Honolulu Mayor Kirk Caldwell moved quickly to call for changing the city Fire Code to mandate automatic fire sprinklers that would have saved lives and property in Friday’s fire at the Marco Polo high-rise.
The 36-story building was built in 1971, four years before sprinklers were mandated for Oahu high-rises. Honolulu Fire Department officials have said repeatedly that if the building had sprinklers, the fire would have been contained to the unit where it started.
It was a fire that was beyond anything Oahu had seen in decades, visible from the freeway and the hillsides above Waikiki, dramatic images on social media posted by people who were right there. Then came the terrible revelation that lives were lost and families had nothing left. If only there had been sprinklers. Why weren’t there sprinklers?
The obvious answer is the cost, but there’s something else at work here, because in the moments when people stood on the street and stared up at the smoke billowing from the windows, no one thought sprinklers were anything less than essential.
But time blunts priorities and erodes urgency.
In February 2005 then-Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann called for retrofitting high-rise buildings with fire sprinkler systems.
“Two fires just last week, including the fatal one in Waikiki, serve as a wake-up call for the need for sprinkler systems,” Hannemann said in a news release back then. “The lives of both our city’s residents and our Honolulu firefighters are at stake here. I’m aware that it’s costly to retrofit a high-rise building, but if even only one life were to be saved, it will have been worth the investment.”
Then time passed. The fury, indignation and calls for change that rise up after a needless death faded into mumbles, and then whispers, and then distant memories as the community turned its collective attention elsewhere.
What will happen this time?
Again we smash against the hard truth that even for the middle class in Hawaii, the life we’d like is beyond our means. Usually, when we contemplate this, it means that though a family is dual-income and college-educated, it can’t afford ski trips to Banff or private school tuition for two kids at the same time. But for many in Hawaii, it means that safety or preventive measures are too expensive and certainly less pressing than paying for things that are immediately needed, like prescription drugs or child care. We roll the dice and say our prayers.
The City Council should require sprinklers, but it also needs to employ some creative thinking to assist with the cost to individual owners. Owners of pre-1975 condos, some elderly or on fixed incomes as in the case of some Marco Polo residents, can’t simply be presented with a huge assessment for sprinklers.
But the key is to act while the horror of what happened is still top-of-mind and not to let so much time pass that other things seem more urgent.
Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.
