Fire across the street exposes faulty safety system

A fire today, Friday April 22nd 2011 around 9h30, across the street from the Marina Center in a commercial/residential building imposed much inconvenience to residents with a power outage caused by the fire department.



This outage exposed a major problem with the Marnia Center's emergency system in that it simply did not work. Large residential buildings like the Marina Center are required to be outfitted with a backup system so that when there is a power failure, certain basic lighting systems continue to operate from an independent backup generator, usually a gas powered generator. But today, during the power outage, the entire building was left without any light in the halls and stairways... a serious breach of the National Building Code and the National Fire Safety Code, two laws that are applied in each municipality across Canada to ensure the safety of residents.

As the fire from across the street grew, smoke billowed across the street to the Marina Center and entered into to the building through the various vents used by the ventilation system. Since the emergency power backup system was not working, the emergency ventilation system in the stairwells was NOT working. In fact, once the fire department discovered the faults in the Marina Center, they installed their own ejector fan powered by a gas generator on the north stairwell to evacuate the smoke from inside the building. You can see on the pictures below that the fan and generator are labeled 457. 457 is the ladder truck stationed at station 57 which is the fire station just south of the building. So, the fire department had to take an ejector fan from a fire truck and put it in the Marina Center to evacuate the smoke because the Marina Center's system was not working!



- Why was it not working?
- For how long has the emergency system been broken?
- When was the last maintenance?
- When was the last inspection?

Obviously tenants were not happy and word got around. In the late morning fire fighters were dispatched to the Marina Center and went up floor by floor to make sure residents were okay, as the halls were pitch black. Then later that afternoon an inspector from the fire department made rounds checking the smoke detectors of each apartment in the building.

This lack of oversight on the part of Marina Center management is surely going to be the subject of an investigation and an eventual fine by fire department inspectors. But for tenants it also means that their lives were put in danger and justifies a rent decrease.

What would have happened if the fire was in the Marina Center? And what would have happened if the power would have been shut off by the fire department only to discover that tenants could not evacuate without lighting or could asphyxiate because the pressurized stairwell ventilation system was not working?

Alarming questions that merit concern.