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12.15.2003
The Codes
BY MARK ARSENAULT
Journal Staff Writer
The history of the Rhode Island fire code is the history of fire: the code is debated when people die.
One of those debates -- over whether older properties should be exempt from new safety rules -- came after the Highland Street disaster in West Warwick.
It was 1995, two days before Christmas, and the gifts were jumbled around the tree in the Phenix apartment. Holiday lights shared an electrical outlet with a television, aquarium and appliances.
A heavy gift -- maybe the tools or the weight set -- crushed the extension cord near the tree.
Down the hall, stairs rose to the attic bedrooms of Apartment C.
There slept Edward Larocque; his wife, Dale; sons Adam and Nicholas; daughter Crystal; and a family friend, Jesse Brodeur.
Two floors below, in the basement of 66 Highland St., electricity charged through a nest of bad wiring, much of it illegal.
The circuit breaker in the house was the wrong size and it allowed the extension cord in the apartment to heat like an electric torch.
The apartment's smoke detectors had no batteries. Renovations to the building -- which should have triggered code requirements for a fire alarm -- had escaped the notice of inspectors.
Flames spread through the gifts, and then climbed the Christmas tree.
Fourteen-year-old Crystal Larocque woke to her father's cries: Get out! Get out!
It was 8 a.m. but her room was dark with smoke. Family members were fumbling, shrieking, feeling for a way out. She heard her brother shout, "Dad! I can't find the doorway!"
Crystal couldn't breathe. Groping in the dark she found the window. She climbed onto the roof and screamed to arriving firefighters that her family was still inside.
Rescuers found them huddled together, oxygen-starved and near death.
Only Crystal would survive.
In a town scorched by fire throughout its history, the 1995 blaze -- which would inspire proposals to update Rhode Island's fire code -- was the deadliest fire West Warwick had ever seen.
Until 2003.
STANLEY A. DAVIES, an investigator for the state fire marshal's office, felt uneasy as he searched the charred house on Highland Street for the cause of the fire.
Here I am walking around, looking at wiring in a place where nearly a whole family was wiped out.
Davies was an experienced investigator. He was born in Providence in 1930 and grew up dreaming about becoming a firefighter and an electrician. He joined the Warwick volunteer fire force in 1948, and worked as a paid Cranston firefighter from 1952 to 1973. He taught for a year in the electrical trade, and then joined the state fire marshal's office in 1974.
He was the department's electrical expert.
When a deaf colleague told Davies that she was afraid to sleep because she couldn't hear her smoke alarm, Davies rewired her smoke detector to trigger her vibrating alarm clock. Then he refined the design, developing a smoke detector that sent a radio signal to a vibrating alarm. With private donations to pay for parts, Davies contributed his own time and made dozens of the units for people who needed them.
At 66 Highland St., Davies discovered that the wiring was so bad, a fire could have started at any number of places throughout the house.
Something else about the Highland Street disaster gnawed at Davies.
The building had no alarm system, and the family had no warning. He was convinced that a modern alarm would have saved all five lives.
Alarm systems were not required in most large apartment buildings constructed before the state fire code was updated in the 1970s. Those existing buildings were exempt from new rules under a grandfather clause -- unless the occupancy changed or the building underwent a major renovation.
The term "grandfather clause" can be traced to laws in southern states in the 1890s intended to disenfranchise blacks while permitting whites to vote. Under the clause, whites who descended from people who had the right to vote retained the privilege, even if they did not meet new literacy and property qualifications.
The term has come to mean an exemption from a new law.
Opinions differ on why the grandfather clause was written into the fire code, originally in 1976. It may have been created as an acknowledgment that older buildings could not meet modern standards without great expense to the owners, said state Fire Marshal Irving J. Owens. That's also the understanding of Robert J. Voas, who was named state fire marshal in the mid-1970s, when the laws were being drafted.
William F. Howe, inspections chief for the state fire marshal, said it was his impression that the clause had evolved from constitutional concerns about passing new fire laws that made legal buildings illegal, which could result in criminal prosecution.
