By Shane Brandhorst
How do fire inspections save lives?
It’s a question I was asked recently. On the surface, it sounded simple — almost obvious — especially coming to me as the fire marshal. Inspections save lives. That’s the job. That’s the answer.
But the more I sat with the question, the more it lingered. What was really being asked? Was it curiosity, rooted in a genuine desire to understand how inspections translate into safety? Was it frustration, perhaps from crews who see inspections as a burden rather than a mission? Or was it skepticism — a belief that inspections are bureaucratic checkboxes, disconnected from real-world danger?
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The truth is that fire inspections don’t save lives in an abstract or theoretical way. They save lives in very real, very specific ways, often because of lessons learned through unimaginable loss.
To understand their value, you have to understand where fire codes come from. And that history, more often than not, is written in tragedy.
Hard lessons learned too late
Fire codes are not arbitrary rules dreamed up in offices or classrooms. Every line in a code book exists because someone, somewhere was seriously injured or killed. Each requirement represents a hard lesson learned too late. Locked exits. Overcrowded rooms. Flammable decorations. Disabled alarms. Absent sprinklers. These are not hypothetical dangers; they are recurring themes in disasters that have reshaped how we think about fire safety.
Over time, those lessons have driven the adoption of fire suppression systems, fire alarms, emergency lighting and clearly marked exits. They have been debated, refined and ultimately written into law, not to inconvenience building owners or slow down business, but to ensure that when something goes wrong, people have a fighting chance to survive. Fire inspections are the mechanism that turns those lessons into action.
To see why inspections matter, we only need to look at some of the fires that forever changed the landscape of building safety in the United States.
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire
On the late afternoon of March 25, 1911, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Greenwich Village, New York. The factory occupied the top three floors of a 10-story building where hundreds of garment workers — mostly young immigrant women — sat shoulder to shoulder at sewing machines. Fabric scraps littered the floors. Flammable materials were everywhere. When flames ignited on the eighth floor, the fire spread with frightening speed.
Escape routes failed workers. Stairwell doors were locked from the outside, a deliberate decision by factory owners to prevent theft and unauthorized breaks. The lone exterior fire escape twisted and collapsed under the weight of fleeing workers. Fire department ladders reached only as high as the sixth floor. Trapped above the flames and smoke, many workers faced an impossible choice. Some burned where they stood. Others jumped.
By the time the fire was extinguished, 146 people were dead.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire shocked the nation. Newspapers published graphic photographs. Funerals filled the streets. Public outrage was swift and overwhelming. And for one of the first times on a large scale, the country confronted an uncomfortable truth: The deaths were preventable.
What changed: In the aftermath, building safety codes were fundamentally re-examined. Investigations revealed how locked doors, insufficient exits, and poor planning had turned a fire into a massacre. Those findings directly influenced modern egress requirements, now reflected in Chapter 10 of the International Building Code. Reforms included exit doors that must unlock and open without keys, mandatory panic hardware, exit capacity calculations, and multiple exit access routes to prevent single-path escapes. What began as a tragedy became a turning point — one that permanently altered how buildings are designed to protect occupants.
Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire
Three decades later, another disaster would reinforce those lessons in even more devastating fashion.
On Nov. 28, 1942, the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Boston was alive with music and celebration. More than 1,000 patrons packed into a space legally approved for fewer than half that number. The club was lavishly decorated to resemble a tropical paradise, with artificial palm trees, fabric drapery, and highly flammable decor covering walls and ceilings. It was visually stunning — and catastrophically unsafe.
Late that evening, a fire ignited in the basement. Fueled by combustible decorations, flames spread rapidly through the building. Thick smoke filled the space within minutes. Panic followed.
As patrons surged toward exits, they encountered fatal obstacles. The main entrance consisted of a revolving door that quickly jammed under pressure. Other exits were locked, hidden behind decorations, or impossible to find in the darkness and smoke. Some doors opened inward, rendering them useless against the force of the crowd.
When the fire was finally brought under control, 492 people were dead.
The Cocoanut Grove fire remains the deadliest nightclub fires in U.S. history, and its impact on fire safety regulations was profound. Investigations revealed a cascade of failures — overcrowding, locked exits, poor visibility, flammable finishes — each compounding the next.
What changed: The result was a sweeping overhaul of fire and building codes. Revolving doors were banned at main exits unless paired with outward-swinging doors. Exit doors were required to swing in the direction of egress travel. Panic hardware became mandatory in assembly occupancies. Occupancy load limits began to be enforced with real consequences. Interior finish requirements were introduced, along with emergency lighting and illuminated exit signs.
