Bank Fire Prompts Calls to Install Sprinklers in Older High-Rises

The requirement to install sprinkler systems in older high-rise buildings, avoided by Los Angeles officials in the past under pressure from owners because of the cost, was proposed anew Friday in the wake of the First Interstate Bank building fire.

Mayor Tom Bradley, who is on a trade mission in Australia, dispatched a letter to top officials requesting “that you immediately form a task group . . . to recommend to me and the City Council, as soon as possible, an ordinance to mandate the retrofitting of older high-rise structures with fire sprinklers and other safety devices. . . .”

City Council members Nate Holden and Ernani Bernardi proposed related motions to require sprinkler systems in hundreds of high-rises built before 1974 and to study other ways of preventing the spread of skyscraper fires.

Under state law and a city ordinance patterned after it, currently only high-rises above 75 feet and constructed after 1974 are required to install sprinkler systems.

The council will consider Holden’s mandated retrofitting proposal this t week.

The First Interstate Bank building in downtown Los Angeles caught fire late Wednesday night, gutting five of its 62 floors. One person was killed and 40 were injured in the blaze, which is being investigated.

Past Fights Cited

Building managers were in the midst of installing a sprinkler system. Fire officials said that if the system had been operational, the fire could have been contained on one floor.

Citing past fights to enact tough fire laws, Los Angeles Fire Chief Donald Manning predicted strong opposition from downtown business interests to a sprinkler system retrofitting ordinance. Manning said, however, that safety should be the primary concern.

“I think we will have a major effort to either not have such an (retrofitting) ordinance or to reduce the impact of that ordinance, actually the cost of that impact,” Manning said. “Anytime we have come forward with any type of ordinance that requires additional installation of fire protection systems, there have been those who the cost of that impacts on voicing opposition.

“When we look at the situation we’re in, the millions of dollars lost in property damage and the fact that we lost a human life, as a fire chief I can never agree with anything that trades off dollars for lives,” Manning told a crowd of reporters. “(Sprinkler systems) should be installed; the owners’ problem of installing it is working out the economics of it.”

‘Some Couldn’t Comply’

Geoffrey Ely, executive director of the Building Owners and Managers Assn., which represents most of the downtown high-rise owners in the city, stopped short of announcing opposition to a sprinkler retrofitting law. But he warned that many older high-rises that do not now fall under sprinkler laws may be unable to accommodate a new system.

“Our organization would simply tell (the city) they would be running against some constraints that some buildings couldn’t comply with and their only alternative is to close the building down,” Ely said.

Similar warnings were issued more than a decade ago when Fire Department officials first attempted to require sprinkler system retrofitting in older high-rises, according to veteran Councilman Bernardi and Deputy Fire Chief Craig Drummond.

“There was a lot of complaining about the cost and (building owners) were threatening to move out of the city to Orange County,” Bernardi said.

Stiff Resistance

Drummond, meanwhile, was on a task force at the time that examined the idea of retrofitting existing buildings and said the question always was met with stiff resistance.

“They’d say there is not enough proven history, you’ll run us out of business, all the old downtown area will be a ghost town,” Drummond recalled. “Every time we tried to put a package together that we thought would accomplish something significant, we faced strong opposition.” He added that there was even strong opposition at the time to a law requiring automatic sprinklers in new buildings.

Before the City Council passed its ordinance in 1974 requiring new sprinkler systems in new high-rise buildings, the Fire Department sounded out several council members to determine the chances of a retrofitting ordinance. The consensus was that such a plan was politically unattainable, Drummond said, and therefore a formal proposal was never made.

Former City Councilman Arthur K. Snyder, who chaired the council’s Police, Fire and Civil Defense Committee at the time, said Friday he does not recall ever being approached about retrofitting. But he said that the lack of sprinkler systems in the pre-1974 high-rises did not seem to be a problem.

No Serious Thoughts

“I don’t think anyone had any serious thoughts about it,” said Snyder, now a lobbyist who represents some downtown interests.

Manning told reporters that after the spectacular November, 1976, fire on the 20th floor of the 32-story Occidental Tower on South Hill Street, the question of retrofitting again was raised within the department and rejected. In that blaze, three firefighters were injured but there were no fatalities.

The fire chief said he has never before formally proposed a sprinkler retrofitting ordinance to the City Council, indicating that he believed it would be pointless.

“We had a law in place,” Manning explained. We had not had an incident to indicate that the law was insufficient, and therefore I had no evidence to bring to the City Council, only my professional feelings that we were sitting on a disaster.”

Time May Be Ripe

Manning said Friday that in the wake of the First Interstate fire, the time may be ripe for a strong law.

The idea of requiring existing buildings to install sprinkler systems is not a new one, either in Los Angeles or elsewhere. But the requirement has never applied to high-rises in Los Angeles.

In 1984, two years after a fire swept through the Dorothy Mae Apartment Hotel killing 24 people, the city enacted a law requiring automatic sprinklers in stairways and hallways of all multiple-dwelling buildings built before 1943. It was in 1943, that stricter fire safety standards had been enacted.

The 1984 ordinance affected more than 1,300 buildings citywide, and most have now completed the sprinkler system installations, said Fire Commission President Harold Kwalwasser.

Required in Some Homes

Manning said that sprinkler systems are also required in about 10,000 homes in the city that are either too far from a fire station or are set back so far from the street that they are inaccessible to a fire truck.

In December, 1986, the state of Massachusetts adopted a law requiring automatic sprinklers in all existing buildings above 70 feet that were built before 1975. And earlier last s week, the Connecticut Legislature passed a bill requiring retrofitting of sprinklers for all hotels and motels.

New York City, meanwhile, offers owners of older buildings at least 100 feet in height an option of either retrofitting with sprinklers or altering their buildings to prevent a fire that starts on one floor from spreading to others.

John Viniello, president of the National Fire Sprinkler Assn., said that all 50 states have laws requiring automatic sprinklers in certain new structures, whether high-rise office buildings, hotels, or both. In a related development, the California Fire Chief’s Assn. called Friday for legislation requiring automatic sprinkler systems for all buildings in California at least seven-stories high.