Luxury Accommodations Not Necessarily So
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The Editor’s Opinion Page
Let’s face it. If the law doesn’t require sprinklers or alarm systems or smoke detectors or other life protection devices and construction, the owner of a building will not put them in. Such devices add to the costs of a building. What the owner never seems to get through his head is that such devices can in time pay for themselves—through reduced insurance rates. As a consequence of such narrow thinking, people die—often in large numbers—as witness the recent hotel fire in Las Vegas and the motel meeting room fire in Harrison, N.Y.
Typically, the owners of these buildings washed their hands of any blame by claiming (probably true) that the buildings were in compliance with the codes existing at the time of their construction—not much of a solace to the families of the scores who died. By inference, the weakness of the codes lay with the legislators who wrote the codes into law (partially true).
But the laws that go into the legislative hopper are not necessarily the laws that come out of the legislature. In between the going and coming much happens, usually in the form of lobbying by the many and diverse interests that would be affected by the laws, which brings us back to the owners and builders—represented by the real estate industry and the various building associations.
Since lobbyists have great clout in the legislative halls, what comes out of the legislative hopper is a compromise on what went in. But a compromise actually represents no expert point of view. The lobbyists, however, have a law that they can “live with.” But what about the occupants of a building who might die with this law.
The persons who died in Las Vegas and Harrison, N.Y., were certainly not poor tenement house dwellers. In Las Vegas they were affluent vacationers paying top dollar to lose their money. In Harrison, they were executives of big corporations which also paid top dollar. Like most people, these victims felt sure (if they even thought about it) that their top dollar brought top protection in luxury accommodations. It didn’t, of course, which only reinforces the proverb that money can’t buy everything.
So what can be done about it? The fires in the Winecoff Hotel in Atlanta and the LaSalle Hotel in Chicago happened more than 30 years ago. They created a big stir at the time. Much action was urged in legislative halls and some taken. However, a series of compromises down through the years has only made things slightly better. Eventually, designers, builders and the real estate lobby will be brought into line. Until then, what can we in the fire service do?
About all we can actually do is to fall back on public fire prevention education. This education generally stresses how not to start a fire, and how to escape the consequences of fire that has started. Perhaps our fire prevention personnel and programs should tell the citizenry how to stay alive while traveling—by not patronizing those installations that place luxury before safety. There is nothing like a lack of patronage that will make an innkeeper start thinking.
