Fire At High-Rise Forces Evacuation Of Its Residents

A 91-year-old blind woman, Judith Druck, awoke to the smell of smoke early yesterday morning in her Queens high-rise apartment. Ms. Druck got up and opened all the windows, called the doorman, and stayed in her apartment, not realizing that the source of the flames was in the apartment next door.“This is my Chanukah miracle,” Ms. Druck told her granddaughter, after the firefighters evacuated her and doused the flames at North Shore Towers.Ms. Druck lives on the third floor of the 33-story brick co-op, one of the three towers located at a gated complex at the far end of Queens, bordering Nassau County. A cigarette sparked the blaze at 1:34 a.m., and it spread to an apartment on the fourth floor, according to the fire department.In keeping her door closed and staying inside her apartment, Ms. Druck followed the typical safety instructions for residents of high-rise towers, which are considered fireproof by the fire department because partitions between individual units are designed to stop the spread of flames.“A building is considered fireproof if it has cement walls and cement floors,” said fire department spokesman Timothy Hinchey. “High-rise buildings are fireproof, office buildings, housing projects. Anything over six stories is generally fireproof.”In this system of fireproofing, called compartmentalization, buildings are designed so that walls will contain any fire in an area no greater than 7,500 square feet.Ms. Druck’s granddaughter, Elizabeth Axel, 39, of Manhattan, said the flames never spread into her grandmother’s apartment, though a crack formed on the overheated wall facing the adjacent apartment.A firefighter was treated at Cornell University Hospital for high levels of carbon monoxide, and 18 others suffered minor injuries in the blaze, which took more than an hour to get under control. Fifteen people were also treated for minor injuries.“The firemen said the people who left the apartments were the ones who had the smoke inhalation problems,” Ms. Axel said. “My grandmother is an incredible lady. I’m asking her, ‘Do you want to go to the doctor to get checked out?’ and she goes off to the beauty parlor.”The fire department spokesman would not say whether North Shore Towers was outfitted with a sprinkler system. The towers were built prior to 1999, when the laws requiring sprinkler systems at residential buildings went into effect.“Buildings built before 1999 may have sprinklers in certain places, like in compactor areas or in storage rooms, but they are not required to have sprinklers,” said Department of Buildings spokeswoman Ilyse Fink. “They are not required to retrofit the building. There are buildings built in the city 100 years ago, 150 years ago, that are still standing without these systems.”Requirements for commercial buildings are more stringent. Fully automated sprinkler systems were mandated in newly constructed commercial buildings in 1984. Twenty years later, many of the city’s 1,500 commercial high-rises lack sprinkler systems. A retired fire marshal recently told The New York Sun that more than half of the commercial buildings in the city lack such systems. A member of the City Council, Leroy Comrie, a Democrat, helped draft the recently-passed Local Law 26, requiring that full sprinkler systems be installed in all commercial buildings more than 100 feet high within the next 15 years.

Fire At High-Rise Forces Evacuation Of Its Residents

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