Condominium owners are asking for more time and more oversight from the Honolulu City Council to comply with a law that requires them to install fire sprinklers or pass a life-safety evaluation test.
Passed in the wake of the deadly Marco Polo Building fire, the 2018 law affects 323 properties, which include a total of 38,747 units.
Condo buildings in which owners collectively choose not to install sprinklers have until spring 2024 to pass the city’s Life Safety Evaluation of 16 criteria that include mobility within buildings and elevator emergency power. But so far, only 12 of the 178 buildings that have undergone the evaluation passed, reported the Honolulu Fire Department.
During a permitted interaction group meeting on the subject held Wednesday, led by Council Member Carol Fukunaga, supporters of pushing back the compliance deadline for some buildings said a lack of consistency in how the evaluation is conducted is a stumbling block.
For example, among engineering companies, “there’s different interpretations that I’ve run into about elevator lobby furniture — where some companies are mandating that elevator lobby furniture be removed, where other companies are not calling that out at all,” said Jonathan Billings of Touchstone Properties.
“So there is not a consistent message or guideline that the professionals are following when they’re conducting these evaluations.”
While the City Council, in tandem with the Honolulu Fire Department and other stakeholders, created the standardized evaluation, some definitions and parameters tied to the task are apparently left up to interpretation.
Douglas Buhr President of Douglas Engineering Pacific, Inc. said his company has been hired to reevaluate buildings that owners maintain were evaluated too harshly.
“The evaluation is actually quite good, if it’s applied evenly and applied fairly,” Buhr said. “It’s in our discretion as evaluators what to require, what not to require. We just follow the evaluation, and we use our discretion when it doesn’t make any sense… in this case, the judge, jury, and executioner is the design professional.”
Buhr has been involved with over 120 evaluations so far and has not found building that could not pass the evaluation, if the owner is willing to make recommended repairs.
“Most of my clients have a lot of delayed (repairs) or maintenance that they’ve kicked down the road … 90% of it is stuff they should be doing anyway,” he said. Among the needed fixes: “keeping doors working, keeping the latches working, unlocking the stairwells, getting door holders off of their doors, door closers on the unit doors, patching holes.”
A big cost item that many condos fail to meet is installation of a fire alarm system in which the bells can be heard in the bedroom. However, Buhr said that’s rarely the most severe fire code offense. Among the more glaring problems are holes in building structure that would allow a fire to spread rapidly.
Among the buildings Douglas Engineering Pacific has studied to date, Buhr said, the price tag for making repairs to pass an evaluation inspection has ranged from $150,000 to $1.2 million. “The bulk of that is for the fire alarm system,” he said.
Due to the count of buildings that still need to install fire systems that meet code standards, Buhr said imposing an across-the-board deadline is an unrealistic
demand.
Billings agreed, and suggested that a viable alternative may be to create a tiered deadline system for the repairs, with those that need to go through the city’s permitting process given more time to comply with the ordinance.
For buildings that elect to install fire sprinklers, Billings said he was quoted $4.5 million to $7 million for installation in a 200-unit building.
Buildings in which owners collectively opt to install sprinklers currently have until spring 2030 to complete those projects, but may apply for an extension to 2033. However, buildings 20 floors and taller must install sprinklers in their common areas by spring 2026, and buildings with 10 to 19 floors must have sprinklers in common areas by spring 2028.
The July 2017 fire at the Marco Polo condominium building was one of the worst in modern Honolulu history, affecting 200 of the building’s 568 units. Thirty units were destroyed. The building was built in 1971 before sprinkler systems were required.
