In a new report, the Fall River fire chief called for assisted living facilities like the one in his city where 10 residents died in a July fire to be held to the same strict fire codes as nursing homes.
The report into the fire at the Gabriel House Assisted Living Facility describes a range of challenges firefighters faced as they frantically rescued 53 residents, most of whom were physically unable to evacuate themselves. And it recommends a number of steps intended to prevent similar tragedies.
Following fatal fires at nursing homes in Hartford, Connecticut, and Nashville, Tennessee, in 2003, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services mandated stricter safety standards for nursing homes, including sprinkler requirements.
“All of those changes need to trickle down now to the other occupancies that [are home to] vulnerable populations — including assisted livings, including daycares and sober houses and boarding houses, group homes,” Fall River Fire Chief Jeffrey Bacon told GBH News. “Anywhere where there’s a vulnerable population ... we can’t keep waiting for tragedies to happen in these locations to take a good look at what needs to change.”
The Gabriel House did have sprinklers that were activated during the fire, but the building had no fire doors, Bacon said.
“So super-heated smoke and heat were allowed to really move throughout the building and put everybody in the building at tremendous risk,” he said, noting that fire doors would have been required under a stricter fire code.
The fire left Gabriel House’s elevator inoperable and many of the facility’s elderly residents used wheelchairs in the three-story building, requiring firefighters to carry residents out of windows and down ladders. Bacon suggested Monday that could have violated state laws regarding who can live in facilities like Gabriel House.
“In the building code, to live in assisted living, you have to be able to self evacuate,” Bacon said.
The report also recommends the state Department of Public Health expand the range of regular inspections it does of nursing homes and other facilities to include regular “life safety and emergency preparedness” inspections.
The report says, currently, the DPH’s inspections look at five categories: “Administration, Nursing, Resident Rights, Kitchen/Food Services, and Environment.”
“[In] most communities, including Fall River, we can’t staff our fire prevention bureau to be able to do as thorough inspections as these occupancies need,” Bacon said. “So, it really needs to be at the state level, while they’re doing these other inspections that they could add into that the life safety stuff.”
In the days after the fire, members of the Fall River Fire Department said they could have saved more lives if they had more firefighters on hand, leading to an agreement with the city to increase staffing. On Monday, Bacon said he commended the city for the increased staffing.
“But the reality is, and I’ve said that since day one, that you can’t staff your fire department based on the worst incident in memory,” Bacon said.
The report says that while more staff in Fall River would have helped, more should be done in the future to get a higher number of firefighters from other departments through “mutual aid” agreements.
“I think we just need to activate mutual aid from further away,” he said, noting that many of the smaller surrounding communities are unable to provide the same resources that a larger, city-sized fire department would have.
A state commission is currently considering recommendations on how Massachusetts could better regulate assisted living residences. At the time of the fire, the commission faced an August deadline to issue its report, but voted to give itself another 90 days to consider lessons learned from the Fall River Fire. State Senator Mark Montigny sponsored the creation of the commission.
“When we created the commission alongside advocates for vulnerable seniors last year, we were certainly concerned with the inadequacy of state oversight and safety standards,” Montigny said Monday in a written statement. “This report makes clear that universal safety standards are absolutely necessary for all facilities housing seniors and other residents who face various challenges in their lives. This terrible tragedy leaves no doubt that annual inspections, working sprinkler systems, and regular, coordinated fire drills with staff and residents are invaluable lifesaving tools that should be incorporated into all elder care facilities.”
Montigny added that the commission’s upcoming report “must incorporate these requirements in a comprehensive manner.”
Bacon said he’d like to see the legislature to adopt recommendations like that.
“This shouldn’t happen again anywhere else in the country,” he said. “[Assisted living facilities] should be held to the same standard as a nursing home. There should be regular inspections by the state. Any complaints that come from inside of these facilities should be taken care of and addressed at a state level. And we’re more than happy to work with the state, once those changes are made, to ensure that these people are protected in the way they deserve to be.”