Members of the fire services, such as Davies, Owens and former West Warwick Fire Chief Richard V. James, grew to hate the grandfather exemption. It didn't make sense, they argued, that the newer code could not touch the buildings that needed it the most.
After the 1995 Larocque tragedy, Davies and his boss, Owens, saw an opportunity to do something about the grandfather exemption.
Owens had spent nearly all his adult life in the fire services. He was born in South Providence in 1940, and became a Warwick volunteer firefighter in 1963. Three years later, he joined the paid force. Owens later worked as Warwick's fire inspector, ascending to chief fire inspector, and then city fire marshal. Gov. Lincoln C. Almond had appointed Owens state fire marshal in February 1995, 10 months before the Highland Street disaster.
Davies and Owens had known each other 30 years. They decided that eliminating the grandfather exemption was the best way to get modern alarms in the state's older apartment houses.
"I figured, we had this huge loss of life in a family -- somebody will listen to us," said Davies.
Owens gave his blessing to attack the grandfather clause in the 1996 legislative session with a bill filed in the state Senate. Davies and Owens recruited Chief James to talk up the legislation among other fire officials. They would try to repeal grandfathering in apartment houses, strictly for fire alarms.
It was a foot-in-the-door strategy: pass a limited bill, and then expand it later to nightclubs and other buildings.
James was hopeful the bill would pass after the Larocque fire. "That was so, so tragic," he said. "People around the state saw that fire right before Christmas."
State Sen. Joseph M. Polisena, D-Johnston, a former firefighter, was among the sponsors of the legislation. He thought the grandfather exemptions were 10 or 15 years out-of-date, and needed to be changed, despite opposition from apartment house owners. He agreed that it generally takes a disaster to get dramatic action on safety codes, he said. With the Larocque fire, they had one.
The bill was filed Feb. 6, 1996.
The Senate Corporations Committee, chaired at the time by Sen. William V. Irons, D-East Providence, endorsed the bill for passage, but the full Senate did not take it up in a vote and the bill died, according to the state library.
"I believe the landlords got to somebody and had the bill killed," Polisena said.
The people who pushed the bill were not heartbroken. They knew from Rhode Island history how difficult it can be to change the code. They resolved to try again the next year.
RHODE ISLAND didn't have a statewide fire code when the Cocoanut Grove in Boston burned down Nov. 28, 1942, killing 492 people in the worst nightclub fire in U.S. history.
Less than two years later, July 6, 1944, black smoke rose over Hartford, Conn. The tent erected over the Greatest Show on Earth, the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, had caught fire, trapping patrons under a shroud of flames. One-hundred-sixty-seven people died. It was later learned that the tent had been waterproofed with a mixture of wax and gasoline.
Those disasters inspired a Rhode Island law to promote safety in places of public assembly -- including nightclubs. The law stated that wall coverings, including acoustical material, must be fireproof. The year was 1949.
The law also called for regular inspections; Rhode Island quickly learned that the law was no good without enforcement. In 1955, a teacher burned her hands putting out a flaming stage curtain at a school in Cranston.
After that incident, a survey by The Providence Journal of 21 communities revealed that only one, Pawtucket, was up-to-date with enforcing the requirement that wall coverings in public places be flameproofed and inspected every six months by the local fire department.
The disasters in Boston and Hartford also inspired a public policy debate in Rhode Island. People started asking whether the state's hodgepodge of fire and building laws was sufficient.
In 1950, the General Assembly appointed a bipartisan, 15-member commission to determine what should be done about the laws.
The commission recognized "serious conflict" among the fire and buildings laws enacted by various cities and towns. "Of primary import," it wrote in its 1950 report, "it was learned that many of the towns and municipalities have little or no such regulation.
"Such laws as are presently in existence have been proven to be generally antiquated and outdated. Changing times, and the advance of our modern economy, methods of construction and adaptation of new materials for use in dwellings and other buildings have made the existing laws not only impracticable to follow but impossible to enforce."
The panel recommended that the legislature appoint another commission to write a statewide fire and building code, which the Assembly did in 1952.
That commission worked on the project for five years.
It quietly presented its report to Gov. Dennis J. Roberts in 1957. The report included a proposed fire and building code of 149 pages.
