EDITORIAL: Tragic, deadly downtown Las Vegas fire reveals inspection issues

Sandi Jones struggled for air as the smoke billowed around her. “Oh, I can’t breathe,” she told the 911 operator. In the background, an unidentified voice made clear the urgency of the moment: “Get out! Get out!” Just before Ms. Jones escaped the Dec. 21 fire at the Alpine Motel Apartments in downtown Las Vegas, she told the dispatcher that “the place is going up in smoke, and there’s people trapped.”

Ms. Jones was among the fortunate, if losing your home and belongings can be considered such. The early-morning blaze — the deadliest in the city’s history — killed six people and injured 13 others. Several residents jumped from windows to avoid the smoke and flames. The destruction, apparently caused by a stove doing double duty as a heater, left scores of people homeless for the holidays.

Hindsight often brings inconvenient truths into focus while illuminating miscalculations and oversights. And so it is in this case, which should be a catalyst for reform and trigger a re-evaluation of how the city prioritizes fire inspections, particularly in older neighborhoods.

Make no mistake, landlords who fail to maintain their properties or ensure that their structures meet minimal safety standards bear ultimate responsibility for the consequences. In the two days following the blaze, Las Vegas fire inspectors found 42 code violations at the three-story apartment building. Some were particularly egregious, including an exit door bolted from the outside, permanent bars on windows, defective smoke detectors and fire doors and a broken alarm system. The civil case involving the Alpine’s owner, Dragon Hotel LLC, is in its infancy, and will play out in the legal system. The district attorney’s office is also considering criminal charges.

But city fire officials can’t escape a troubling fact: This tragedy likely could have been prevented under a more aggressive program of inspections and oversight. The Review-Journal — through the work of reporters Jeff German, Rachel Crosby, Michael Scott Davidson and Glenn Puit — revealed this month that fire inspectors had ignored the 48-year-old apartment building for more than two years despite a checkered history.

“That’s on me,” Las Vegas Fire Marshal Robert Nolan said. “I wish we would have gone back there.”

According to records, city fire officials inspected the property nine times between 2006 and 2013, failing it on three occasions. When the building changed owners in 2013, however, the problems multiplied. In the 14 inspections since 2013, the building passed only once. That includes three failed inspections during one month in 2016 and three more the following year. Inexplicably, the inspectors never returned despite the building’s dismal record. The property’s most recent evaluation before the blaze was on April 26, 2017.

“We are going to do our due diligence,” said City Councilman Cedric Crear, whose district includes downtown. “We’re going to have an in-depth investigation, and we’re going to find out who and what’s accountable for this.”

City and fire officials point to manpower and resource issues. They also cite standards published by the National Fire Protection Association that hold property owners responsible for hiring contractors to conduct periodic walk-throughs regarding fire safety, while leaving fire officials to check the veracity of such reviews.

But while it’s true that inspection backlogs are common across the country, that should be no excuse in this case. This was no ordinary building. Las Vegas inspectors had consistently identified it as a firetrap. Regardless of staffing limitations, the fact that it was ignored for 32 months after having flunked three inspections should be a flashing red light when it comes to how city fire officials set inspection rotations.

Mr. Crear and others have floated a number of potential mechanisms for avoiding a repeat of the Alpine tragedy, including programs designed to encourage residents to report suspected hazards, legislative action to provide more money for fire safety efforts and harsher punishment for negligent landlords. These proposals may each be useful, but a more comprehensive response would be to invest in technology that not only makes the inspection process more efficient for fire departments and property owners but identifies high-risk areas and ensures problem structures receive adequate attention.

A 2017 Georgia Tech project conducted for the Atlanta Fire Rescue Department successfully used modeling software to generate building “risk scores” to predict future fires and help the city “conduct fire inspections in a more data-driven way (and) to more efficiently use their limited number of inspection personnel.”

We can’t eliminate all residential fires, of course, and inspectors can’t be everywhere all the time. But emerging technology would be well worth the expense and offers a promising means of saving lives. In the meantime, though, local fire officials must redouble their efforts toward ensuring that properties with a history of problems don’t slip to the bottom of the inspection calendar. The community owes such diligence to the six unfortunate souls who lost their lives in downtown Las Vegas on that chilly December morning.