From left, Amelia Houghton, Patricia Graham and Scott Graham discuss their next move after being asked to leave their apartments in the former Union Wadding Building because the developer didn’t have certificates of occupancy.

The Providence Journal / Bob Breidenbach

PAWTUCKET — A scene of desperate economic times played out yesterday inside a former mill, where fire officials evicted as many as 28 people because their new apartments were so unfinished as to be fire hazards. The project manager said she allowed the tenants in — even though their apartments lacked sprinklers or occupancy certificates — because she feared losing them as customers.

“I’m furious that we could have died,” said Ryan Horton, 30, who moved into his unit in the former Union Wadding Building, on Goff Avenue, in October with his girlfriend, Cheshire Bale. Project officials, Horton said, “just lied to us while they collected our money.”

“They deceived everybody,” said Patricia Graham, who moved into the complex Sunday with her husband, Scott, and was spending yesterday packing up clothes to take to their old apartment for a time. “There’s a lot of really, really angry people right now in here.”

The Connecticut company redeveloping the mill, First National Development, offered to put the tenants up at a local hotel while their units are brought up to code. Project manager Aurora Leigh told a reporter that certificates of occupancy were expected “within a week,” but tenants said that fire officials have told them the work probably will take several weeks.

And the city’s zoning director, Ronald Travers, said that “as far as the city is concerned, they are nowhere near ready to occupy a portion of that building.”

Travers said the evictions were for the tenants’ own safety. But some tenants, while understanding, said it placed them in an untenable situation, away from their furniture and belongings still in their leased apartments.

“We’re in a bad place right now,” said Scott Graham.

Fire officials made a surprise visit to the complex Tuesday after receiving a tip that people were living in what amounts to an active construction site. Fire Chief Timothy P. McLaughlin said they discovered that the project had no working fire alarm or sprinkler system and limited emergency lighting, and that people had unrestricted access to areas under construction and demolition.

If there had been a fire, McLaughlin said, people could have ended up wandering “a maze.”

“If something would have happened in that facility, we would have had no knowledge that people were living in there,” the fire chief said. “We would have tried to contain the fire initially, but would we have looked for people? Probably not, without having the knowledge that they were there.”

McLaughlin said First National Development began moving people in last fall to stave off a threat of foreclosure.

“They thought this was the best way to … get a little revenue for themselves, at the expense of the people living in the facility,” McLaughlin said.

First National had initial plans to transform the former factory complex into more than 240 studio and one- and two-bedroom condominium units, The Journal reported in December 2007. At that time, nearly 90 units were being developed in the first phase, which was due to be finished in early 2008.

But then the housing market went belly-up, and First National looked for ways to “survive the economic market fall,” Leigh said.

“This project started as condominiums with bank financing in place, but the bank saw clearly it wasn’t going to work as a condominium project,” she said.

With the company already having invested $4 million in the project, it looked to save it by leasing the units as apartments, said Leigh. But “the paperwork and appraisals” necessary for persuading the bank to continue lending money for the project took six months, she said, “so there was a major stall in approvals and funding.”

Leigh said there had been “a very high risk” of losing the project.

In the meantime, the tenants whom the company’s sales representative had already found were eager to move in to their $800-a-month loft units.

Amelia Houghton, 21, formerly of Northampton, Mass., said she agreed to move in last November even though her unit’s heating and hot water systems worked only sporadically.

She did her own painting, and the company allowed her and others to live in the building rent-free until this month. But the constant delays in fixing her heating and water systems, and other problems, angered her.

“They kept saying it would be a week, then next week, then another week,” said Houghton. To make matters worse, she said, contractors were constantly in and out of her apartment without notifying her. Now the eviction.

“I’m furious,” said Houghton. “I’m not going to be homeless because of this.”

Leigh apologized for the situation and acknowledge that the company erred when moving residents into their units.

“We’ve never done this, moved people in without CO’s [certificates of occupancy], but our sales manager pushed these people in so it would put pressure on me to finish the units,” she said.

Leigh said although the complex does not have a fire alarm system wired to the Fire Department, “every unit has a working smoke detector and a working carbon monoxide detector, so it wasn’t a completely unsafe place. The units are very nice, and I’m trying my best to really finish everything. It’s just unfortunate that we are in this situation today.”

The project, she said, should be completed sometime in “June or July.” Work in progress

The Union Wadding Lofts by the numbers:

•Total number of planned units: 240

•Total number of units in phase 1: 89

•Number of units occupied: 14

•Units occupied before evictions: 14

•Rent being charged to current tenants: $800 a month

tmooney@projo.com