BY MIKE LOVE
“I am not convinced that fire inspections prevent fires,” said the operations deputy, reflecting on all the demands for a fire company’s time. As a result of that statement and later actions, the entire Operations Division quickly stopped doing in-service inspections. Although the deputy of fire prevention strongly resisted this move, he was unable to convince the fire chief, as he, too, doubted the benefits of the inspection program. Consequently, fire company in-service inspections went away 15 years ago without any analysis of what the true impact or the unintended consequences would be.
The above scenario is fictional, but it is not difficult to imagine its occurring. It has happened at many fire departments that have limited time to get everything done or do not understand the full scope of protecting their communities from risk. After all, it is difficult to measure how effective you may be at preventing fires. The important point these chiefs in the scenario missed is that the goal of fire inspections isn’t necessarily just preventing fires: It’s maintaining life safety. With regular building fire inspections, the fire department can discover locked and blocked exits, question and challenge building renovations, learn the building’s layout, and ensure that all of the building’s life safety features are in place and functioning. It bears mentioning here that some exit doors in Charleston’s Sofa Super Store were locked. To our horror, we have to wonder if any of those nine firefighters found one of those doors, only to discover it was useless for saving his life. The fire inspection is one of the important focus areas for overseeing overall firefighter and occupant safety.
Some may see a fire department’s work in fire and life safety just as an extra layer of work that gets in the way of preparing for the next alarm. However, national recommendations have identified the fire department chief as the primary advocate for fire and life safety in his district. In analyzing past fire tragedies, regular fire inspections and strict code enforcement are repeatedly recommended. For fire department accreditation, fire code enforcement is an important criterion for excellence. In Texas, it is required to consider organized fire prevention efforts in the grading for insurance rates, so there really is a “standard of care” that requires every fire department to maintain some fire and life safety and inspection program.
ENFORCEMENT ESSENTIAL TO MANAGING RISK
Fire inspection and code enforcement are necessary to manage risk. Under normal conditions, buildings lose their built-in safety as time passes. Even with regular maintenance and proper upkeep, a building rarely remains as safe as it was when it was new. The building occupant’s behavior and all the materials and contents that come with the building’s use tend to increase risk. Consider the old saying, “If you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse.” This critical area of risk management is directly related to the department chief’s job of maintaining a safe environment for firefighters, but many departments let the opportunity and responsibility for building life safety slip away in their districts.
Although most chiefs have the authority to maintain building life safety in their jurisdictions, for many reasons, they neglect to use it. Many departments may once have had complete responsibility for ensuring building life safety but neglected it over time. The department’s chief and leadership must recognize that doing nothing allows the buildings’ life safety features to decline at an undeterminable rate. At the same time, as the department neglects this responsibility more and more, it loses the sense of urgency of these life safety activities. The farther the department drifts away from performing inspections, the harder it will be for it to resume this activity even if it wants to.
A revival of the existing building inspection program in my department uncovered many safety problems in existing buildings that, if left uncorrected, could have resulted in serious fires. As the business changes, occupancies evolve to meet customer needs and maintain competitiveness. To avoid losing income, a business may create a new look or theme, and a restaurant may squeeze in more tables. You must be able to anticipate, detect, and evaluate these hazards as often as necessary. You can assess hazards only if you can find them, and that means you have to look for them. Once inside a building for a fire inspection, you can evaluate conditions to determine if the building complies with codes and, if not, what action is needed before something bad happens. It should be easy to imagine the degree of code compliance in buildings that have not been inspected in a long time.
Although most firefighters enjoy the challenge of fighting and suppressing the toughest fires, we cannot rely only on reacting to emergencies to keep the community safe. We must recognize that performing regular building inspections and hazard evaluations in our districts makes building owners more aware of our presence. Conversely, deferring inspections reduces our presence, and building operators would become complacent and indifferent. Ensuring buildings are code compliant and safely maintained reduces firefighters’ exposure to greater risks resulting from unsafe conditions. The United States has one of the worst fire records per capita among the industrial nations. This is the result of our refusal to perform regular fire and life safety inspections.
SOFA SUPER STORE TRAGEDY
Reacting to fire only when it happens will not reduce risk or improve safety. Ignoring buildings as they age and evolve permits the existence of increasingly dangerous conditions that could lead to disaster. The most recent and obvious example in which a building’s poor record of code compliance resulted in a catastrophe was the Sofa Super Store fire in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 18, 2007. Nine firefighters died fighting a well-advanced fire. In many ways, complacency and disregard for code compliance increased the risk to the firefighters.
