Fire Watch Ordered at New School

Los Angeles city fire officials have ordered the school district to post fire wardens at a new Northridge high school because of concern that the fire alarm system has failed to operate properly since the school opened last fall.

The city fire marshal’s office called for the fire watch at the 500-student Valley New High School No. 1 last week after being notified by The Times, which obtained documents showing that the school’s principal and others have complained for months about the alarm system.

The problems, these reports and interviews show, are that the fire alarm rings frequently and in some cases is unable to pinpoint the location of a potential fire at the school, known informally as CSUN High School.

School district building inspection reports also show that for months, the $33-million campus -- one of a record eight new schools opened last fall -- had some fire doors that wouldn’t close and others that lacked functioning panic bars. And as recently as Jan. 5, one top Los Angeles Unified School District official questioned whether the campus was safe to reopen after the winter break.

District officials said that as of last Wednesday night, there have been two fire wardens on duty at the school 24 hours a day. One patrols the campus while the other sits by a phone in case a call has to be made to the Fire Department. Fire officials said they now feel confident the school is safe because the fire wardens are there.

Los Angeles school district officials said any problems with the fire doors and exit bars have been fixed and contend that the fire alarm system was “functional” all along and that students were never in jeopardy.

“I have no doubt in my mind that that was the case on Sept. 9, when we put kids in that school,” said James A. McConnell Jr., who heads the district’s massive building program.

He and other district officials said extensive testing showed only minor “discrepancies” in the alarm system, which they characterized as 96% in working order. They say the system is extremely sensitive, blaming malfunctions on the dust and dirt generated by ongoing construction.

But Assistant Fire Chief Al Hernandez said city fire authorities believe the alarm system “doesn’t work to the standard that we want it to: without any errors.... We consider it broken.”

Asked if the school’s problems with false alarms and jammed fire doors had created a danger, Hernandez said: “I won’t say that it was dangerous. It’s not safe.”

The dispute over fire safety at CSUN High came to a head last week. Fire inspectors visited the school and issued a violation notice, ordering a 24-hour fire patrol.

That action prompted a high-level meeting between school officials and fire authorities, who imposed the fire watch for two weeks, giving the district time to complete a new round of tests and prove the system is fully operational.

Allowed under state and local laws, a fire watch is essentially a stopgap measure that calls for at least one person to look for smoke in such buildings as schools, churches, hospitals and office complexes that have known fire safety problems.

Fire authorities occasionally invoke a fire watch to allow occupancy of new buildings in which the fire systems are still being completed. In fact, fire wardens patrolled Staples Center for a year after it opened while the building’s fire alarm system was being completed, Hernandez said.

CSUN High, on Zelzah Avenue adjacent to Cal State Northridge, was among the new schools opened in September as part of the district’s ambitious building campaign to relieve student overcrowding and reduce busing.

Students, teachers and administrators have been housed in the main four-story, 38-classroom building while construction crews continue to work on the multipurpose room and other buildings.

John Perez, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, the 42,000-member teachers union, said he called Supt. Roy Romer a few days before the school opened to express concerns about reports of malfunctioning fire alarms there and at another new campus, South Gate Middle School.

“We said, ‘Maybe you ought not to open these schools for a couple of weeks until these things get done,’ ” he said. “He said, ‘No, the state law says we can open the schools as long as we have a fire warden on each floor, and that’s what we’re going to do.’ ”

Informed that there was no fire watch at the Northridge school until city authorities required one last week, Perez was livid. “As far as I’m concerned, they [school officials] lied to the union and they lied to the parents by saying the schools were safe.”

LAUSD files show that the Fire Department issued a “fire/life safety violation” against the school Sept. 8, the day before it opened. The citation ordered the district to have at least one fire warden on the site at all times until the department deemed the alarm system to be “restored to proper operating conditions.”

The files also show that on the same day, a member of the district’s internal fire safety team issued a memo saying last-minute testing found the alarm system to be “functional” and that there was no need for a fire watch. But fire officials, who learned about the test from The Times last week, said it appears that proper procedures were not followed in conducting that test.

Romer said he was unaware of the Fire Department’s September citation. Although the district instituted a fire watch at South Gate, Romer said his staff said it wasn’t necessary at the other new schools.

“There is no way that I would have proceeded at the other [schools] had I not been assured that they were OK on fire safety,” Romer said. “On the sacrosanct issue of student safety, I am confident that we have made the right decisions every step of the way.”

The alarm system at CSUN High, along with other fire safety features, continued to be a problem after school opened.

A November inspection by the district’s office of environmental health and safety noted that there were unlighted exit signs throughout the buildings, one door that couldn’t be fully opened and another that failed to automatically close as designed when the alarm went off.

School principal Connie Semf complained about problems with the alarm, as well as the school’s public address system, in a December memo.

She wrote that the fire alarm continued to sound and she noted one instance in which she wanted to hold a fire drill but the public address system failed.

“This has happened every time I have attempted to use the system in response to an alarm,” she wrote. “It is not safe.”

As recently as Jan. 5, Bob Collins, an LAUSD district superintendent, who reports directly to Romer and oversees the San Fernando Valley area that includes CSUN High, wrote a memo saying that he had “significant health and safety concerns” at the campus. Collins reported that the “fire alarm goes off daily because of unidentified system problems.”

Citing that and other problems, Collins asked in the memo whether the school was safe for students and staff.

At Romer’s direction, construction crews and district employees worked throughout the next weekend to fix the fire doors and the exit signs before classes resumed, records and interviews show.

School board member Jon Lauritzen, who represents the area, said he was concerned that the alarm problems linger.

“The fact that it’s still going on,” he said, “really disturbs me.”

*

Times staff writer Duke Helfand contributed to this story.