By Holly Danks
The Sunday Oregonian (Portland, Oregon)
Copyright 2006 The Sunday Oregonian
All Rights Reserved
Oregon fire officials have spent the decade since the fatal Oakwood Park Apartments fire trying to enact laws and policies to prevent tragedies.
Tim Birr continues the quest for stiffer building codes and increased fire safety, two years after he retired as a division chief with Tualatin Valley Fire & Rescue, the lead agency that fought the four-alarm blaze. He lectures nationally and lends his voice to debates between fire officials trying to keep people from dying and builders trying to keep costs down.
“I will never, ever forget it,” Birr, a 30-year fire service veteran, said of the Oakwood Park fire. “I’ve been to bigger fires, I’ve been to more challenging fires. But I’ve never been to one that was more tragic. So many people died.”
They didn’t have to, Birr and other fire officials say.
In the late 1960s, when the Oakwood Park Apartments were built, multifamily residences three stories or higher were supposed to have fire sprinklers. But like many, the owners of the Aloha complex built an earthen berm around the lower level so the three-floor apartment was considered to have only two stories and a basement.
Knowing sprinklers would have saved lives at Oakwood Park, Birr and the district’s then-fire marshal, Jeff Grunewald, worked for more than 18 months to get the Oregon building codes division to require tougher fire suppression measures in apartments statewide.
“We ran into a real buzz saw of opposition from builders and developers,” Birr said. “It’s largely a matter of cost.”
The building codes division adopted a compromise. Local jurisdictions can require sprinklers in new construction of multifamily buildings of more than one level, including basements.
“In the end, we were able to get something done about it, and it was huge,” Birr said.
Within a couple of years, all nine cities in the Tualatin Valley fire district, which is the largest in the state and serves Washington County and parts of Multnomah and Clackamas counties, adopted local sprinkler amendments. Washington County, Gresham, Seaside and Cannon Beach also signed on early; Portland recently adopted the sprinkler rule.
Because the code does not retrofit older apartments, where most fires take place, officials looked to increase safety by changing landlord and tenant behavior through education.
The fire district trains landlords to replace broken smoke detectors and faulty hinges on self-closing doors, educate new tenants about fire alarms and escape plans, and report any juvenile fire setting, and the district provides Spanish-language safety posters.
Oakwood Park managers knew that Ray DeFord, who started the deadly 1996 fire, set other fires at the complex four years earlier but didn’t call police or get him help.
With DeFord as the basis, Judy Okulitch, coordinator of the Oregon Fire Marshal’s juvenile fire setting intervention program, created a national curriculum that is being tested in several states.
The program is designed to teach arson investigators “to understand the importance of youth-set fires at a very early stage so fires don’t end up with deaths like we had in the Ray DeFord fire,” she said. “That’s a pretty big result nationally.”