By Nate Carlisle and Julia Lyon
The Salt Lake Tribune
WASATCH, Utah — When a spectacular spread of flames destroyed Wasatch Junior High School two years ago, parents learned the frightening way that schools may not always be safe.
Their fears led the State Fire Marshal’s Office to promise to inspect every public school in Utah, and a review of records shows officials are on their way to meeting their self-imposed three-year deadline for completing the task.
As of the end of July, 71 percent of Utah’s public, private and charter schools have received fire inspections since the junior high burned, data shows. The office is on pace to conduct inspections on the remaining schools by fall 2008.
Yet despite the extra emphasis on inspections, the marshal’s office acknowledges there still are problems with record keeping and adequate staffing. Most important, documentation proving inspections took place can be hard to find.
The marshal’s office is quick to point out, though, that despite a handful of minor blazes that have sparked in Utah schools since the Wasatch Junior High Fire, no Utah child has died in a school fire since the office was created in the 1960s.
“I have 100 percent confidence the children are in a safe environment,” said Brent Halladay, the fire marshal’s chief deputy.
Alarms replace bells
On July 11, 2005, Wasatch Junior High, 3750 S. 3100 East, Millcreek Township, was like many Utah schools. The 46-year-old building had no sprinklers or other modern fire-safety features and records show it had not been inspected in four years.
The day of the fire, a circuit overload or power surge ignited a computer server tower. The fire spread out of a media room, eventually reaching the school’s attic.
In the attic, with no breaks to impede the flames, the blaze roared through the building and left firefighters helpless. No students were in the school and the few staff present escaped without injury.
The destruction led the Granite School District to increase its fire prevention efforts. Meanwhile, the marshal’s office set out to conduct inspections in all schools within three years.
If three years sounds like a long time, consider the logistics: Utah has more than 850 schools that often include multiple buildings. And in 2005, the marshal’s office had eight inspectors assigned to visit those schools and all the other buildings under its jurisdiction - everything from jails to nursing homes to the governor’s mansion.
Inspecting a school can take a few hours to an entire day, depending on the building’s size and sophistication.
After the Wasatch fire, the Legislature increased the office’s budget to provide another full-time inspector dedicated to schools and three more part-time inspectors who work in the state’s rural areas.
The office still has seven other full-time inspectors whose duties include schools and other public buildings. Rural deputies are used exclusively in schools, Halladay said.
Most of the inspections of the past two years have been completed by personnel employed by the marshal’s office, but some also were conducted by local fire departments or by special deputies. Special deputies are trained by the marshal to be part-time inspectors but school districts employ them.
In 2005, state lawmakers criticized the special-deputy arrangement, saying it put the deputies in the position of enforcing rules against the institution paying them. Halladay says the deputies can contact his office anytime there’s a conflict.
Also in 2005, The Salt Lake Tribune reported the marshal’s office intended to conduct its three years of school inspections solely with its inspectors, but Halladay said in a recent interview that his office always intended to use deputies to help with the inspections.
“We’re out in the schools all the time,” said Randy Haslan, Jordan School District’s director of new construction. “If there are things that we are seeing that are grossly in error, that’s immediately brought to [the] attention of the principals.”
Write it down
One issue still hampering fire safety at Utah schools is record keeping.
While the marshal’s office says it has documented every school inspection in the past two years, finding those records can be troublesome. The office does not have a central records repository. Some documents are kept at the marshal’s headquarters in Murray, while others are kept in regional offices in Ogden and Richfield.
When two Tribune reporters visiting the Murray headquarters tried to view the inspection records for schools in Carbon County, no recent records were in the files. Kim Passey, a deputy fire marshal, said the records were probably with the part-time deputy assigned to inspect those schools.
This fall, the marshal’s office is scheduled to begin logging inspections of all buildings into a computer database. The database, which was being planned before the Wasatch Junior High fire, is designed to solve record-keeping problems, but the office does not plan to input old information from its paper files into the new database. They’ll be starting over.
The fact that only about half of Alpine School District’s schools have been formally inspected by the state fire marshal should not alarm parents, said Dave Holdaway, Alpine’s physical facilities director.
“Parents can be pretty comfortable,” he said. “That’s quite a feat to have 50 percent of them done considering the size of their staff and other responsibilities they have.”
He and other Wasatch Front school district officials caution that inspection numbers don’t paint the full picture. Schools that have yet to receive official inspections are likely to have been checked by district staff trained in fire safety. In Jordan, officials trained in fire safety check schools on average once a year. Some districts have similar systems, although others primarily rely on state officials to do the job.
While formal fire inspections may have increased in frequency statewide since the Wasatch fire, the building’s loss did have another impact at Granite School District. Because the fire started in the junior high’s server room, now servers are all contained in cabinets made of metal rather than wood. Ventilators or air-conditioning systems are being installed to keep the rooms cool.
Moreover, the fire raised awareness about what could go wrong.
“Wasatch woke up a lot of people,” said Kurt Fisher, Granite’s fire marshal, who now does inspections full time as a result of the fire.
Teachers are more willing to make changes in their classroom when fire hazards are spotted. On a recent state fire inspection at Granger Elementary, a stuffed armchair in a classroom became a casualty.
“Make a note, take this out,” Principal Wayne Williamson told his staff.
One problem the marshal’s office can’t fix is the antiquated fire alarm systems in older schools.
Districts may chip away at the situation, which can require millions of dollars to resolve. Granite High School, whose fate has seemed uncertain in an era of school closures, is receiving an automated smoke and heat detector system worth about $500,000.
It’s replacing a system that only went off when someone pulled the alarm.
Ten other older Granite schools still require upgrades, which will cost the district about $8 million.
Halladay points out that a more recent inspection was unlikely to have saved Wasatch Junior High. Fire inspectors are not trained to examine electrical components like those that caused the fire, he said.
“If we were to have examined Wasatch Junior High the day before the fire, we would not have gone through the server box,” Halladay said.
Halladay said his office intends to keep a presence in schools even after the three-year plan is finished. Rural schools are to be inspected annually, he said. The goal for urban schools is an inspection every two years.
That’s because reviewing and inspecting new construction in urban areas occupies more of the office’s time, he said.
“It isn’t through once and we’re done,” Halladay said.
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