Keep fire safety measures moving

Around 2:15 p.m. on July 14, Jeffrey Rockett awoke to the sound of what he thought was an alarm clock. He noticed “light ambient smoke” in the air and got up to investigate. Then he saw smoke shoot up from floor to ceiling and turn into flame.

These were the early stages of what would become the disastrous Marco Polo condo fire, which would burn for more than four hours, leave four people dead, 80 apartments damaged, 30 destroyed, and cause more than $107 million in damage.

The sound Rockett heard was actually a smoke alarm in the elevator lobby. Rockett and Laura Gearhart, both occupants of Apartment No. 2602, crawled to safety as black smoke began to fill the unit and the hallway. When they passed the elevators, they got up and ran down the stairs.

Rockett’s account of their escape, contained in the Honolulu Fire Department’s Oct. 16 report on the fire, provided the first public details of what happened in No. 2602, where investigators said the fire began.

What the long-awaited, 86-page report does not provide is the answer to everyone’s question: How did this happen?

“The fire’s cause has been classified as UNDETERMINED pending any further information and final forensic analysis of tagged items,” the report said.

Lack of a definitive cause makes it difficult to say how the fire could have been prevented. But that doesn’t mean returning to business as usual.

The Marco Polo disaster rightly prompted calls for a serious and sustained effort to make the hundreds of older high-rise buildings in Honolulu and their residents safer.

The City Council considered, then postponed, action on a bill to mandate that older high-rise buildings install fire sprinkler systems, an expensive proposition that experts say would likely have prevented the fire from spreading. The Council instead formed a residential fire safety advisory committee, tasked with coming up with less-costly recommendations, such as exempting buildings that can be protected without a full sprinkler system.

It was a good start, and more can be done. For one thing, the management of the Marco Polo should pursue further forensic investigation. The report suggested some possibilities for an accidental cause, based on items found in No. 2602: electrical failure or malfunction of an air conditioning unit or computers; anomalies in some electrical outlets; and a gas cylinder and lighter wand in proximity of the fire’s origin. The circuit breaker panel did not appear to match the typical two-bedroom electrical configuration noted in the building plans, the report said.

Furthermore, the building elevators were malfunctioning, affecting the ability of firefighters to get to the upper floors.

More broadly, Marco Polo should prompt discussion among apartment dwellers and their building managers about taking their own safety measures. For example, the report noted that strong winds helped drive the spread of the fire. Ensuring that fire doors are kept closed and that apartment doors have self-closing mechanisms could provide crucial protection. So could proper and regular inspections of electrical systems, as well as fire extinguishers and smoke alarms in every apartment.

The Marco Polo, built in 1971, is one of more than 300 high-rise buildings in Honolulu without fire sprinkler systems, which became mandatory in 1975.

Those buildings are aging. So, too, is Hawaii’s population; and elderly people are less mobile and especially vulnerable when fire and smoke sweep through the confined spaces of an apartment building.

Three Marco Polo residents — Joann M. Kuwata, 71; Britt Reller, 54; and his 87-year-old mother, Jean Dilley — died in two separate neighboring units on the 26th floor. Marilyn Van Gieson, an 81-year-old woman who was disabled and waited in her 32nd-floor condo for four hours for firefighters to rescue her, died 20 days later at Straub Medical Center.

Their tragic deaths are reason enough to make sure the Marco Polo fire is not simply forgotten.