High-rise blaze draws attention to sprinkler rules
The lack of sprinklers at a San Francisco highrise apartment building that caught fire Monday — leaving residents of 30 units displaced — has a supervisor determined to find out if city rules on old buildings need revision.
Residents of the highrise in the Gateway complex, some of whom are in their 100s, returned to a smoky but mostly intact building wondering if a sprinkler system, which is not required in older buildings, would have put out the fire in its early stages to reduce damage.
Aaron Peskin, supervisor for District Three, said he’s looking into the issue.
“I will be talking to city officials about whether or not it is good public policy to require sprinklers in buildings like that,” Peskin said.
Built in 1965, the 25story high-rise was required to have fire sprinklers only in storage areas and the garbage chute. Older buildings need not be retrofitted with sprinklers unless a property
owner is modifying the building.
San Francisco firefighters have specific methods for dousing fires in buildings without sprinklers, Fire Department spokesman Jonathan Baxter said.
“We do know that sprinklers do help with preventing fires, and based on (the building’s) age it did have the fire safety measures that are required,” Baxter said. “We were able to fight the fire with the measures that were in place.”
There were no injuries but plenty of rattled nerves.
A pair of women in their 70s said they had sheltered inside their apartment on the 24th floor after finding the stairwell filled with smoke.
Georgie Evans, 76, who uses a walker, said she first thought it was a false alarm, but then a voice on the building intercom instructed her to stay put inside her unit.
“I was concerned they weren’t coming to get us,” Evans said. “They didn’t send anyone up.”
She and her roommate, 73-year-old Mardi Kildebeck, went back into their apartment, closed the door and waited for the all clear.
Thirteen floors below, Troy Keim was cooking dinner in his 11th floor unit when the alarm went off around 5 p.m.
“We thought we set off the smoke detectors, so I didn’t go outside for a little while,” he said. “But when we did, it was blazing.”
The fire broke out in a corner of the 12th floor and quickly spread to the 16th floor of the building at 405 Davis Court in San Francisco’s Financial District.
On Tuesday, a pile of charred furniture sat on the sidewalk and the smell of smoke lingered. Passersby and residents walked past and gazed upward at the blackened corner of the building.
The fire burned for 45 minutes and damaged five floors. Firefighters helped at least a dozen elderly residents evacuate, Baxter said.
John Wells was in his 10th floor unit when the smoke alarm went off. He didn’t immediately react, he said, because the building has a few false alarms each year.
“My son poked his head out the window and said, ‘Dad, there’s smoke out here,’ ” Wells said.
Wells, his wife and 13-yearold son waited outside the building and with friends in a nearby town house for five to six hours before they were able to go back inside at 11:30 p.m., he said.
In 2003, Wells said, he was a resident in a Tenderloin apartment building equipped with sprinklers that quickly put out a fire in a unit below his.
“If this building had had sprinklers, we wouldn’t be out here talking,” Wells said.
Another resident, who gave her name only as Jennifer, wasn’t home at the time of the fire. She begged firefighters to let her go to her 10th floor apartment and rescue her cat.
She stayed at a friend’s town house overnight. She doesn’t know when she’ll be able to go back to her home.
Baxter said the cause of the fire is still unknown. On Tuesday, several fire inspectors were talking to building staff in the lobby of the highrise.
Deputy Chief of Operations Mark Gonzales said the fire was never in danger of spreading and that firefighters were able to control it by forcing the flames away from corridors and toward windows.
The Gateway complex property owners declined to comment. San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Gwendolyn Wu contributed to this
report.