Fire sprinkler bill on hold as Council awaits recommendations

Following summer’s deadly Marco Polo fire, city leaders continue to grapple with how to make hundreds of Honolulu high-rises safer without overburdening owners and tenants.

Bill 69 would mandate that some 360 aging buildings, representing nearly 40,000 residential units across Oahu, be retrofitted with fire sprinkler systems.

However, on Tuesday the City Council’s Executive Matters and Legal Affairs Committee deferred the measure for a second time as its members await what will likely be less stringent recommendations on the sprinklers.

A 15-member Residential Fire Safety Advisory Committee panel might soon recommend instead that architects, engineers and other professionals evaluate Oahu’s older high-rises and see whether a partial sprinkler system — or even no system at all — would suffice in each case, Honolulu Fire Chief Manuel Neves told Council members Tuesday.

By evaluating each high-rise individually, the number of older buildings requiring sprinkler systems could shrink from 360 to around 150, Honolulu fire officials told the Council members.

“One proposal, for example, right now is that any apartment building with the units all having exterior access, all the way up to 19 floors, would not need fire sprinklers,” HFD Assistant Fire Chief Socrates Bratakos told the Council on Tuesday. “And that removes a whole lot of buildings from the list.”

“Even buildings with interior corridors up to nine floors would not need sprinklers, either,” Bratakos added.

Those comments seemed to reassure some Council members who’ve advocated for reducing the hardship with less stringent requirements. The proposed mandate has drawn the ire of high-rise residents who’ve argued that it would pose an undue and unfair burden on them that could force them to find tens of thousands of dollars to pay for the sprinklers.

“It’s a big difference … when you’re talking about 250 buildings versus 100 buildings versus 50 buildings, and I think that’s sort of the order of magnitude that we would want the (fire safety advisory committee) to take a look at,” Councilwoman Carol Fukunaga said Tuesday.

The fire safety advisory committee — composed of city, state and community members — is slated to vote on the recommendation during its Oct. 5 meeting, Neves said. The City Council could then take up Bill 69 again at its Oct. 24 meeting, Chairman Ron Menor said.

Menor further expressed hope that the advisory committee would have recommendations on any financial incentives to help pay for the sprinkler systems ready for the Council to consider at its Nov. 1 meeting.

Four people died and five others were seriously injured due to the seven-alarm Marco Polo high-rise fire on Kapiolani Boulevard on July 14. More than 80 units were damaged by flames, more than 30 were destroyed and another 130 sustained water damage.

The total damage estimate exceeds $100 million.