NFPA Journal - January/February 2018 - 10

Dispatches
mitigation, and education and outreach. "It says the city should identify
critical or high-risk properties, staff
enforcement roles accordingly, identify
how property data can be better shared
between departments, streamline the
complaint and violation process, conduct a public education workshop, and
so on," Bizal said.
Some of the NFPA recommendations
have already been implemented by the
city, according to a memo sent from
Oakland City Administrator Sabrina
Landreth to Mayor Libby Schaaf and city
councilors in November. The city has
committed to hiring a dozen new fire
code inspectors, strengthening its inspection process and moving to a risk-based
model, investing in new technology to
better track and share property data, and
more, the document says.
At the time the memo was sent, the
city had investigated over 30 warehouse
and commercial buildings where unpermitted residential, work, or assembly
occupancies were suspected, and about
a third of those cases had been resolved.
Instead of pushing to evict tenants in
these types of properties, Oakland's
approach to problem properties has
instead been to first give property
owners a chance to get on the path to
compliance in a bid to maintain the
city's vibrant arts culture and to recognize the challenges many residents face
in finding affordable housing.
But some have been critical of that
approach. "I understand the city wants
a vibrant arts and cultural community,
and I understand there's a housing
crisis...But that doesn't mean you get
to turn a blind eye to fire and safety
issues just because your mayor is worried about displacing people from a
building they shouldn't have been in in
the first place," Robert Thompson, an
attorney representing a dozen families
of Ghost Ship fire victims, told The San
Francisco Chronicle.
The newspaper also published articles taking aim at the city-specifically,
its fire department-in the immediate
aftermath of the fire. The Ghost Ship
warehouse had not been inspected
in 30 years and wasn't listed in the
department's database of properties

10 | NFPA JOURNAL * J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 8

requiring inspections, according to
the Chronicle. "It seemed even more
odd that such activity went unnoticed
by the fire station that's located just
a block away," the paper wrote. About
three months later, the city's then-fire
chief, Teresa Deloach Reed, who is a
current member of NFPA's Board of
Directors, announced her retirement.

Beyond Ghost Ship:
politics and policy
Oakland's learning experience has
hardly been unique. After the Ghost
Ship fire, reports surfaced from cities
across the country as they discovered
similar properties,
NFPA.ORG/
in some cases
DISPATCHES
shutting them
Read the January/ down with few
February 2017
questions asked.
NFPA Journal
Los Angeles city
article on the
Ghost Ship fire,
officials, for exam"Under the Radar" ple, shut down an
illegal warehouseRead the memo
from Oakland on
turned-night club
what the city has
that contained
done since the
Ghost Ship fire
"haphazard wiring
snaked through
walls" and fire hazards like a staircase
canopied by bamboo wood, according to
the Associated Press.
Elsewhere, the approach has been
more akin to Oakland's. Denver city officials, for example, have allowed property
owners time to bring their spaces up
to code, even while residents continue
to occupy them. In December, the city
announced a new grant program to provide funding to help owners bring some
of these properties into compliance.
Cities' sudden action on the issue of
the undocumented repurposing of buildings isn't surprising. It's an unfortunate
but common trend: neglect, tragedy,
action. It was seen after the Cocoanut
Grove fire in Boston in 1942. It was seen
in the United Kingdom after the Grenfell Tower fire just this past June.
Despite this, a recent telephone
survey of over 1,000 U.S. residents commissioned by NFPA shows the public
overwhelmingly thinks policymakers
should prioritize fire safety, and do so
by adopting the latest fire and electrical safety codes. Eighty-one percent of

U.S. adults surveyed said policymakers
should prioritize fire safety, and 74
percent said they trust their state and
local politicians to adopt the latest fire
and electrical safety codes. In reality,
though, many jurisdictions are slow to
adopt the latest codes and standards
from organizations like NFPA for a
number of reasons, such as financial
stresses and the inherent slowness of
the legislative process.
To help meet the expectations of the
public, NFPA recently formed the Fire
and Life Safety Policy Institute. Based
in Washington, D.C., it will provide
policymakers on the local, state, and
federal levels with "recommendations,
analyses, and ideas to help guide or
influence them on different courses of
action that will move us toward our
goals around preventing loss," Policy
Institute Director Meghan Housewright
told NFPA Journal in September, when
the institute launched.
When it comes to issues specifically
like the Ghost Ship warehouse, a more
tangible resource from NFPA to help
enforcers be more effective is a new
inspection tool called Property Inspection Prioritization, or PIP. The tool is
one of a number of new data-driven
resources from NFPA. "Our vision
here has been to build a family of data
solutions that are useful to fire departments and many others," said Kathleen
Almand, vice president of research at
NFPA. "A lot of these tools are built
around risk assessment."
With the PIP tool, AHJs will input
information about properties in their
jurisdictions into the system, which
then churns out a data set of properties prioritized based on risk. It was
designed to "replicate the thinking of
a building inspector," said Joe Gochal,
director of data and analytics for NFPA.
NFPA will continue improving the tool,
Almand said, with the goal of providing
a resource that can prepopulate information fields using real-estate records
and other data sets about a property to
make AHJs' jobs easier.
For more information on the Policy
Institute, visit nfpa.org/policyinstitute,
and to explore the PIP tool, visit
nfpapip.net.
http://www.NFPA.ORG/DISPATCHES http://www.nfpa.org/policyinstitute http://www.nfpapip.net
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NFPA Journal - January/February 2018