The commission's report was dropped into a drawer. The public would not learn of it for 18 months, when their televisions showed images of a horror in Chicago, at Our Lady of the Angels.
BY THE LATE 1950s, the Our Lady of the Angels School on Chicago's West Side was already an old building. It was put up in 1908, long before the city's 1949 building code.
The school was grandfathered. Modern safety elements, such as fireproof stairwells, were not required. The school's open wooden staircases may have been unsafe, but they were within the law.
The former church building was a house of God before the diocese converted it to a house of learning. That's why the cavernous first floor was so tall, and why the second-floor classrooms looked out windows 25 feet above the ground.
On the afternoon of Dec. 1, 1958, dismissal time crept near for 10-year-old Don Traynor, a relentless wisecracker who despised the necktie he had to wear to school. Traynor was in Room 212, a fifth-grade geography class of more than 50 pupils.
Around 2:30 p.m., a boy who would soon be dead, raised his hand. "Sister," he said, "I smell smoke."
The class agreed, everyone smelled it. The teacher, Sister Mary Clare Therese Champagne, asked a child to check outside a door for smoke. When the door opened, an ugly cloud poured in. The smoke was black, impenetrable; it was oily and stinky, thick with poison from burning linoleum.
Sister Mary Clare Therese dashed over and shut the door. She came to the front of the class. In the last moments of her life, she was perfectly calm. Relax, stay calm, she told the frightened class, the fire department was on the way. Then she prayed.
No one was prepared for how quickly the fire raced up the stairs. The transom glass over the door shattered and smoke squeezed inside.
The sister ordered, "To the windows!"
Don Traynor got to the window and looked down. The ground was so far. He could see fire billowing out to his right.
Children screamed and hurled themselves out windows. Some landed, still screaming, and crawled away with broken bones. Some landed and were quiet, grievously injured or dead. The scene looked like a battlefield.
Traynor thought about his sister, Diane, a fourth grader in the next room.
He saw one girl lose her balance as she jumped. She plunged headfirst and died.
I will not jump, Traynor thought, unless I'm burning.
Behind him, the classroom was black and invisible. He shared the window with another boy. Traynor cursed. The other boy prayed. The school's fire alarm went off, a metal clapper on a bell. Don Traynor was incredulous. He said to his friend in the window, "This is no drill."
They clung to the window for 30 minutes before firefighters rescued them with a ladder. They were two of 28 survivors from Room 212. Another 27 children died in that classroom, along with their teacher.
Traynor couldn't find his sister. He wandered to a nearby grocery. The people there gave him orange juice. He drank it. Then he went home. There, he learned that his sister had jumped into a fireman's net. She was burned, but alive, and would spend more than three months in the hospital.
She was lucky. The fire at Our Lady of the Angels would kill 92 children and three nuns.
A THOUSAND miles away in Rhode Island, people watched the fire at Our Lady of the Angels on a new medium -- television. It was the first disaster of its type broadcast nationwide. What they saw horrified and frightened them. Parents wondered, are our schools safe? What are we doing to prevent something like this?
In the eight months after the fire, Rhode Island school systems hurriedly spent an estimated $1 million to make local schools safer. They added fire doors and fire escapes, sprinklers in many wood-framed buildings and fire alarms. They sealed off boilers, cleaned combustibles from closets, improved exits and fireproofed corridors. Eight Rhode Island public and private schools that were considered firetraps closed in the months after the Chicago fire. Some were renovated, some never opened again.
In 1959, the General Assembly passed a law increasing the number of mandatory school fire drills.
In Providence, a Journal reporter wondered about the blue-ribbon panel that was drafting a state fire and building code. Was the panel still working?
Governor Roberts acknowledged that the panel had finished its work more than a year before.
Pressed for answers, the governor said he hadn't taken the plan forward in 1957 because General Assembly leaders had told him there was too much opposition to a radical overhaul of fire laws, and it would never pass.
The report had been shelved and forgotten.
Rhode Island's fire chiefs warned that a fire similar to the Chicago disaster could happen anywhere. The state fire laws were a mishmash of conflicting authorities, directives and regulations.
