Sprinklers: No Choice

Los Angeles County owns or leases 27 high-rise buildings, including three hospitals, none of which have sprinkler systems. All therefore face the same massive fire-safety problem with which the city of Los Angeles is grappling. Thousands of city and county employees work in these buildings, thousands of citizens conduct business there, thousands are treated in the hospitals, thousands are tried in the courts or serve on juries. Millions of records that affect virtually every phase of local life are stored in these buildings. They must be protected, starting with the hospitals.

The buildings that lack sprinklers were built before the enactment of the 1974 state law requiring them. As a result of the First Interstate high-rise fire earlier this month, a Los Angeles City Council committee is already studying the cost of installing sprinklers and related work, like removing asbestos that would be dislodged in the sprinkler installation. This retrofitting would involve City Hall, City Hall East, City Hall South, Parker Center police headquarters and city hall branches in Van Nuys and San Pedro.

After the First Interstate fire, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors requested a report on the status of its buildings, due early next month. The news will be bad. A county official says that the list of buildings without sprinklers includes the Hall of Justice, the Hall of Records, the Hall of Administration, the Criminal Courts Building on Temple Street, the county courts building at 1111 N. Hill, the municipal traffic court building at 1945 S. Hill and court buildings in Van Nuys, Long Beach and Pasadena.

Worse, the main buildings of the Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, Martin Luther King Jr. General Hospital and Harbor-UCLA Medical Center have no sprinkler systems. These are buildings that are jammed with patients, buildings that would be difficult to evacuate in the case of fire. They will be hard to retrofit with sprinklers because they never close and there are few slack times. But they must be retrofitted as soon as possible.

It is worth noting that the federal government is ahead of the city and county, at least locally, on this score. A contract is expected to be awarded in September to install sprinklers in the federal building at 300 N. Los Angeles St. The General Services Administration is also working on plans and appropriations for installing sprinkler systems in the federal buildings at 312 N. Spring St. and 11000 Wilshire Blvd.

Installing sprinklers is a massive project for which the city and the county have no money. The City Council’s Police, Fire and Public Safety Committee heard Wednesday that it could cost $36 million to install sprinklers and remove asbestos in the six city buildings.

No formal cost estimate has been presented to the County Board of Supervisors, but working some simple mathematics illustrates the scope of the problem. Los Angeles County has 10.5 million square feet of high-rise floor space unprotected by sprinkler systems. If the work must be done in off-business hours in occupied offices, it could cost roughly $7 to $7.50 per square foot, according to a county official’s figures. This means that retrofitting the county buildings would cost well over $70 million--and that does not include the removal of asbestos.

The work must be done. There is too much potential for disaster if the city and county dodge the issue. And the city cannot ask private owners to retrofit Los Angeles’ 520 high-rise buildings without sprinklers unless it is protecting its own quarters as well.

The price is probably too high to be carried by the city and county general funds, which already are strapped for money to provide needed public safety, health and welfare services. The city and county may need to consider a special bond issue to pay for these projects. City and county leaders will be asking how they can finance the sprinkler systems and how they can hold the costs down while ensuring good work, as well as whether they can train their own employees to do the job. Those are legitimate questions. But the officials should not question the basic principle. The sprinklers must be installed as soon as possible.