A fire that gutted one of 14 senior-citizen apartments in the former West End School on Chestnut Street exposed a vulnerability in old Henderson buildings renovated for housing, Fire Chief Danny Wilkerson said Monday night: Sprinklers are not required.
Henderson firefighters received the alarm from the Senior Center at Chestnut and Granite streets at 5:19 a.m. Sunday after one of the renovated building’s 14 residents was smoking in bed, Wilkerson told the City Council during its regular meeting.
No one was hurt in the blaze, including the resident of the destroyed apartment, who was missing for a time but was found at Sunrise Biscuits. The fire was contained to the one apartment but still was responsible for an estimated $75,000 in damage to the building and $55,000 in damage to its contents, the fire chief reported.
“It was very fortunate,” he said. “The fire-alarm system worked.”
Limiting the fire to one second-floor apartment was a kind of triumph. Wilkerson said the West End School was essentially the same construction as the old Townsville High School, which was destroyed in a matter of minutes a couple of weeks ago.
“It was scary yesterday morning,” the chief said.
Two advantages for firefighters this time were that the West End fire had a single point of origin and that the city location gave them access to ample water.
Water used to battle Sunday’s blaze seeped into the apartment below and damaged the building’s electrical system, so the power to the building was shut off, Wilkerson said. That displaced all 14 residents of the building, three of whom were placed in the temporary housing by the Red Cross. The others are staying with relatives.
An electrical inspector will have to check the damage, and some repairs may be required before anyone can move back into the apartments. But Wilkerson said the residents should be able to return soon, with the exception of the person who lived in the gutted apartment.
The bigger issue, the chief said, is that the city code does not require any fire-suppression system in residential buildings that were built before 1988 and are less than 35 feet tall. The West End building meets both of those exemptions. Smoke detectors succeeded in getting the Fire Department to the scene in time to save the building, but Wilkerson indicated that automatic sprinklers could have prevented most of the $130,000 in damage.
“Any fire chief will tell you that they wish the building were sprinkled,” Wilkerson said.
He said the situation is the same at the main Senior Center on Garnett Street, which was renovated by the same developer as the West End site to include apartments. Wilkerson said firefighters, who are two blocks from the downtown center, have responded to four or five calls sparked by accidents in apartment kitchenettes. Nothing has turned into a dangerous fire, but the threat is there.
One of the goals of the Downtown Development Commission is to encourage more people to live on the upper floors of buildings on Garnett Street, but such residences apparently would also be exempt from having any built-in fire-suppression system.
“We’re going to have to do some kind of push … to try to get these buildings sprinkled,” the fire chief said. “It’s a serious issue.”