Trying to balance the budget nearly two decades ago, city leaders slashed Spokane's fire prevention division by one-third, resulting in fewer inspectors to — among other things — regularly check that apartment buildings and commercial businesses have basic safety elements, from smoke detectors to adequate exits.
Between 2004 when the cuts were made and 2020, the need for inspections only grew, with the city adding 20 million square feet of new buildings and increasing commercial space by more than 22 percent, according to a report by Fire Marshal Lance Dahl, who became head of the fire prevention division in late 2020.
So in 2021, Dahl requested that the Spokane City Council increase fees for several types of annual fire permits to better line up with similarly sized cities such as Tacoma. With the higher fees approved and bringing in about $1.2 million more a year, Dahl hired five new inspectors in 2022 and restarted a program ensuring thousands of buildings are inspected every one to three years, as recommended by national fire standards.
The inspectors have already started making their way through the city's 1,625 multifamily apartment buildings with five or more units, Dahl says. About 440 of those buildings have been inspected since October.
"We're finding issues in about 80 percent of the buildings we've inspected," Dahl says.
Some of the smaller issues include not having smoke and carbon monoxide detectors in both bedrooms and common areas, Dahl says. Other fixes include making sure that bicycles and other stored items don't block emergency exits, that exit lighting is adequate, and that furnaces and laundry rooms are up to code.
The inspectors are also working through more than 8,700 commercial building spaces that need to be inspected at least once every three years, if not more regularly.
High-occupancy apartment buildings should be inspected annually, Dahl says, which can prevent horror stories experienced in some places where officials didn't know buildings were being used the wrong way.
Dahl recalls the Ghost Ship fire in Oakland, California, which killed 36 people attending a concert in a warehouse illegally converted into an artist collective and living space.
"I don't want to see that in our community," Dahl says. "We've already seen some of that."
During his decade-plus in the fire prevention division, Dahl recalls learning about a facility that was leasing out storage units for people to live in, without appropriate bathrooms, heat or fire escapes. In another case, a church put a school in a building that wasn't designed as an educational facility.
"When you use a building for a usage it wasn't designed for, potentially you could put people at risk," Dahl says. "If we aren't out there doing these inspections, we can't correct those things we don't know about."
Part of his motivation centers on the large number of colleges in the area, and the knowledge that many old homes have been converted into apartments, sometimes illegally.
"That's the stuff I'm worried about catching over the next year," Dahl says, "places that were converted without plan review or the proper permitting process to ensure that our kids have a safe place to live." ♦
