responsible for replacing batteries- they of course dont want to be bothered but I tell them that if it is not in the lease that the tenant is responsible, that they are going to have to step up to the plate.

For the most part however this is a neverending, uphill battle- each and every year, I would say that I find more than 50% of smoke detectors in these apartment complexes are not functioning.

 

[LGreene]

For the most part however this is a neverending, uphill battle- each and every year, I would say that I find more than 50% of smoke detectors in these apartment complexes are not functioning.

Do you think it would be helpful to fire inspectors, property managers, and tenants, to have a sheet that you could hand out, with the most important reminders about fire safety? I know the guide (typically a larger booklet from the ones I've found) is supposed to be given to the tenants when they move in, but I wonder if they are read, especially if the tenant does not speak English. A shorter piece could be handed out with each inspection, and could be translated into different languages. It could be available on the web so you just print off what you need and it could be updated regularly.

If that seems like a good idea, what are the top-10 items that should be on that list?

 

[mark handler]

Do you think it would be helpful to fire inspectors, property managers, and tenants, to have a sheet that you could hand out, with the most important reminders about fire safety? I know the guide (typically a larger booklet from the ones I've found) is supposed to be given to the tenants when they move in, but I wonder if they are read, especially if the tenant does not speak English. A shorter piece could be handed out with each inspection, and could be translated into different languages. It could be available on the web so you just print off what you need and it could be updated regularly.If that seems like a good idea, what are the top-10 items that should be on that list?

RESIDENTIAL APARTMENT

BUILDING FIRE SAFETY

http://www.fdnyfirezone.org/download/apartment_fire_safety-en.pdf

FIRE SAFETY HANDBOOK

For Apartment Managers

http://www.seattle.gov/fire/pubed/apt/apt_managers_handbook.pdf

 

[mark handler]

Further Resources for Apartment Managers

Seattle Fire Department Fire Prevention Division, Public Education Section

http://www.seattle.gov/fire/pubEd/

Seattle Fire Dept. Apartment Fire Safety Website

http://www.seattle.gov/fire/pubEd/apt/aptFireSafety.htm

Fire Emergency Guides for Multi-Residential Occupancies

http://www.seattle.gov/fire/FMO/firecode/infobulletins/2007-1.pdf#2007-1

Smoke Alarms in Rental Properties

http://www.seattle.gov/fire/pubEd/brochures/smoke%20alarms%20rental.pdf

King County Fire Marshal, Dept. of Development & Environmental Services

http://www.metrokc.gov/permits/FireMarshal.aspx

Washington State Fire Marshal’s Office

http://www.wsp.wa.gov/fire/education.htm

Washington State RCW 59.18.060—Landlord Duties

http://www.wsp.wa.gov/fire/regional.htm

Seattle Dept. of Planning & Development, Landlord-Tenant Information

http://www.seattle.gov/dpd/Publications/Landlord_Tenant/

Rental Housing Association of Puget Sound

http://www.rha-ps.com

Resources for Educating Tenants

Apartment Fire Safety Fact Sheet

http://www.seattle.gov/fire/pubEd/brochures/apartment.pdf

Home Fire Safety Checklist (including languages other than English)

http://www.seattle.gov/fire/pubEd/brochures/fire%20safety%20checklist.pdf

Fire Safety for Seniors

http://www.seattle.gov/fire/pubEd/homeSafety/seniorSafetyTips.htm

Fire Stoppers Program (for kids who misuse fire)

http://www.seattle.gov/fire/pubEd/firestoppers/fireStoppers.htm

 

[TJacobs]

The single biggest reason for the fire death in Chicago was the lack of elevator recall. Second was the lack of sprinklers.

Propping the apartment door open (presumably fire-rated self-closing) by stupid residents can't be prevented.

 

[That Inspector Guy]

Do you think it would be helpful to fire inspectors, property managers, and tenants, to have a sheet that you could hand out, with the most important reminders about fire safety?

Ihave thought of this, and even went so far as to consult a community member who is familiar with the population. The problem is that there are so many written and spoken dialects to these people that it would be difficult at best to deliver the message.

 

[FM William Burns]

Lori,

Sorry I was out of town all day yesterday at a meeting but it looks like Mark Handler has provided some excellent resource links I'm sure you can glean much needed material from. Our city website has much of the same but not as elaborate as Seattle's. Some of the links Mark has provided don't work but the ones in Post #17 are functional and you can access the majority of other useful material including teaching aid material from the menu's on Seattle's pages. Looks like I will be copying some stuff I don't have on ours (so thanks Mark). Regarding languages, we used our resource at the local county library who works with the many Arabic and Spanish cultures in our county to come up with the safety tips in their languages and as close to correct dialect that would fly.

If you would still like to have my presentation talking points, send me a PM and I'll email you some of my presentation outlines we build off of next week.

 

[cda]

UN signage

http://www.nunya.net/_/rsrc/1283812554997/random-images/No-Unconcealable-Weapons-Allowed-552x700.jpg

 

[mark handler]

UN signagehttp://www.nunya.net/_/rsrc/1283812554997/random-images/No-Unconcealable-Weapons-Allowed-552x700.jpg

Thanks for sharing

 

[cda]

Wrong one

http://image.shutterstock.com/display_pic_with_logo/450076/450076,1262963998,1/stock-photo-no-fire-sign-44037655.jpg