BY BILL MANNING
High-rise death traps proliferate in the urban American environment. For decades, American politicians have ignored tried and tested engineered fire protection solutions to these public safety threats.
Political opportunism favors campaign pay-offs from the building and real estate lobbies to the demands of a few fire safety “zealots.” Combine this self-serving reality with a largely ignorant public and a fire department culture hopelessly skewed to the manual response side of the battle, and it’s no mystery why the situation continues.
Last month, in an unsprinklered Chicago high-rise, the inevitable happened once again. There are many aspects to the incident that contributed to the tragic loss of six workers in that building, most involving human error and all of which require heavy scrutiny. But the bottom line is this: For want of an automatic fire sprinkler system in that building, six people died.
For want of a system that covers human error with near 100-percent reliability—at the price of installing new carpet throughout the building—six people died, families are in mourning, and a city is in an uproar.
It’s not as if officials in that city didn’t know that the building—and many others like it—wasn’t sprinklered. It’s not as if they didn’t know that sprinklering the building would have made it safer for the hundreds of people who worked in it every day. It’s just that they didn’t care enough about it. Money was simply more important, important enough to keep rolling the life safety dice over and over. Twice in October—at the high-rise office building and two weeks earlier at an unsprinklered high-rise housing project in which two residents died—the dice came up “craps.”
The current sprinkler retrofit ordinance in Chicago is slanted so far toward the building owner that one could almost say there isn’t a retrofit ordinance in that city. Fire sprinkler advocates have petitioned Chicago for years to pass a retrofit ordinance with teeth. According to the National Fire Sprinkler Association (NFSA), one such advocacy group, a mayoral spokesperson recently accused the Association’s activism of being “self-serving.” John Viniello, president of the NFSA, responded, “Of course, we have a vested interest, but so does the Mayor, so does the Board of Aldermen, and so do the powerful real estate interests who oppose retrofitting sprinklers in buildings at risk. The difference is that the vested interest we represent saves lives and protects property and has for well over a century.”
Make no mistake, this is not a Chicago phenomenon. Cities and towns across the United States are rolling the life safety dice, and have been for many years. Where money and political power are at stake, people become expendable. That will only change when people get angry and organize against such unconscionable practices, and they need to see their fire department leading the charge.
In Chicago, people are angry. Chicago politicians are doing the damage control dance. It remains to be seen whether an “independent” investigation, as called for, is produced within an environment of nonpolitical transparency the public deserves. No doubt the investigation will and should include an examination of the strategic and tactical actions taken by the fire department that day, which were called into question by initial reports, so that lessons will be learned and changes made. But all the human error that may have manifested itself before or during the fire—whether it be assigned to city officials, building management, the fire department, or occupants themselves—needs to be placed in perspective with the life safety bottom line: None of those errors would have ever come into play had a properly designed and maintained automatic fire sprinkler system been installed in the building.
A city and a nation are waiting to see if this time city leadership will stand up for what’s right and become a model for urban sprinkler reform or capitulate once again to the business interests. The former will go a long way toward helping explode the myth that there’s any trade-off whatsoever—be it passive fire protection design or human intervention—for fire sprinklers in high-rise buildings of any kind. If not, how many rolls of the dice—and needless deaths—will it take to change? How can it be that fire sprinkler technology is more than 100 years old and we still don’t get it?
It’s time for cities across the country to legislate aggressively on behalf of fire sprinklers and life safety. It’s time for the principal agents for life safety in America—the members of our fire service—to demand that our public servants serve the public on this critical issue. There’s no excuse for local, state, and national fire organizations taking a back seat on the sprinkler issue. On a moral plane, our own indifference or self-serving agendas are in the same ballpark as the palm-greasing coziness between our high-rolling politicians and the building lobby.
The dice are rolling ….
