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An assistant county fire chief says it's common for upcounty neighborhoods built in the late 90s and early 2000s to have streets that are too narrow for emergency vehicles to pass when vehicles are parked on each side.

The Office of the Fire Marshal recently evaluated roads in the seven-year-old Kings Crossing development in Boyds and found that there wasn't enough room for emergency vehicles to pass when cars are parked on both sides of the road, Assistant Fire Chief Mike Donahue said at a homeowners association meeting last week.

County fire officials have investigated complaints in most of Clarksburg, and the city of Gaithersburg is looking at streets in the Kentlands and the Lakelands, Donahue said. In some areas of Clarksburg, developers have been required to retrofit roads, he said.

On-street parking in the Kings Crossing development near the border of Germantown will be restricted to one side of all streets to allow fire trucks and other emergency vehicles to more easily navigate the cramped streets, a problem that fire officials are addressing in other new upcounty communities, he said.

The office investigates road access problems on a complaint basis, but there are likely many other roads in the upcounty that are too narrow for emergency workers, Donahue said.

"This is probably the tip of the iceberg for this area," he said.

Easy access is especially important for new single-family houses like those in Kings Crossing because they are generally built with easily combustible materials and large, open rooms that allow fires to spread rapidly, Donahue said. Houses are also being built closer together than in the past, he said.

"We do understand that people live here. This is your home, your community. We're not out here to make your lives impossible," Donahue said. "… This was not an easy decision on our part."

The streets, most of which do not have curbs or gutters, are 20 feet wide, the minimum required by county law, Donahue said. According to a proposed executive regulation that must be voted on by the County Council by the end of June, roads that allow parking on both sides of the street should be at least 36 feet wide to accommodate emergency vehicles.

Firefighters on ladder trucks need roads that are 20 feet wide, not including space for on-street parking, to operate, though they can make do with as little as 16 feet if necessary, Donahue said. Fire officials have been working with planners to provide clarity on how much access firefighters need in new developments since Clarksburg residents uncovered hundreds of site plan violations in the community in 2005, he said.

County law requires that single-family homes have two parking spaces, a requirement satisfied by two-car garages, Donahue said. The county planning department will not support a waiver to create more parking because the Kings Crossing development is at the maximum allowable level of impervious surfaces such as pavement, he said.

Residents said they understood the safety issue but were frustrated that the community was built without the input of fire officials.

"It's probably the best we're going to get out of a bad situation," said resident Bob Caverly, 52. "We got screwed by the planning department and the developer and now we've got to live with it."

Road recommendations by fire officials did not carry much weight before the Clarksburg controversy because they were not directly involved in the discussions between planners and developers, Donahue said. Fire officials provided direct input to planners in the past but were disinvited from the process in 1997, he said.

All roads must now go through the fire marshal's office before they can be approved, he said.

"It's important to us not to be in the mode of making a fix after the fact," he said. "We're trying to get ahead."