Fire alarm recheck not done
Building that burned in April had faulty device since 2011, but fire officials failed to inspect properly
SAN JOSE >> A fire alarm that didn’t work when flames roared through an apartment building last month had been flagged by fire inspectors in 2011, but was not checked again for seven years because of bureaucratic bungling, the city fire marshal said Tuesday.
“We failed to complete the inspection,” San Jose Fire Marshal Ivan Lee said.
A civilian fire inspector retired soon after finding in 2011 that the alarm in one of eight buildings at the Summerwind Apartments did not function, Lee said. No one ever followed up to make sure it had been certified as working.
Despite the blunder, firefighters who inspected Summerwind over the next six years gave the complex a passing inspection, Lee said.
The nearly tragic lapse was a significant oversight and raised serious questions about how San Jose is meeting the state’s mandate for annual fire inspections at apartment buildings.
Mayor Sam Liccardo on Tuesday called it “unacceptable.”
Nobody was killed in the early morning fivealarm fire on April 17, but 15 people were injured and 120 residents were displaced.
Local fire agencies have been under increased scrutiny in recent years over fire inspections after a pair of deadly fires in Oakland killed 40 people in buildings with faulty wiring and other problems that the fire department had either failed to inspect or follow up on previously flagged safety hazards.
In San Jose, records show an inspector noted on May 18, 2011, that the alarm at Summerwind was not certified as working. Seven years later, Summerwind’s owner still had not gotten the alarm certified or finished the permitting process, which would have required it to be tested
“I tried pulling down the fire alarm twice, but it didn’t work.”
— Yaneth Garcia, resident
and functioning, Lee said. And no city official caught the lapse.
As the fire spread, resident Yaneth Garcia tried to alert her neighbors to flee. “I tried pulling down the fire alarm twice but it didn’t work,” she said. She said she thought she was too weak to pull the lever properly so she asked a neighbor for help. Together they pulled the fire alarm again, but nothing happened.
“I remember screaming at everybody to get out,” she said. Outside, she grabbed logs and threw them at people’s windows to wake them up. As flames raced through the halls, some people couldn’t escape.
Many desperately ran to balconies, some three stories high, and began to tie bedsheets together to use to climb down. But firefighters arrived and began pulling people to safety.
Lee said it is not clear if his fire inspectors have overlooked problems at other buildings in San Jose, the nation’s 10th largest city.
Separate divisions in his office work on fire inspections and fire safety permits, using different records systems that aren’t cross-referenced, so communication between the groups “is limited to word of mouth,” Lee said. The long lack of follow-up on the 2011 Summerwind violations “was a breakdown in both groups.”
The mix-up raised concerns about San Jose’s fire inspections. Firefighters — not the department’s trained fire inspectors — had performed the annual state-mandated safety inspections of the apartment complex in recent years, Lee said. But he acknowledged firefighters “just check the basics” — such as whether fire exits are clear or whether fire hazards are present — and don’t inspect alarms or check their permit or certification records. The civilian inspectors, who know to check if alarms are certified, never went to the building because the Summerwind inspections were assigned to firefighters, he said.
Hours after the fire, one of San Jose’s fire inspectors, Andrew Whyte, issued 14 fire safety violations to the building owner, including two that he wrote were “carried over” from 2011. The owner, Richard Gregersen, didn’t immediately respond to messages Tuesday.
In addition to the nonworking alarm, Whyte noted a lack of lighted exit signs, emergency lights and a failure to identify where fire protection equipment was located.
Liccardo said the discovery of the long-ignored violations exposed two “unacceptable failures.” First, he said, the building owner never followed up on the 2011 violation by failing to get the alarm certified and permitted.
And the city’s “internal procedures failed” when the fire department didn’t follow up. “We need to fix the silo approach” to inspections, Liccardo said, by using a software system that would allow inspectors and firefighters to see all records about a building in one place. The city is working to upgrade its software, he said, but there’s no firm deadline for when a new system would be in place.
Council member Tam Nguyen, whose district includes the Summerwind Apartments, said he too has “a very high concern” about the lack of follow-up. “This fell through the cracks. This is a great wake-up call,” he said, calling for a fire department review of how many buildings may have similar issues.
Another member of the council said “more training needs to be done” so inspections by firefighters are equal to those done by civilian inspectors. “That’s something we have to look at,” Council member Johnny Khamis said.
John DeHaan, a fire safety consultant based in Vallejo, agreed.
“You can’t tell me that someone in a fire company can’t look at an alarm and see if it doesn’t have a current tag on it,” he said.