A month after the Chicago school fire, with the horror of more than 90 dead children still echoing across the nation, the panel's recommendations for a state building and fire code were resurrected.
The new bill got one committee hearing in the spring, and then died.
By 1960, the horror of the Chicago fire had faded, the opportunity to update the law had been lost, and nobody re-introduced the bill.
ON JULY 10, 1960, Antonio Quatruopolo, a 54-year-old handyman at Bristol's Colonial Inn, let himself into the bar at about 5 a.m. to scavenge for spare change that might have been dropped during a party the night before.
The handyman lit a cigar and flicked the match into a wastebasket, which immediately erupted in flames. He tried to douse the fire with water from the bar. No good.
He panicked, locked the door to the bar and fled.
A veteran firefighter would later say that the fire shot through the three-story brick building "like it was going through a straw hat."
Six people were trapped and killed. Quatruopolo was convicted of manslaughter.
The Colonial Inn fire renewed the focus on the state's fire codes. The town's health director shouted at a public meeting in late July 1960, "Do we always have to have a fire or a holocaust to get some action?"
Less than two years later, another six people died when a rooming house burned down on Wilson Street in the Providence Armory District. The first firefighters on the scene found flames spurting from almost every opening in the house. The victims ranged in age from 9 to 71.
The legislature responded in its 1962 session by naming another 15-member commission to consolidate and revise the fire code, the third commission in 12 years to take up the task.
That commission released its report in 1965. A bill based on the recommendations passed the House, but died in the Senate.
Finally, in April 1966, the General Assembly approved a 281-page state fire code, to take effect Feb. 1, 1968. It would become commonly known as the '68 code, though legislation filed later delayed its enforcement to 1974.
The 1968 code relied on "passive" fire protection, such as walls that would resist flames and contain a fire until somebody noticed it. Fire-prevention philosophy evolved from "passive" protection to "active" detection with sophisticated fire alarms, and another commission rewrote the fire code in 1976, toughening the fire standards for new construction.
The amendments created the grandfather clause to exempt existing buildings from the new standards, leaving the '68 code as the rule for most buildings -- including nightclubs -- in Rhode Island.
CHRISTMAS 1977 was two weeks away.
The 3 a.m. call was for a fire at Providence College's Aquinas dorm.
Providence Fire Department Lt. Sidney Lima rode Ladder 8 onto the campus. He was an experienced firefighter, having worked the job since 1953. A burly guy who had also worked as a longshoreman, Lima had made lieutenant in 1971; he was the department's first black officer.
He had seen terrible fires, having been stationed in South Providence early in his career, where he had to crawl around smoky triple-deckers, feeling for people. In 1962, he was the tillerman, steering the back of the engine, on the way to the fatal rooming house fire on Wilson Street.
Ladder 8 turned a corner, and Lima could see Aquinas.
"Holy mackerel!" he said.
The building's fourth floor, 45 feet above the frozen ground, was in flames, fed by paper murals hung in a Christmas decorating contest.
As they drew closer, Lima saw two sheets on the ground. What were those sheets doing there? No . . . They were people. Two girls in housecoats, dead on the snow from a drop from the fourth floor.
But there wasn't time to worry about the dead. There was a face in the window of Room 412. Two students, Mary Kim Fasolo and Terry Burchell, waited to be rescued.
Ladder 8 moved into position, and then Lima and firefighter Walter Scorobogaty scampered up. They helped Fasolo out first. Lima guided her, step by step, as they backed down the ladder.
"My hands are freezing," she told him.
"You take my gloves," he said. He yanked them off and helped her put them on.
They helped Burchell down, too.
The bodies of the women who had jumped from the window were still on the ground. "Walter, get some salvage covers," Lima said, "Let's cover the bodies."
Firefighters searching the building for people to rescue were discovering more bodies. Ten young women would die. Lima had never seen anything like it; nobody had -- it was the deadliest fire Rhode Island had ever known. Investigators suspect the fire began with an electrical short in a hair dryer.
Though the 38-year-old building exceeded minimum safety standards for its age, it did not have sprinklers, and was exempt -- under the grandfather clause -- from needing heat and smoke detectors in every room.
