A Year After High-Rise Fire, Many Still at Risk : Safety: Fire officials say lives are still threatened in 79 buildings. But many landlords and tenants say installation of sprinklers is just too expensive.

One year after a pre-dawn blaze destroyed much of the Wilshire Terrace luxury co-op in Westwood, fire officials say that lives are still at risk in 79 other Los Angeles high-rise apartment buildings that are without sprinklers.

But there is no agreement in sight on a safety standard for sprinklers that would satisfy the Fire Department while still being cheap enough for landlords, tenants, condo owners and city housing officials.

“That’s the agony right now,” said Bonnie Brody, an aide to City Councilman Richard Alatorre. “At what point does implementing this become such a hardship that older people on fixed incomes are thrown out on the street?”

Alatorre is chairman of the City Council’s Public Safety Committee, which is expected to take up a proposed high-rise sprinkler law sometime in February or March.

Without it, said Fire Marshal Davis R. Parsons, “ultimately, someone is going to die in one of the high-rise buildings as a result of a fire. Whether it’s tomorrow or 10 years from now, I don’t know.”

But even the cheapest system approved by the Fire Department for some buildings would cost as much as $12,000 per unit for an average condominium, or $200 a month in extra rent if a landlord passed on the cost to tenants under the city’s rent stabilization ordinance.

Those estimates do not include extra costs for asbestos abatement or for repair of ceilings and walls after the installation of water lines.

“I appreciate (the Fire Department’s) point of view,” said Barbara Zeidman, the city’s director of rent stabilization. “But there are other ways of killing people, and one of them is to displace wholesale numbers of senior citizens. It beats the hell out of me where they’d go.”

There are other economic problems that make the Fire Department’s proposal unrealistic, she said, including the difficulty that landlords would have in financing the work.

Retrofitting the 18-tower Park Labrea complex, site of the greatest concentration of residential high-rises in the city, could cost its owners, Forest City Development, as much as $30 million, she said.

“I don’t think Forest City is going to jump at that,” she said.

Indeed, Forest City spokeswoman Joan Kraden said that “at the moment, we believe that what they are requiring does not meet the cost-benefits test. It’s out of line. It can’t be done without some consideration for the burden it places on all the parties involved.”

The demand for a high-rise sprinkler ordinance began after the First Interstate Bank fire, which took one life and injured 40 workers on May 4, 1988. Ironically, installation of a sprinkler system was 90% complete at First Interstate, but it was turned off the night of the fire.

The pressure for a residential high-rise ordinance increased after the Dec. 23, 1989, conflagration at the Wilshire Terrace, which began as an arson blaze at a construction site next door but eventually spread to 33 locations in a mile-long, block-wide swath of Westwood.

Except for a few cases of smoke inhalation, no one was hurt in the fire that raged at the 14-story building, whose board of directors had discussed a sprinkler system only weeks before the fire.

After a year of cleanup, restoration and remodeling, including installation of a state-of-the-art alarm and sprinkler system, residents of Wilshire Terrace began moving back into apartments on the relatively unscathed west end last week.

Parsons, a deputy chief in the Los Angeles Fire Department, said sprinklers are vital.

Because of the distance of upper floors from the ground, it can take rescuers as long as 15 or 20 minutes to reach the top of a high-rise, he said, time enough for fire to spread and people to be killed.

Critics say that no one in recent memory has burned to death in a Los Angeles high-rise, but Parsons said that the 1979 death of three people during a fire at the Bunker Hill Towers West could have been avoided.

One man died of smoke inhalation in that blaze and a man and a woman leaped to their deaths, taking their poodle with them. “If the fire had been put out from a sprinkler, they never would have had to panic,” Parsons said.

At Park Labrea, tenants are already embroiled in a dispute with management over proposed charges of $12 a month to cover the cost of a recently installed system of fences and gates.

“Compared to that, the costs (of sprinklering 2,800 units in Park Labrea’s 18 towers) are absolutely astronomical,” said David Hamlin, president of the Park Labrea Tenants Assn.

“If you impose it, you won’t have to worry about saving any lives, because nobody will be living here,” he said.

Condo owners are also upset about the prospect of massive expense to pay for fire-safety systems.

Glen Rosten, a Westside condo resident who has represented the Greater Los Angeles Condo Assn. in talks with city officials, cited federal figures that he said show the chance of dying in a high-rise fire to be half as likely as being killed by lightning.

“We want fire safety and we think there are a number of things that could be done, predominantly educational,” he said, recalling that employees at Wilshire Terrace were credited with saving lives through the building’s pre-planned evacuation procedures.

“These fires can be contained for hours in one unit, and if people are informed in time they can get out,” he said.

The proposed city legislation to require high-rise sprinklers has already gone through about 22 drafts, said Brody, Alatorre’s aide, who called it the toughest problem she has dealt with in 15 years of government service.

“The really sad part of it is that in new buildings it takes a split second to add, and in old buildings it’s such an agony,” she said.