BY BILL MANNING
Throughout the county, the practice of “grandfathering” buildings—exempting structures predating fire and building codes from the law—is widespread, if not commonplace. There is no more tragic example of the results of this stupid habit than what occurred in West Warwick, Rhode Island, earlier this year.
Recently, the Rhode Island state legislature passed bills, with the firm backing of the fire service leadership, to eliminate the grandfather clause in the state. The bills include an automatic sprinkler retrofit and central-station fire alarm requirements for 150-plus-occupancy “special amusement buildings” (including nightclubs) and many places of public assembly with occupancies exceeding 300.
This is good news.
Of course, it took 100 dead to do it.
But if you think The Station Fire generated a wave of sprinkler legislation throughout the rest of the country, guess again. It would be unfair to say that all fire departments and municipal leaders ignored the issue. However, you’d think from the reaction of some that fires in places of public assembly only can originate with pyrotechnics and when there’s booze around.
It’s now more than four months after The Station Fire. If you haven’t grabbed onto its tow by now, you ain’t grabbing it. Major gains in fire safety, it’s sad to say, are contingent upon keeping major tragedies “in the headlines.” With public interest about as long as the next TV sound bite, our window of opportunity closes quickly.
We continually lapse into a state of denial (don’t deny it): If it doesn’t happen in our backyard, it won’t happen in our backyard. To use two examples with which I’m very familiar, Has any other state, other than New Jersey, passed college dormitory sprinkler legislation after the Seton Hall Fire (I bet many of you don’t even remember it)? How many states passed mandatory truss marking placards for commercial buildings after the Hackensack Ford Fire?
The business community did not lobby full-force against the new Rhode Island legislation. But complaints—and warnings—are bubbling to the surface. “Safety is Number One, but ….” “Well, when you steamroll legislation ….” “There will be a hue and cry from business owners ….” Fortunately for the rest of us, we won’t have to stand tall against the powerful building lobbies because we live a safe distance from West Warwick.
Grandfather clauses are like old shoes: They stay in your closet for a long time.
THE FIRE DATA BONEYARD
The National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS) is the boneyard for our national fire data. It’s our “Roach Motel”: Data checks in, but it doesn’t check out.
The United States Fire Administration (USFA) Web site’s “data center” offers some statistical snapshots for the year 2001. That information is borrowed from the National Fire Protection Association’s annual fire department survey, which canvasses some 3,000 fire agencies from around the country and extrapolates these responses into a broad statistical picture. The USFA publishes only one analysis that actually uses real NFIRS data, and the most recent includes statistics up to 1998. That’s five years ago, for all you fire politicos inside the Beltway. And the reason fire departments send fire data to a national fire agency is what, again?
The tagline for the National Fire Information Council (NFIC), a USFA-funded group of state and local fire officials that supports so-called NFIRS development, is “Fighting Fire With Facts.” Good thing you don’t act with the same degree of urgency as the NFIC and the USFA when it comes to fighting fires. The town would burn down before you get there.
NFIRS has been a debacle from the start, but most notably since the Federal Emergency Management Agency 14 years ago (1989, for you Beltway fire politicos) began its ill-fated NFIRS Version 5.0 project, which it has yet to complete. The history is rich with conspiratorial politics, bureaucratic mismanagement, and old-fashioned stupidity. It’s a story of illegal contracting practices; of launching a federal software company to compete with the private sector; of instituting a so-called “vendor certification” policy to manipulate the free market; of reporting form/required data overkill; of missing the NFIRS launch by several years, releasing an unfinished project, then making frequent, unannounced revisions to its unfinished federal software product such that many vendors were forced out of business; of lost data and mainframe mishaps; of excuses and denials … but no timely national fire data.
I ask you, Are you any better off than you were 15 years ago?
Some might say the USFA hasn’t totally failed its responsibilities under the Fire Prevention and Control Act of 1974. But it sure has come close.
You’ve heard the adage, “Knowledge is power.” In the national perspective, a lot of your knowledge is rotting in the NFIRS boneyard.
