A devastating apartment fire has sparked a push on enforcement of lowrise apartment buildings in the city.
New Westminster Fire and Rescue Services is forming a prevention task force that will target lowrise apartment buildings in the city. The move comes in the aftermath of a Jan. 31 fire on Ash Street that levelled the building and left more than 30 people without homes.
“It’s really to upgrade buildings that are noncompliant and help work with them,” said Fire Chief Tim Armstrong. “It’s to better educate the tenants and work with the building owners to help provide a safe environment for their tenants.”
A total of four firefighters will be assigned to the two task forces that will allow the department to do more inspections of apartment buildings in the city.
“We are already active,” Armstrong said about building inspections. “We have already upped our inspections – it’s just that we don’t have the staffing levels to keep on it. This will give us that extra help.”
Fire inspectors in the fire prevention division and crews working on the trucks also do inspections when time allows.
“The crews will still do inspections,” Armstrong said. “It is a way of accelerating it.”
The fire department regularly inspects buildings in the city to ensure they meet fire regulations, but the Ash Street fire was a strong reminder of the need for buildings to be properly maintained.
“Without having fires, we have had other buildings in the city that have been problematic as far as code enforcement and maintaining proper building conditions and life safety requirements within the building,” Armstrong said.
The task force will focus its efforts on inspecting the nearly 500 lowrise, wood-frame buildings in New Westminster.
“Those buildings were built in a time when probably there was a push on local government to create affordable hosing and rental housing accommodation. A lot of them are rental buildings,” Armstrong said. “In their day, the building code wasn’t as stringent as it is today. There’s no real legislation to make them upgrade to the current building code.”
Armstrong stressed that he doesn’t want to create hysteria that it’s unsafe to live in these kinds of buildings. He said they’re generally safe if they are properly maintained.
“The idea of this prevention task force is to take suppression crews and focus primarily on these buildings,” he said. “So what we want to do is get all our inspections up to date and then take a more in-depth look at these buildings and come up with a ranking system, a triage system.”
As firefighters inspect buildings, they will plot false alarms and fire calls on a map of the city, and rank them based on their need for service and history.
“We will triage all these buildings – rank them, based on going in and going over whether they have multiple calls, a bad history. They will be ranked as a high risk ahead of those that may be spotless and well maintained and have no history of problems. Then we are going to put those on a map. We are hoping to see by looking at the map where our problem areas are,” Armstrong said. “It might be in one grid of the city we have a lot of false alarms or our rankings system for the building shows we have high-risk buildings in there. Now we can go in with the building department, bylaws and us, and says we are going to concentrate on this area and see if we can reduce our calls to these areas, improve fire safety in the buildings and hit it from more of a strategic approach, as opposed to not really looking at the trends or patterns.”
While apartments are required to have their fires alarms and extinguishers tested annually, firefighters will be able to catch it if that hasn’t been done.
“Under our current bylaw and the Fire Services Act, we are required to have a regular inspection system,” Deputy Fire Chief John Hatch told The Record after the Ash Street fire. “With the size of our department, we have built in a two-year inspection system. The buildings themselves, the building owners, must have their fire alarm systems serviced and checked annually. As well, they are supposed to be performing monthly tests and recording those testing systems in their buildings.”
As part of the new task force, New Westminster Fire and Rescue Services hopes to educate the buildings owners about issues, such as ways of reducing false alarms. It’s also hoping to do more public education with apartment residents.
While making annual visits to local buildings, fire inspectors check exterior and common areas but don’t go into suites. The goal is to get into suites if possible – not to enforce bylaws, but to educate residents about home safety issues such as kitchen and cooking safety.
In addition to obvious needs such as a working smoke detector, Armstrong said firefighters could also educate people about safety issues posed by space heaters and electrical cords. With many older buildings having minimal wall plugs, he said residents may resort to power bars and multiple plugs, which can overload the circuits and pose a fire hazard.
Armstrong said the jobs have been posted, and his goal is to see the task force get to work by the end of the month. The four firefighters who take on the job will still be available to attend fire calls if needed.
“We are going to take one truck and it will still be available if we have a fire,” he said. “They will be focused on prevention duties in the day but if we have a fire they will be maintaining their firefighting skills as well. They will be able to be called back to a fire.”
Along with the task force, the fire department also wants to launch a public education campaign about the need for apartment residents to call 911 in the event of a fire. Although newer buildings are required to be monitored by alarm companies, that’s not the case with some of the older buildings in the city as it wasn’t required by the building codes of the day.
“An alarm in a building doesn’t mean we have been notified. Unless an alarm company monitors the building and that alarm company has called E-Comm or 911 dispatch, it could be ringing for a period of time and we don’t know. I think a lot of people have this illusion that as soon as an alarm goes off there is a bell ringing here at the fire hall and we know about it,” Armstrong said. “Even if you think somebody else has called, pick up the phone and call 911 and let them know you have alarms going off. If nobody calls, there is a delay in us getting to the scene.”