To begin with, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited the Sofa Super Store’s owner with willful violations that put store employees at risk. A trapped store employee called 911 for help. Knowledge of a trapped occupant changes the focus of firefighters. As mentioned earlier, numerous padlocked store exits reduced the safe egress of employees and customers as well as the doomed firefighters. Do you think the operator was any more concerned about the firefighters’ safety? The firefighters took extraordinary measures to save the occupant. News reports later offered the store owner’s regrets, “The owner of a furniture store where nine firefighters died has told a Charleston newspaper he wishes he had put sprinklers in the building ….” The owner also said no one pointed out possible fire hazards in his building and that he would have fixed anything that was wrong.1 It should also be noted that the owner of Boston’s Cocoanut Grove Nightclub, convicted criminally for willful violations that resulted in the deaths of 492 people in a 1942 fire, reflected that he wished he had died with the others. We can avoid or better manage risk ahead of time to avoid such regrets.
If a fire department ignores the buildings in its district, building operators either assume that they are safe or that that they will not be held accountable if they knowingly avoid code compliance. Ultimately, the building operators (following the fire department’s example) will become indifferent to and complacent regarding hazards that can slowly evolve. Safe conditions result from code compliance, regular hazard evaluation, and code enforcement. If the building owner and operators anticipate regular evaluation of fire code compliance and the fire department has made them aware of fire hazards and how to reduce them, they would be more inclined to maintain a safe environment. It is up to us to keep them expecting a visit at any time from the fire inspector. If we can educate the building owners so they are constantly aware of the life safety risks and the potential impact, this alone is worth our visit to the building. If we ignore them, they will ignore us.
Just look at one area of risk identified at the Sofa Super Store, the area of fire origin. The risk of storing highly combustible waste that ranged from discarded upholstered furniture to furniture packing materials in an area where the employees were allowed to take smoke breaks is a graphic example of how indifference can lead to risk. This is a root causebehavior that enabled some near-perfect fire conditions to come together to create the fire. The area of fire origin of the Sofa Super Store was the covered loading dock between the store and the warehouse. The availability of combustible waste material in the covered loading dock area allowed the developing fire and hot gases to accumulate under the roof adjacent to the store and quickly gain access at the eaves to the truss void just under the roof of the rest of the building.
Fighting a fire involving materials and contents contained in a compartmented area is a pretty straightforward operation. However, it is a completely different operation to try to catch up to and control a fire that has gained access to the building’s structure. Regular evaluation and correction of hazards and risky behavior should eliminate these obvious conflicting conditions. Fire inspectors are trained to envision and predict risk based on combinations of hazards.
The Sofa Super Store had a significant number of conditions that could have been identified and corrected through proper code enforcement. Many of our fire districts have similar and worse conditions just waiting for the right opportunity. Firefighters can face an additional extraordinary hazard in an already dangerous occupation brought about and sustained by their leaders’ inaction. This unsafe trend among many fire departments must be changed through dedicated efforts of inspection and enforcement.
There really is no good excuse not to start an in-service inspection program. However, you should first understand your legal authority. If none exists or the present one is weak, the next step should be to push for the necessary local legislation to adopt a fire prevention code such as National Fire Protection Association’s Uniform Fire Code (NFPA 1) or the International Code Council’s International Fire Code (IFC). Either of these codes will provide the foundation and guidance for helping you to develop your fire and life safety program. Some areas of the country have local or state laws that provide the basis for authorizing an enabling process for eliminating fire risks.
Chief, if you don’t advocate for the safety of firefighters and building occupants in your district, who will?
Endnote
1. “Store Owner Where Nine Firefighters Died Wishes He Had Sprinklers,” Associated Press, as reported in InternationalFirefightingNews.Com, September 5, 2007, www.firefightingnews.com/article.cfm?articleID=37318.
MIKE LOVE is a 31-year veteran of and division chief with the Montgomery County (MD) Fire and Rescue Service. He oversees all functions of life safety, community outreach and information, planning, and recruiting and serves as the Montgomery County fire marshal. He is a graduate of the University of Maryland and the National Fire Academy’s Executive Fire Officer Program and is a certified public manager.
