- Dirk VanderHart
- The feared fire hazard
While rhetoric flies and the city’s tenuous stance on the permit of a controversial southeast apartment project congeals into seeming permanence, one agency is quietly fretting on the sidelines: the Portland Fire and Rescue Bureau.
Fire officials worry the proposed 81-unit structure — incomplete and wreathed in garish yellow on the corner of SE Division and 37th Ave — could be prone to disaster.
“That’s become one of our high-priority targets,” Alan Ferschweiler, president of the Portland Firefighter’s Association, tells the Mercury.
The project could attract squatters while it lies dormant, officials fear, or fall prey to vandalism. And the fact it’s not complete means firefighters battling a blaze could be especially vulnerable.
“There’s no sheet rock to protect the firewalls,” Ferschweiler said. “We’ve had a couple instances where buildings have gone up in the middle of construction. It’s a very dangerous situation.”
So the bureau has taken a rare step, Ferschweiler said. It’s developed a response plan for the site — something typically saved for complete buildings.
While construction on the project is stalled, minor activity has continued. Records show the site’s fire sprinklers have been scrutinized by the city in recent weeks.
But no one knows when real progress might resume. After a dust up last week, Mayor Charlie Hales said the building’s developer, Dennis Sackhoff, will have to wait until April 11 to file for a new permit.
I’m waiting on an official line from the Fire Bureau. Then I’m done writing about this for a while. (I think).
UPDATE, 3:37 pm: The stalled project is at its “most vulnerable state of construction” from a firefighting standpoint, according to the response plan [PDF] the fire department created.
“If this building experiences a fire, expect it to be a fast moving and dynamic incident,” the document says.
Fire officials are particularly concerned that the structure abuts other buildings on Division, said bureau Spokesman Rich Chatman. The city has allowed developers to finish installing sprinklers at the site and asked that it be secured with fencing.
“Everyone was concerned about it enough that we said, ‘Let’s go ahead and map this out,'” Chatman said.
Well, that does seem like the obvious solution. Burn it to the ground.
“TAKE ME DOWN TO CLUSTERFUCK CITY WHERE THERE’S NO PARKING AND THE CONSTRUCTION’S SHITTY.”
It’s almost like there’s an Egyptian curse on the property.
There’s nothing shitty about the construction. In addition to sprinklers, a major way that fire codes work is that when a fire breaks out in one part of a building, it should take a long time to spread to the next compartment. (In residential construction, each unit is normally one compartment). This requires building floors and walls out of fire-rated assemblies, that can withstand fire for a certain length of time. The easiest way to do this is with sheetrock. Sheetrock is easily damaged by water, so you don’t start installing it until the building is watertight.
So right now, the building is only partially framed, without any sheetrock on the walls, and without any doors or windows that would prevent fire from spreading from one compartment to another. This is typical, but not that much of a problem in a building that has people working on building it every day. Lying abandoned, it’s a potential target for arsonists, and without any of the fire protection systems that would go into a finished building.
TL;DR
I’m surprised anything gets built in this City..