Fire Reveals Gap in Safety Laws

A fire on the sixth floor of a residential high-rise in Koreatown on Monday left a resident critically burned and exposed what authorities said is a gap in city regulations that allows more than 100 towers to go without sprinkler systems.

Laws mandate that apartment buildings and office towers constructed before 1943 and after 1974 have fire sprinklers installed. After an office tower fire in 1988, the city extended that requirement to all commercial high-rises. But fire officials said those rules leave about 75% of residential high-rise buildings without sprinklers.

As fire officials investigate the cause of Monday’s fire, they said sprinkler systems are proven to help reduce the spread of fires and should be in all high-rise buildings.

“As a firefighter, it is a huge concern,” said Capt. Frank Comfort, a member of the Los Angeles Fire Department’s High-Rise unit. “Everybody knows sprinklers save lives. When you don’t have them, what are you saying?”

In the early 1990s, the Fire Department pushed for regulations that would require all high-rises to have sprinklers, but the proposal ultimately failed.

“There is an extremely strong lobby of residential owners,” said Comfort, who was an inspector at the time and recalls the debate vividly. “The sad thing is, we’ve already had far more deaths in high-rise residential buildings than at office buildings.”

The fire broke out in a single apartment around 10:20 a.m. at the 39-year-old Wilshire Tower on 7th Street. Residents said there was a frantic rush as the apartment manager and several assistants ran throughout the 168-unit building, banging on doors and yelling at people to get out.

Virginia Shappiro, 80, said that after hearing an assistant manager pound on her door, she started yelling at her husband that they had to go.

“I said, ‘Sam, get your shoes on, we’ve got to get out of here,’ ” she said.

Other residents were alerted to the blaze by a fire alarm that went off.

“I heard the alarm, I opened the door, and sure enough the smoke was filtering down. I told my husband ‘let’s get out,’ ” said Kyung Ok Kwak, 72.

About 80 firefighters responded within minutes, arriving to see black smoke billowing from the sixth floor and the stairwell.

They extinguished the fire in apartment 602 in a half-hour, said Capt. Rex Vilaubi.

The two women in apartment 602 were injured. One was rushed to a nearby hospital with third-degree burns and respiratory complications, the other was sent to another hospital with minor injuries, Vilaubi said.

The two women were being interviewed at the hospitals by arson investigators, but there was no reason to declare the blaze foul play, Vilaubi said.

The department had not determined the cause of the fire as of Monday, he said.

Los Angeles has been the site of several destructive high-rise and apartment fires and has reworked its sprinkler regulations several times in recent decades. Still, the rules don’t cover all tall buildings.

Of the 700 high rises in Los Angeles, about 200 are residential, fire officials say. Of those, about 75% are not required to have sprinkler systems, Comfort said.

State law requires all high-rise buildings constructed after 1974 to include sprinkler systems. But the question of what to do about hundreds of older structures remains unsolved.

In 1982, an arsonist set fire to the four-story Dorothy Mae apartment building on Sunset Boulevard near downtown, killing 24 residents. In response, the city required sprinkler systems in the hallways and doors of residential buildings constructed before 1943 if they had a central hallway design.

Six years later, the First Interstate Bank Building in downtown caught fire while the sprinkler system was being upgraded by the owner. One person was killed.

A few months later, the City Council adopted an ordinance that required all existing commercial high-rises to upgrade their fire prevention equipment and include sprinkler systems.

The Fire Department backed another proposed ordinance that would require all residential high-rise buildings to install fire sprinklers as well. But apartment owners aggressively fought the plan, saying it could bankrupt them.

A city report found that it would cost as much as $50,000 per unit to install the sprinklers, and because of city rent-control laws, the owners could not pass the costs on to tenants.

After years of debate, the City Council in 1993 unanimously rejected the proposal.

Harold Greenberg, a past president of the Apartment Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, said most building owners would like to provide sprinklers and other safety measures but can’t afford it.

“Many times it comes to a situation of cash-flow,” Greenberg said. “Most landlords will do what they can to protect their investment if they can afford to do it.”

Councilman Martin Ludlow, who represents the Koreatown area, says he plans to meet with fire and building officials to determine why sprinklers were not required at the Wilshire Tower Apartments.

“I’m very concerned,” Ludlow said. “It doesn’t make sense to me that you could allow a building of such height to not have a sprinkler system.”