These changes did not erase the loss, but they reshaped public safety nationwide. And once again, inspections became the line of defense, ensuring that what was written into code was actually followed. Unfortunately, more than half a century later, history repeated itself.
The Station nightclub fire
On Feb. 20, 2003, patrons packed into The Station nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island, expecting nothing more than a loud, carefree night of live music. The band Great White was set to perform. The crowd was energized. The room was dark. Few could have imagined that within minutes, the building would become an inferno.
Before the show, the band’s tour manager prepared pyrotechnics — sparklers meant to shoot brief bursts of sparks into the air. No permits were obtained. No inspections had been conducted. No fire watch was present.
Compounding the danger, the club’s walls and ceiling were lined with polyurethane foam installed for soundproofing. The material was cheap and effective, but it was also highly flammable and produced thick, toxic smoke when ignited. When the pyrotechnics were triggered, sparks reached the foam almost instantly. Flames raced across the ceiling.
Within 90 seconds, the fire had engulfed the interior. Within five minutes, temperatures exceeded 1,800 degrees. Smoke filled the room. Visibility vanished. As patrons rushed to escape, they crowded the main entrance, which quickly became impassable. Other exits — poorly marked and unfamiliar — went largely unused.
One hundred people died. More than 230 were injured.
The Station Nightclub fire revealed a familiar pattern: a building constructed under older standards, later converted to a new use without meeting updated safety requirements. Fire sprinklers, which could have controlled the fire in its early moments, were never installed. Had they been, experts agree, nearly every life lost that night could have been saved.
What changed: Once again, tragedy forced change. Assembly occupancy requirements were tightened. Sprinkler thresholds were lowered. Interior finish testing became more rigorous. Pyrotechnic use was strictly regulated, with permitting, inspections and fire watches required. The NFPA banned pyrotechnics in buildings smaller than 10,000 square feet. These changes were not theoretical; they were born from the knowledge of exactly how fast things can go wrong.
How lives are saved
After each disaster, codes were changed in an effort to make buildings safer. Yet devastation and heartbreak continue, followed by the same painful question: How did this happen again?
When we look at the long list of fire code changes born from these disasters, it’s critical to remember that each one carries a cost. People paid for these lessons with their lives. Many of those deaths were preventable, not because the rules didn’t exist, but because they weren’t followed, enforced or inspected.
This comes down to balancing evolving fire codes with the responsibility to enforce them. While tragedies have revealed gaps that led to new regulations, most modern fire losses aren’t due to missing rules; they’re the result of breakdowns in compliance, inspection or enforcement. And that can be partly due to not enough personnel as departments are forced to do more with less. Fire codes will never be completely “ironclad” because buildings, materials and risks are always changing, but for the most part they already address known hazards. That means the focus increasingly shifts to making sure those standards are actually followed in practice. In the end, life safety depends just as much on accountability and consistent enforcement as it does on the rules themselves.
That brings us back to the original question.
How do fire inspections save lives in my city? Inspections create the opportunity to ensure that businesses are following the code and not cutting corners. They identify dangers before they turn deadly, like sparklers being used near highly flammable materials, blocked or locked exits, and fire protection systems that are either poorly designed or not functioning as they should.
This is how lives are saved. It’s how everyone can go home at the end of the day, whether after work or a night out with friends, knowing that we did our job. We inspected the building, business or nightclub, and determined it to be safe, so they have nothing to worry about.
The public may not see fires every day. They may never hear about lives lost because of them. But that’s not a failure, it’s the goal. Fire inspections exist to protect life, because when a life is lost, nothing can undo it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shane Brandhorst serves as the deputy chief of fire prevention/fire marshal for the City of Bozeman, Montana, a municipal career fire department. Since his appointment in October 2025, Brandhorst has led fire prevention, code enforcement, and community risk reduction initiatives that protect both the public and firefighters. Previously, he served as a fire inspector, gaining hands-on experience in inspections and proactive fire safety education. Over his 32-year career, Chief Brandhorst has served in roles from firefighter to assistant chief across volunteer departments, service in the U.S. Air Force, and multiple civilian fire organizations, building expertise in fire service operations and CRR. He is a member of the IAFC Fire and Life Safety Section, serves as a peer assessor for the Center for Public Safety Excellence (CPSE), holds a bachelor’s degree from Columbia Southern University, has earned the Fire Marshal (FM) designation, and is pursuing his Chief Fire Officer (CFO) designation.
