Gambling With Lives

The Los Angeles City Council is thinking about requiring all high-rise buildings to have sprinkler systems--not just those built since a 1974 state law mandated them in new construction. Those buildings are not covered now because of resistance when the law was passed. There will be resistance this time as well. Ignorance of the consequences can be no excuse this time, however, and the council should act with public safety uppermost in its mind. It could start with City Hall and City Hall East, which houses the Fire Department; neither has sprinkler systems.

The First Interstate Bank fire last week not only struck fear in every person who works in or visits high-rise offices in Los Angeles but also seriously weakened the economic argument against sprinkler retrofitting. A sprinkler system was being installed at the First Interstate building, which was built before the state law took effect. But the work, which cost $3.5 million, wasn’t finished, so the bank and other building tenants lost millions more. Alexander Handy, a building engineer, lost his life.

The economics of safety is hard to calculate. Offices house the lifeblood of businesses: their accounting records, personnel files, plans for the future and most of all their employees. Not to provide the safest possible quarters for these assets, human and computerized alike, is to gamble a known payment for sprinklers against irreplaceable losses, not to mention potential lawsuits.

Will Los Angeles high-rises lose tenants if managers install sprinklers and charge higher rents? Will businesses flee the city because of onerous safety requirements? Far more likely is that tenants may vote with their feet, choosing to invest their futures in buildings well protected with sprinklers, functioning smoke detectors, proper fire doors and safe wiring.

Lawmakers resist the poormouth argument best after major disasters. On Sept. 4, 1982, fire roared through the Dorothy Mae apartments on Sunset Boulevard. Twenty-four people died. Eventually the City Council passed an ordinance requiring sprinklers outside each apartment in all residential buildings constructed before today’s tougher codes were enacted. That work has been done.

The Dorothy Mae ordinance has saved lives and property on more than one occasion. High-rise buildings are at grave risk, filled as they are with combustible office equipment and poked through with holes for cables, elevators and air-conditioning ducts, all of which can as readily carry fire, smoke and fumes. It is time to protect people in the buildings where they work as well as the buildings in which they live.