Officials in Los Angeles are reconsidering closing a legal loophole that exempts tall buildings built between 1943 and 1974 from fire sprinkler requirements after an unsprinkled high rise apartment tower on the city's Westside caught fire yesterday for the second time in recent years, injuring a a 13 of people, including a three month old baby and one man who is listed as being in serious condition.
The Los Angeles Times reports that the fire took place in a 25-story tower located in the Barrington Plaza complex, which is made up of three similar towers of differing heights surrounding a landscaped superblock site. The fire engulfed the sixth and seventh floors of the tallest tower and caused smoke damage to several floors in the development. According to The Los Angeles Times tenants in the building report a variety of maintenance issues in the complex, including a constantly broken elevator. A fire took place in the same building back in 2013 that apparently led to few safety or building upgrades, The Los Angeles Times reports. At the time, tenants reported not hearing any fire alarms in the complex. Worse still, the building is reportedly currently outfitted with fire stair wells that are not pressurized, so in the event of fires like the one that took place yesterday, the stair wells act as chimneys, pulling smoke into them and making escape from the building dangerous and difficult.
A dramatic high-rise apartment fire in Los Angeles is being called "suspicious" by investigators.
13 people were hurt, including 2 firefighters and a 3-month-old baby: https://t.co/5tsM4gFrWk pic.twitter.com/4WcaXdV1xu
— CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) January 30, 2020
Breathtaking video of fire fighters saving a man who had escaped from the apartment that was on fire highlighted the precariousness of the situation during the blaze as fire fighters raised a ladder up to the sixth floor to save the victim who was gripping the tower's corrugated metal cladding to escape the flames.
The complex was designed by local corporate architects Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall (DMJM) and was billed as the "largest privately built apartment development west of Chicago" by The New York Times when it opened in 1962. Realty company Douglas Emmett is the current owner of the complex.
The tower complex encompasses three of the 55 residential high rises in the city built between 1943 and 1974 that are not outfitted with fire sprinkler suppression systems, The Los Angeles Times reports. The city instituted a fire sprinkler system regulation after a high rise fire in 1988 at the First Interstate Tower (then the city's tallest tower), but did not require sprinklers for towers built after 1943 or before 1974.
After the 2013 fire, Los Angeles City Council officials contemplated removing the sprinkler loophole and the Los Angeles Fire Chief formally recommended that sprinklers be added to those structures in 2017, but momentum to make the necessary changes has yet to materialize.
3 Comments
Describing this as a "loophole" is a bit off, I think. The building code did not require sprinklers in this type of building at that time, right? I live in a fairly tall (17-story) building in NYC from the same era that also does not have sprinklers, and I know of many others -- there are probably hundreds of such buildings in the city, some quite tall. I believe (though have not double-checked this) that stairwells in this era of building were also not required to be pressurized -- that idea came only later on.
Perhaps the city should make more fire protection requirements, such as sprinklers, retroactive, but in buildings from that era where the height is basically 8' from slab-to-slab, there's not a lot of space to bring sprinklers into everybody's homes. So increasing the fire safety probably requires other approaches.
It's not a loophole if it was intentional and well known.
^ Excellent post. And many of the city's older non-residential high-rises were retrofitted with sprinklers and other fire/life safety upgrades back in the '90s.
As for the headline: "closing a loophole" sounds sexier than "updating the code." The former smells of heroes and villains and activism, which of course is more important than accuracy.
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