The Ghost Ship building where over 30 people died had no fire sprinklers . this is completely unacceptable. I think that when fire codes change, all existing buildings should be forced to comply with the New regulation. When you give exemptions to safety measures, people die. We can’t just wait for these old deathtraps to burn. We need to do something about them.
Do you own your own house Boffking? Does it have sprinklers in it?
I don’t think this case had anything to do with grandfather clauses. It wasn’t an old structure, it was a new improvised structure they built in a warehouse that was not permitted for people to live in it or to have concerts in it.
Let’s say that I decided to build a commercial structure for my widget-making business. I research the law, determine my costs, and realize that it will be close, but I can build and be profitable. I do so and my business starts to work.
Then a new law is passed regarding building safety and because of the Boffking Rule, I have to retrofit my building to install the new safety features. I have no money to do this and/or if I do this, I will not be profitable.
Too bad, you say? I have to go out of business, declare bankruptcy and sell? What if there are no buyers at the price it would take to retrofit? Does the building just get abandoned?
The problem is not that there are buildings unfit for continuous human occupation.
If every building not fit for residential use is to be demolished:
A few million more people become homeless.
A few million organizations suddenly have no club houses.
Billions of dollars of all kinds of wares (including your blessed smartphones) would be destroyed because there is no place to store them.
As I pointed out in a Pit thread:
Certain people take pride in living Bohemian-stye (see: 1950’s counter-culture) in “lofts” - old warehouses are preferred; old factories have weird stuff attached to the floors.
NOBODY is going to upgrade a warehouse to “Human Residence” standard - doing so would make the building too expensive for “Loft Living” PLUS: the mere existence of a sprinkler would “spoil the ambience” of the place, and the self-styled “artists” would find a properly funky building for their “Lofts”.
Demand safety regs is a real “tin ear” to the situation.
True, safety mandates have to do with *use, *not just with age. I strongly suspect even the current updated safety measures for a commercial warehouse would not have matched those required of a public events space or a residential construction. The question becomes if the Ghost Ship had been in any way permitted for the purposes for which it was being used and inspected for compliance with such permit.
Emphasis added. That’s not really the question because we know the answer, and it’s “NO”.
I propose that renters should be responsible for all code upgrades, just as a test measure.
Boffking, are your outlets up to code? How about your circuit breakers? Do you want to know how much it will cost to upgrade them, and are YOU ready to pay?
Of course the real answer is that the establishment in question didn’t have a waiver to the fire code because of some grandfather clause. It was in violation of the fire code and was not operating legally.
Then that and the following answers how the proposed **boffking **rule would not have saved them.
Oh, dear, people carry out activities contrary to laws and regulations? Why, I never…
What ** Ultra Vires**.
Plus, the other consequence of the Boffking is that established businesses like the one UltraVires describes would lobby hard against any changes to safety codes. That would make it harder to get advances in safety codes implemented.
An evolutionary approach to implementing building code changes generally works well and is a compromise between no changes except after major lobbying fights, and changes across the board that can have drastic impacts on established businesses.
Hosting a concert in a warehouse packed with tinder and no safety features. What could go wrong? At some point personal responsibility and sound judgement need to be employed.
Just to take the OP’s ideas to their extreme: When fire codes were first invented, should we have said “Okay, let’s demolish Chicago and build a newer, safer one”? Should New York City have been rebuilt from the ground up when the first fire codes were introduced?
That’s not how building codes work and that’s not how they were ever intended to work. It’s a ratchet. As old buildings are demolished and new ones built, or as old buildings are restored and brought up to code, the worlds gets safer. At no particular point can you say “now we’re safe, and the codes we’ve been following up until now are not safe, so those buildings have to be rebuilt, even though just yesterday they were still officially deemed ‘safe’”.
And that’s ignoring the whole noncompliance issue, which was the real problem with this particular deadly fire.
Fortunately elected politicians in every country are of such stern mettle they will say “Fuck you.” to lobbyists bearing gifts, and say “Stuff it, we’re gonna do what’s right, not what’s popular.”
And then repeat “Salus Populi Suprema Lex Esto” to each other approvingly, as they often do.
Well does it Boffking?
By evolutionary, we mean that when UltraVires decides to renovate or expand that factory, then the whole building must be brought up to current code. There are exceptions for changes that would be prohibitively expensive. Also the renovation must be more significant than basic maintenance.
I had to upgrade a hell of a lot of fire alarm systems in my days as a commercial fire alarm technician in Texas because “there was no grandfathering of fire codes.” Surprise, they changed codes on you three months ago and now you have failed inspection where you used to pass for years. This was a conversation I had a lot with businesses, and they were frequently $20k conversations. That is the reason I am now in the Portland, Oregon area from Houston. They updated fire codes and didn’t have anyone up here with the experience to pull off retrofits and upgrades on super old buildings.
I don’t know if that is true everywhere though.
Its not like the fire marshal just walks into places at least once a year and checks shit out, though. IF they show up, though, IF - yeah they could have put the kabosh on this whole situation.
But there were 6 fire marshals at the time in the Houston Metroplex working all of Harris County, so yeah, they never showed up at random like they could have because they never had the man power to do so.
Its not uncommon for businesses to have to move because the fire marshal decided that a building had to have a sprinkler system retrofitted onto it, though. I can think off hand 5 restaurants alone I had to do fire alarm systems in where the landlord refused to pay for the upgrade so they had to relocate.
There was a Black Eyed Pea location in Conroe, TX that just shut down because the fire code changed, and they leased the land the building was on. The Woodlands location had half the numbers the Conroe one did, but it was going to be around $120k to do a proper sprinkler system into the building and do the tie in to the water, ripping out the parking lot. The building sat empty for about 4 or 5 years and then they just tore it out and replaced it with a parking lot.
That sounds right, now that I think of it. But there are other building codes that do allow grandfathering. When our local fire department built a new training tower, they made sure that it wasn’t built to current codes. They wanted the firefighters being trained to learn how to move equipment through old, grandfathered stair and door geometries, rather than expecting the newer clearances and not knowing how to adjust if an older building caught fire.