Fire inspection results available

Searchable online portal now contains information on 1,442 Toronto residential highrises

Six months after London’s deadly Grenfell Tower fire, Toronto tenants living in highrises can finally look up the results of fire inspections in their own buildings.

The city and Toronto Fire Services launched a searchable online portal on Tuesday, containing fire safety information on 1,442 residential highrises, including Toronto Community Housing buildings.

The move follows a Metro story on fire safety reports being kept secret from tenants. A North York man was told last summer he had to make a Freedom-of-Information request to learn about his own building.

Tenants and potential tenants can now see when inspections were done, what fire code violations inspectors found and when they were resolved. The portal only contains information on closed inspections dated January 2017 onward.

“The goal obviously was to make this type of information more accessible, easily available, for those tenants that have questions about the status of their building and maybe some of the history of their building,” said Toronto Fire Services deputy chief Jim Jessop. “I am not aware of any other fire service in this province that has anything close to what we have launched.”

Fire services committed to getting the results online by the end of the year at October’s tenant issues committee.

Mark Legate, the tenant who was instructed to file a Freedom-of-Information request, told Metro the portal does not address his concerns as it does not include information on open fire code violations.

“The issue has always been that tenants are not being made aware when the violations are known and not yet addressed. That is the point when tenants need the information about the safety of their apartments/ buildings; not weeks, months or even years later when the issue is ‘closed.’ ”

“Tenants are not being made aware when the violations are known and not yet addressed.” MARK LEGATE TENANT