Copyright 2006 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
By RICHARD WHITT
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Since 1990, a federal agency in the Washington suburb of Emmitsburg, Md., has been dutifully gathering fire safety information about U.S. hotels and motels.
More than 35,000 properties are on the U.S. Fire Administration’s “National Master List” of structures deemed safe for federal employees while on government business. To get on the list to do business with Uncle Sam, a hotel or motel owner has to certify that the building has smoke detectors and, if it’s over three stories tall, sprinklers.
But the discovery this week that the Holiday Inn & Suites at Delk Road in Marietta improperly made that list --- and that there is no verification of the information supplied by hoteliers in Georgia and many other states --- casts doubts on its accuracy.
The Marietta hotel was deleted from the list this week after a fire there Sunday killed a South Carolina man and fire investigators revealed that the seven-story structure had no sprinkler system in the rooms. The cause of what fire officials are calling the worst hotel fire in Marietta history, which also injured 20 others, remains under investigation.
Facilities not on the government’s list are ineligible to share in the $25 billion in federal travel money spent yearly by traveling federal workers.
It’s not clear whether federal employees stayed at the Holiday Inn, which is located near I-75 near Dobbins Air Reserve Base and Lockheed Martin’s Marietta plant. But the Federal Emergency Management Agency paid $59 to house Hurricane Katrina evacuees there for one night in the past few months, according to FEMA records. The U.S. Fire Administration is a division of FEMA.
How did the Marietta hotel get on the government’s master list? Someone representing the hotel simply filled out an online form stating that the facility had sprinklers and e-mailed it to the agency, said Tim Ganley, a project officer at the Fire Administration who looked into the matter at the Journal-Constitution’s request.
Jerry Daly, a spokesman for the hotel owners, said he was unable to reach them for comment. But Daly said that one building at the hotel, with 46 rooms, does have sprinklers and that that might have led to the mistake. Another 147 rooms in an older building don’t have sprinklers, Daly said. He said the owners have not yet determined how the mistake was made.
To qualify for the approved list, the federal Hotel and Motel Fire Safety Act of 1990 requires sprinklers in all rooms, Ganley said.
The federal declaration form, FEMA 75-13, admonishes that information being supplied by the hotelier “is subject to verification by federal, state and local fire authorities and that I am subject to fines of up to $10,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years if I knowingly make false or fraudulent statements to the government.”
But Georgia is among the half of the states that do not check on hotel owners’ declarations that they meet federal fire safety guidelines, Ganley said. And it’s unclear which government entity is responsible for enforcing the law, he added. “Fraud is a state issue,” Ganley said.
Ganley said it’s up to the governor of each state to designate someone to grant or deny approval for a property asking to be on the list. Fully half the states have “ceded” that responsibility to the Fire Administration, he said. But that doesn’t mean the agency actually takes responsibility for verifying the information submitted. That responsibility remains with the governor, Ganley said.
But no one in Gov. Sonny Perdue’s office had ever heard of the federal law, Perdue spokeswoman Heather Hedrick wrote in an e-mailed response to questions.
“We also checked with South Carolina and Florida, neither of which have heard of this law, nor have they appointed anyone to the position,” Hedrick wrote. Both states are listed on the Fire Administration’s Web site as having ceded that authority to the agency.
The 1990 law was put into place after several fatal hotel fires, including the disastrous MGM Grand Hotel fire in Las Vegas, which killed 87 people. The law’s purpose, according to the Web site, is to “save lives and protect property.”
“The system works pretty well,” Ganley said.