COULD MANAGING AGENTS BE HELD LIABLE FOR FIRE DEATHS?
BY AARON LANG, AMERIGARD ALARM & SECURITY CORPORATION
"The most dangerous place to be with respect to fire is in your home!" This statement from the United States Fire Administration is especially true if your home happens to be an apartment in a high-rise building. High-rise fires have shown time and time again that such buildings are the hardest to evacuate. Early detection and reportage of fires, therefore, are critically important in apartment buildings, but almost no high-rise buildings in NYC are equipped to do either one quickly enough.
Unfortunately, most boards of directors and landlords unknowingly furnish their buildings with smoke detectors that are not capable of providing adequate early detection. The public is never told that there are two different types of smoke detectors that operate differently: ionization detectors and photoelectric detectors. Nor is anyone told that the type found in more than 90 percent of apartments, ionization detectors, fail to give timely warnings because they do a poor job of detecting smoke, which is the major killer in most fires. Tenants cannot be safe without a sufficient number of properly located photoelectric smoke detectors in their units.
However, smoke detectors do not save lives by themselves; a detector that
sounds its horn in a vacant apartment does not help anyone, especially not residents on other floors. A truly effective system must be able to sound a building-wide alarm to alert residents to a fire and communicate with the Fire Department to insure immediate dispatch.
The manufacturers of ionization detectors have been held legally accountable
in a number of recent lawsuits that had multimillion dollar verdicts for the deaths of victims who are not given timely warnings in fires, despite the fact that their detectors are UL listed.
Landlords have also been held liable for fire deaths in buildings with legally acceptable but inadequate protection, as in the lawsuits on behalf of the South Park Tower fire victims.
Current litigation clearly proves that legal precedents concerning liability are changing. In the near future, we can expect to see legal responsibility engulf managing agents, too. Soon, they could be held liable for deaths and injuries due to inadequate fire safety protection in the buildings they manage.
Even though a building may comply with the NYC Fire Codes, managing agents should be aware that these codes are outdated, that they do not meet the current national Fire Protection Association standards, and that they may provide an inadequate defense in court. Once again the South Park Tower case is instructive. The Court is considering charges of negligence against the landlord, even though the building allegedly met NYC Codes. The fact that the Code is inadequate does not relieve the landlord of the obligation to provide adequte protection. It is a very small step from this to holding the managing agent responsible as well.