Death at Leisure World avoidable

Fire officials say man could have been saved by a sprinkler system

Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2005

Click here to enlarge this photo Dan Gross⁄The Gazette Fire officials survey the site of a Friday evening fire in the 3200 block of South Leisure World Boulevard. One man died as a result of the blaze.

An emergency sprinkler system could have saved the life of an 80-year-old man and prevented much of the $1.6 million in damage caused by a fire that swept through a dozen Leisure World apartments on Friday, Montgomery County Fire Chief Thomas W. Carr Jr. said Monday.

‘‘You can assume [a sprinkler system] probably would have had an opportunity to hold the fire in check, if not put it out,” he said in a phone interview.

Built in the 1970s, well before passage of county legislation requiring fire control sprinklers in new housing, the two-story, garden-style apartments in the 3200 block of South Leisure World Boulevard in Aspen Hill were quickly engulfed by flames around 7 p.m.

The fire started in the kitchen of one resident’s apartment after the woman accidentally turned on the wrong stove burner, igniting a plastic coffeepot, fire officials said. Residents from 12 units were displaced.

‘‘It just kills my soul that they didn’t go back and put them in,” said Leisure World resident Sandy Rovner. ‘‘Even though they weren’t required, they should have been put in.”

The benefits of emergency sprinkler systems are indisputable, said former Rockville City Councilman John F. Hall Jr., a volunteer firefighter who championed a city ordinance in 2002 that required all new homes to have sprinkler systems.

‘‘There has never been a fire-related fatality in a home with a functioning sprinkler system,” Hall said, citing national statistics.

Retroactively fitting emergency sprinkler systems into multi-family buildings would be a costly undertaking that each housing association in Leisure World’s 9,000-person senior living community would have to consider, said Kevin Flannery, general manager of Leisure World of Maryland.

Fire facts *Unattended cooking is the leading cause of home cooking fires. *Three in every 10 reported home fires start in the kitchen, more than any other place in the home. *One-third (34 percent) of candle fires occur after candles are left unattended or inadequately controlled; 26 percent occur when some form of combustible material comes too close to the candle; 6 percent are started by people playing with the candle. *The most common material first ignited in residential smoking-related fires are mattresses and bedding, followed by trash and upholstered furniture. Source: Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Services

For years, the state has required multi-family complexes to have sprinkler systems. In 1987, the county followed by requiring sprinkler systems in new multi-family and townhouse buildings. The county followed the lead of Rockville and Gaithersburg, requiring in 2004 that new single-family homes have sprinklers.

In Montgomery County, about 100 older residential high-rises and many smaller multi-family buildings like those that burned in Leisure World do not have sprinkler systems, Carr said.

‘‘The greatest need in fire protection is in multi-family housing, particularly high-rises,” said County Councilman Philip M. Andrews (D-Dist. 3) of Gaithersburg, who has been pushing for new legislation that provides additional incentives to retrofit older high-rise buildings.

The county attorney’s office is reviewing that legislation, which is expected to go before the council early next year, Andrews said.

The fire department joined in the push for the legislation this spring, Fire and Rescue Services spokesman Pete Piringer said, after an elderly couple died of smoke inhalation in their East-West Highway high-rise. The unit did not have a sprinkler system.

‘‘We don’t have the expectation that the 98 buildings without them will have sprinkler systems installed next year,” Piringer said. ‘‘But we’re working very closely with those [owners] that are going to be affected.”

Currently, owners of the county’s grandfathered residential buildings can get tax incentives forgiving either the total cost of the retrofit or up to half of their property taxes for the year they install sprinkler system.

Hall estimates the cost of retrofitting sprinkler systems to be approximately $1.75 to $2.25 per square foot, roughly 25 cents above new installation costs.

Starting with high-rise buildings, retroactive installations in multi-family housing would require a flexible approach to incentives and years to complete, Andrews said.

‘‘The fire at Leisure World shows that you have significant risk in low-rise, multiple-family units, as well as a high-rise,” he said. ‘‘But things could have been much worse. High-rises are much harder to respond to.”