Balcony sprinklers could have stopped blaze at Langley condo, fire chief says
B.C. fire chiefs have long lobbied for balcony sprinklers to be a requirement for wood-frame apartment buildings, which likely would have made a difference in a fire that devastated a Langley condominium complex Sunday, according to an executive with the organization.
“This again emphasizes the need for them,” said Don Jolley, first vice-president of the Fire Chiefs’ Association of B.C. and chief of the Pitt Meadows Fire Rescue Service.
Fire chiefs have cited a lack of sprinklers as a contributing factor to many similar fires over the past decade and have lobbied the provincial government “over many years” to fix what they view as “a flaw in the building code,” but to no avail, Jolley said.
“Quite simply put, if there had been a balcony (sprinkler), if this (Langley) fire started on the balcony, which it sounds like it did, every single occupant of that building would be enjoying Christmas at home,” he said.
The fire at the Paddington Station complex, in the 5600 block of 201A Street in Langley, burned through the roof of the four-floor structure on Sunday morning, damaging many suites before it was extinguished and sending dozens of residents into the street.
Displaced residents gathered outside the building Monday, writing lists of valuables for firefighters to bring out if possible.
Geoffrey Holland, who sold CDs and DVDs online, figured most of the 16,000 discs in his fourth-floor apartment were lost in the fire.
“The room where I kept most of my stock, the roof is actually burned off and collapsed in,” Holland said, adding that the rest of his apartment was soaked. “I was watching them pump water into the living room, essentially.”
Holland praised firefighters’ efforts, but criticized the building’s construction for its lack of attic sprinklers and firewalls. By late afternoon Monday, firefighters came out with Holland’s water-damaged computer, an iPad, three iPods and four hard drives.
“They did a great job. They did everything they could,” he said of the firefighters.
“It’s not their fault how the building was built.”
Holland also praised volunteers at the nearby Douglas Recreation Centre, which was turned into a makeshift meeting place for residents. Volunteers took him to Walmart to get supplies for himself and his dog, and gave him a ride to his mother’s home in North Vancouver, where he will stay until he finds a new place.
First-floorresidentAnneDruelle said another fire in the building last January had her living in a hotel for two and a half months. Druelle said her insurance provider told her it could be as long as two years before anyone can live in the building again after Monday’s blaze.
She held out little hope that anything could be salvaged from her apartment.
“There’s probably a lot of water and smoke damage,” she said. “When they opened the front doors of the lobby (Sunday), we watched the water pour down the steps for almost an hour.”
Jolley said a few B.C. municipalities, including Pitt Meadows, had drawn up bylaws to make balcony sprinklers a requirement on woodframe apartments, but that was before 2004, when the province stopped allowing ad hoc changes to the building code.
Some builders are adding sprinklers to their developments, said Peter Warkentin, a partner with Quadra Homes, the developer that built the Paddington Station project in 2009. Warkentin said five- and six-storey wood-frame buildings are required to have sprinklers on balconies and in attics. Buildings of that height have been allowed under the building code since 2009.
“The issue is, is the building code stringent enough on threeand four-storey buildings? And it isn’t,” Warkentin said.
Warkentin said since about 2012, “pretty much every developer” has put sprinklers on balconies and in attics of wood-frame buildings “whether the building code requires it or not.”
However, Jolley said his association would prefer to see that required in the building code, and not left to the goodwill of builders. The group believes it would be a simple accommodation because it would only involve extending sprinkler systems that are already required for interiors.
“To us, it’s inexpensive, it’s a nobrainer, and would prevent these tragedies that continue to occur and are very, very much preventable,” Jolley said.
The issue of fire protection for wood buildings was in the spotlight in 2009, when B.C. lobbied for changes to the national building code to allow for wood-frame construction up to six storeys as part a provincial strategy to boost the forest-products industry.
A pair of fires at large woodframe buildings under constructioninMetroVancouver—particularly a May 2011 blaze in Richmond that razed the first project in B.C. built to the new six-storey limit — prompted tighter rules for fire safety, including the addition of sprinklers at earlier stages of construction.
At the time, the fire chiefs’ association worried the province was rushing ahead with its policy without addressing all fire-safety concerns. The group worried that few fire departments had ladder trucks capable of fighting fires in taller buildings, but Jolley said that likely wasn’t a factor — once a fire such as Sunday’s blaze gets inside an attic structure, he said, it is typically too late for firefighters to stop its spread across the entire roof.