Driving back to the station, Sidney Lima thought about his own daughter, who would soon be off to college at Tufts University. He cried.
RHODE ISLAND'S Stan Davies was at the Las Vegas MGM Grand hotel until 1 a.m. on Nov. 21, 1980. On vacation from his job at the fire marshal's office, Davies and his wife saw "Jubilee," and then retired for the night to a time-share condo across the street.
By the time Davies fell asleep, an electrical short in a pastry case in the MGM Grand deli was probably already smoldering.
A ruckus in the street woke Davies a little after 7 a.m.
Jeez, even in Vegas a guy should be able to sleep in.
Then Davies saw the smoke. He put on the television and watched live coverage of the MGM Grand on fire. Flames were blowing out from under the marquee. Helicopters circling the building were swooping down to pluck survivors off the roof. Eighty-seven people would die.
Davies wandered the fire scene.
How could this happen? In this day and age, how could all these people have died?
He worried about the Rhode Island fire code. The fire alarm sections were so vague. Could they prevent a disaster like the MGM Grand?
Over the next two years, Davies worked with engineers, members of the fire marshal's staff and fire alarm experts to write and win approval for a 30-page update to the fire alarm rules. It was a highly technical document, which spelled out meticulous requirements for alarms in new construction.
Existing buildings were left exempt from the updated code by a grandfather clause.
THE 1995 Highland Street fire that killed the Larocques prompted advocates to push for partial repeal of the grandfather clause in 1996. They failed, and tried again in 1997. A House bill died in the House Corporations Committee, chaired by Woonsocket Democrat Gerard M. Martineau, according to the state library. Martineau did not return several messages seeking an interview. A Senate bill that year got stuck in Senate Corporations.
During the winter of 1996-97, Stan Davies was busy in West Warwick, helping to investigate a string of arsons that burned 20 buildings in Arctic, the town's center.
In 1998, a Senate bill to limit grandfathering failed in the Committee on Health, Education and Welfare. On the House side, state Rep. Kenneth Carter, D-North Kingstown, sponsored the bill to repeal the grandfather clause in apartments to require more alarms. He amended the bill to extend the time limit for landlords to install fire alarms to five years.
The bill passed the House on April 21, but it never got out of the Senate Corporations Committee, still chaired by Senator Irons.
Irons is now Senate president. Senate spokesman Greg Pare researched the history of the bills and spoke with Irons about them, but could not determine why the Corporations Committee recommended the bill in 1996 and not other years. "We don't remember is the short answer," he said. "Why something came out in '96 and didn't in '97 or '98, we cannot say."
Davies retired from the fire marshal's office in 1998. His goal had been to repeal grandfathering, to eventually eliminate safety exemptions in all buildings.
But after three years of no success, the bill was not refiled.
In June 1998, a fire gutted a West Warwick apartment house on Providence Street. Nobody was killed, but 17 people were left homeless.
Like the apartment building on Highland Street that burned in 1995, the Providence Street building lacked a central fire alarm. It didn't need one -- under the grandfather exemption.
Richard James, West Warwick's fire chief, complained that Rhode Island had not learned from its past. "We could have easily had 17 corpses on our hands," he said after the fire. "This could have been Highland Street all over again."
THE STATION fire in February 2003 was Highland Street all over again -- but 20 times more deadly.
The small-town irony was painful -- one of the last West Warwick officials to inspect The Station was Fire Marshal Denis P. Larocque, a cousin of the Larocque family killed in the Highland Street fire.
The Station was not required under the fire code, due to grandfathering, to have modern safety features, such as sprinklers, an alarm system wired directly to the fire department and an automatic kill switch on the air-circulation system, set to shut down the movement of air in a fire.
Even the bills in the 1990s that would have targeted grandfathering in apartment buildings would not have improved safety in nightclubs or other places of public assembly, and Irons has noted that the fire wouldn't have started if existing laws had been followed.
Senator Polisena, the longtime opponent of grandfather exemptions from the fire code, is unequivocal in his analysis of The Station fire: "I believe grandfathering caused the deaths of 100 people."
TOMORROW: The Enforcers
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