Apartments lack fire walls

Erin Neff

Wednesday, March 8, 2000 | 11:19 a.m.

The wooden-framed Cedar Springs Apartments, where fire claimed four lives Tuesday morning, had no fire walls and was regulated by 1970 building codes, despite numerous recent fires and complaints from residents.

Since Jan. 1, 1997, the Clark County Fire Department was called to Cedar Springs 36 times, including 16 times for reported building fires, 15 times for trash fires and five times for barbecue fires.

Of the 16 building fires, only two were of significant size, Leinbach said.

The inability of county officials to force improvements in older apartment buildings in Las Vegas is ironic, given that tourists in the city sleep in hotels built under the nation's toughest fire codes.

"A building has to be maintained in accordance and compliance with the codes it was built under," Rita Mincavage of the county's building department said Tuesday. "The county has no way to go into a 1970s building and make it comply with current code. There's just no way they can do it."

The devastating fires at the MGM Grand in 1980 and the Las Vegas Hilton in 1981, which killed 84 and 8 people respectively, led the state Legislature to make sweeping changes regarding fire safety in commercial, government and school buildings.

Hundreds of millions of dollars in safety improvements were made statewide, leading fire officials to dub Nevada's fire codes the toughest nationwide.

But apartment complexes were not included in the retrofits that required alarm system upgrades, sprinkler installation and fire wall construction.

"Obviously newer buildings are built to higher standards," said Ron Lynn, the county's assistant building director. "Older buildings have a greater likelihood of fire in large part due to maintenance issues."

The Cedar Springs Apartment complex was built in 1972 by contractor A.G. Spanos Construction Inc. -- the nation's fifth-largest apartment complex developer.

In the late 1970s four major fires destroyed large portions of office and apartment complexes in Las Vegas built by Spanos. One person was killed in a Jan. 18, 1980, fire at a Spanos apartment complex.

Fire investigators at the time found gaping holes in firewalls that hastened the spread of the flames.

Clark County Fire Department spokesman Bob Leinbach said there were no firewalls in Cedar Springs Apartments' Building 45, where Tuesday's fire started.

"There weren't any firewalls, and none were required in the building codes when it was built," Leinbach said. "Many firewalls are made of sheet rock and are designed to withstand high temperatures up to a point. Their main purpose is to slow a fire down."

The county rewrites its building code every three years, adding about 900 changes each time, Lynn said.

For a building like Cedar Springs to come up to today's standards, he said, would take thousands of code changes and millions of dollars, even though recent fires there suggest some improvements may have been necessary.

Mincavage said the county had two reports of significant fires at Cedar Springs in September 1998 and in 1994. The county has also received seven complaints from residents since Jan. 1, 1997, ranging from a ceiling falling down to a plumbing problem.

Four of those seven complaints were found to be justified, and the county ordered apartment owner Desert Associates Limited Partnership to take corrective steps.

Desert Associates, with a Natick, Mass., address, is owned by Gary Widett and Ronald Simons.

The company was not registered with the secretary of state's office in Massachusetts or Nevada.

Neither Widett nor Simons could be reached for comment.

Sun reporters Mary Manning and Jace Radke contributed to this report.