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City council members pushed Wednesday for a package of new fire safety bills — including one that quadruples fines against negligent landlords — to prevent another disaster like the Bronx high-rise blaze that killed 17 people in January.
Legislation introduced at a city council hearing by Oswald Feliz (D-Bronx), would force building owners to fix faulty self-closing doors — which helped the inferno at Twin Parks Northwest spread rapidly — in 10 days or less instead of 21 days.
It also increases fines against landlords who falsely claim to have repaired the doors from around $250 to a maximum of $1,000.
“The Twin Parks fire was avoidable. Had all self-closing doors actually closed [and] functioned, that fire would not have turned into the tragedy that we saw,” Feliz said at the hearing to discuss the proposed bills. “We have one overarching goal — figure out what can be done to eliminate the occurrence of residential fires.”
Under the bill, the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development must also reinspect the doors after complaints from residents.
But councilman Eric Dinowitz (D-Bronx) slammed the department for only inspecting the fire safety feature after there’s a complaint — stressing that most tenants are unaware that their doors are supposed to self-close, and therefore don’t mention the problem to the city.
“I want to talk about this word I keep hearing [from the DHPD] ‘proactive,’ and every time you describe it, it sounds like it is in response to something,” he said.
But the department’s deputy commissioner, AnnMarie Santiago, said inspectors have no reason to visit buildings unless there’s a reported problem. The department last year issued 22,000 self-closing-door violations, she said.
“Generally we focus our resources on where we have a known issue of some sort,” she said.
“We really would have no reason to be in that building, other than we are trying to address some condition that exists that is affecting the lives of the tenants that are there,” she said.
Dinowitz fired back, “I respectfully disagree.”
He urged the city to launch an education campaign to teach tenants about the potentially life-saving door function, so they know a broken one is worth a call to 311.
Before the historic blaze broke out in January, the Twin Parks Northwest high-rise had been cited six times between 2013 and 2019 for failing to keep all of the building’s self-closing doors in working order, according to records. The landlord sometimes let the problem languish for three years.
FDNY officials have said the fire was sparked by a space heater in a third-floor apartment, and that several malfunctioning self-closing doors allowed smoke to quickly fill the building.
At the hearing, Feliz suggested “hiring more inspectors” along with cracking down on landlords — to which Santiago responded, “I think we’re trying to do both.”
Meanwhile, a second fire safety bill presented Wednesday would prohibit the sale of electric space heaters without automatic shut-off and thermostat features.
A third bill would require landlords to keep buildings warmer by raising temperature requirements from 68 to 70 degrees during the day, and from 62 to 68 at night between October and May.
City council will vote on the bills at a later date.
Additional reporting by Maggie Hicks
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