Two Fires, Two Messages
TWO FIRES, TWO MESSAGES
— Anna Nissen, architect— June, 2010, updated October 2010, + July 2015 Update
Two children, now adults, survived a fire across the street from my house. The situation was eerily similar to the devastating fire that cost five young lives in Fremont.
The difference is that a week before the fire across the street, a fortuitous school assignment generated an escape plan from the upstairs. Awakened by fire trucks, I had already missed their descent to the sidewalk from out the window onto the lower roof. I happened to have immortalized their escape plan about a year before they conceived it. The house long ago disappeared into a heap now covered with a mantle of blackberries.
MESSAGE to All Who Sleep Above the First Floor:
work out a feasible escape plan and engrain it in the entire household. Rescue/escape from contemporary townhouses can be problematic— please consider a flexible ladder for all floors about the ground floor. See attachment for details.
MESSAGE to City Hall:
if a tragedy can be called luck, then this is the wake-up call. It's actually the city's third major townhouse fire, but the first to take lives. "Can townhouses be saved?" is how Councilmember Clark phrased it two years ago because the more candid question: "can public safety be reclaimed?" did not fit with the program. The answer to both questions: simple—stop the opportunistic code interpretation responsible for the inadequately accessed townhouses. The Fremont townhouses were built prior to the interpretation. The townhouses involved in the first major fire made use of the interpretation. Several people were injured and several buildings damaged. The second fire was hard to access and resulted in a $2 million loss.
Before the fourth wake-up call occurs, please consider retro-sprinklers for the least accessible of the townhouse "packs" (mid-block, no alley, micro-permitted access) and fire-department cataloging of buildings with pre-engineered trusses. Why? National concern over increased risk of community-wide fire spread—see attachment. Fuss over the Fire Department if you must, but not about their equipment or procedures. No, go after them for not having the gumption to make certain you know when you are way off base.
I too have been overly respectful. Clear back in 2007, I encountered my first crammed-on townhouse project. Told that townhouse access requirements were not being enforced as written, I believed newly elected Councilmember Burgess when he assured the group assembled to meet him at a Saturday morning breakfast that he knew about the fire safety issue with these townhouses, as did the fire department, and that it would be resolved.
In early 2008, a more focused group extensively documented the destructive block-busting effect these projects were having on the city's multifamily neighborhoods and questioned the assumption that fixing this problem could wait for or needed a major overhaul of the multifamily code. The overhaul was pulled for reconsideration. We continued to request an emergency interim ordinance to stop these fire hazards from proliferating all over town even where apartment zoning allowed higher density. What transpired is so hard to believe, many simply refuse to do so. Mid-summer of 2008, the last mayor called a press conference to announce his answer to "can townhouses be saved?" He pronounced that henceforth all townhouses, legal or not, would be subjected to streamlined design review. October 2010, the Council is poised to do the same.
In an October column, Danny Westneat quoted a Kirkland foreclosure attorney on the counterpart to this mess: " the problem is so huge that the system, both financial and political will do what it does best when cornered: Look the other way." It now looks like it WILL take another fire (or two) to resolve what to do about the most seriously compromised of the townhouse packs and to abandon the idea that "modern codes" preclude serious hazards. See attachment for fire issues and elsewhere on this website for solutions.
July, 2015 Update
Finally! The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) speaks up: The dangers of lightweight construction