 Good afternoon and thank you for joining me for another episode of Kondo Insider. My name is Jane Sugimura and I'm your host for the show today. And today we're going to be talking about the fire safety ordinance that's ordinance number 18-14. And because I've been getting some calls in the last month about this ordinance. And for those of you who don't know, in July of 2017, the Marco Polo fire, there was a fire at the Marco Polo and if you lived in Hawaii at that time, then you would have seen it on television, you would have read about it for weeks in the newspaper and the city decided that, you know, they had to do something to prevent a catastrophe like that from happening again. Unfortunately, in that fire four people died, you know, from the fire they couldn't get out of the building. And so the city set up a task force and I, on behalf of Hawaii Council of Association of Department Owners, was on that task force. And so, and the reason why we were on the task force was basically to provide input from a condominium's point of view as to how this ordinance would affect us. But let me just tell you what it's all about for those of you who don't know. And if you don't know, then you're in a kind of like a world of trouble. Okay, there's an ordinance, 1814, and it basically says, all high-rise buildings in Oahu must have fire sprinklers in their common elements and in their units, except if you are exempt or if you pass a life safety evaluation. Okay, so starting with the premise that every high-rise building has to have a fire sprinkler. And a fire sprinkler costs millions of dollars, millions of dollars to install. So most of the condos don't want it. And so the ordinance says, okay, there are some buildings that are exempt. And this is how you're exempt. If you're 10 stories or below, or if you have open exterior quarters, now what's an open exterior quarter? That means when you open the door to your unit and you walk outside of the hallway, there's no interior quarter. You're not in a hallway that's enclosed. You open your door and there's the air. You're outside and it's open to the air. That means that's an open exterior quarter. If you have, if you're one of those two situations, a 10-story building or less, or open exterior quarters, you don't have to put in fire sprinklers. But you need to pass something called a life safety evaluation. And a life safety evaluation is an inspection that is done to your building by a professional, licensed professional, an engineer, an architect. But anyway, these are people who do, you know, work on the building and they will be looking at 17 items. And if you're interested in what they're looking at and you want to know if there's a list of the buildings, there's 360 buildings that are deemed to be high-rise buildings. They are on the fire department's website. And so if you go to the fire department's website, in fact, I think if you Google fire department and look for their fire safety resources link, then you will find the list of buildings, the buildings, and it will tell you how many stories it is as far as the city's concern. So if it's 10 stories or less, it will show you on the map, on the spreadsheet. It will also say whether or not your building has exterior, open exterior corridors, which means you're exempt from putting in fire sprinklers. But you still need to do the life safety evaluation. And the life safety evaluation basically is an examination of your building to see if it's safe so that if there is another fire like there was at the Marco Polo, it's not going to blow up and get huge like it was at the Marco Polo and end up killing people. And with the fire, the thing that's very scary about a fire is very, very, it happens very, very fast. So once you find out there's a fire, the first thing you need to do as a resident, you need to get out of the building. You need to get out of the building. And so the fire, the life safety evaluation basically kind of measures things that help you get out of the building. Whether or not you have an updated fire alarm system, whether you have huge smoke detectors in your hallways, whether you have smoke detectors inside your units, and the ordinance, an existing city ordinance requires you to have one smoke detector in each bedroom. And under the life safety evaluation, if you have a smoke detector in the hallway and they're linked to the ones in the bedroom, you get more points. But the thing is, you have to have this licensed professional come in and look at your building, and that means that they have to go through most of your units. And it's not something that's going to get done in an hour. It's going to take weeks to set up, weeks for this licensed professional to go through your building. And then they do a report. And they basically, you know, look at the size of the building, the construction, is it drywall? Is it concrete? Is it wood? And, you know, the, the, the, if it's wood, you're going to get a very, very low score because it's not safe. If it's concrete, it's going to be higher. And if you're a low building, like 10 stories or less, you're going to get a higher score because it's easier for the fire department to get in there and help, help put the fire out and rescue people. And it's easier for the people to get out. Whereas if you have a 40 story building, the fire, the trucks don't go up that high. And so the fire people have to go into the, into the building and go up the stairwells, which is very dangerous. Okay. So the life safety evaluation basically looks at how safe is it for the firefighters to go into a building and how safe is it for the people who live in the building to get out in time so that they don't get hurt. And so this is what the, the engineers who go through your building are evaluating and they have a matrix. The fire department and the task force came up with this matrix and it's called the matrix. It's a spreadsheet with the 17 items and the things they look at is whether or not you have standpipes and under the building code, I think you're supposed to have a standpipe near every stairwell and they have to be in working order. They can't be leaking and, you know, so this is a big fire thing and you have to have smoke detectors. You have to have an alarm system and most of your older buildings, the elevators don't talk to the alarms and the smoke detector and the newer buildings, the elevators are connected to the fire alarm and to the smoke detectors and they're all talking to each other. So when the fire goes, when there's a fire alarm, every the elevators will go down to the bottom floor and the alarms go off, the smoke detectors go off and there are alarms in people's units to get them to leave the space and go to safety. And other things that, you know, that they're looking for is something called vertical openings and if any of you have watched the television fire, I mean the the recreation of the Marco Polo fire, you saw the fire moving up the building and if you looked at that you figure, well, how could how does that happen? And it, you know, when you look at look at a building and if you look at the where the pipes are inside the walls, when the building is built some it depends on when it was built. In the old days they were required to put some kind of sealant around the pipes because they would make a hole so that the pipes could be inserted into the building and go up the building and then they would have to because the holes are bigger than the pipes you put seal around it so that it's so no air gets through. But over the years the seal deteriorates and so now you've got air and the fire department said that at the Marco Polo some of the vertical openings were as big as a person and so what happens when there's a fire you have air moving through these inside the walls and it drives the fire up. And so if you could close those vertical openings then it makes it safer for the building. And another thing that they check, they check the corridor doors, the ones that are on the edge of the you know the ends of the corridor to make sure they're fire rated. And if they're fire rated they're going to have a metal plaque on the door and the inspectors will also look at the unit doors to see if they're fire rated to keep the fire inside. That's why one of the things they teach you when you run from a fire is you leave and you shut the door behind you. Okay, don't leave the doors open because that lets the fire travel. Okay, and one of the things that is inspected when they go into your building is to see whether every unit has got a fire door. And according to the newspaper articles about the Marco Polo, when they went and there were doors, there were doors to Marco Polo that had ventilators or what do you call them, they were open. They had openings in the door where you had where air could come through. And all that does is it feeds the fire. A fire rated door I think is one and almost two inches thick and it's solid. It's solid wood, it's not hollow. Okay, and I think it has to be rated for 30 minutes so that if you shut the door the fire will keep the fire out for whatever time it's rated. And these are the things that are looked at in the fire, the life safety evaluation. And the reason I'm talking about the life safety evaluation is that all the buildings in Honolulu, they're a deadline for completing a life safety evaluation is next year, May 3, 2021. Okay, and that's almost, less than a year away, almost a year. And you may think, oh, I'll have a whole year. But there's 360 buildings in Honolulu. So you don't want to wait till the last minute because these things, you know, you can't get it done in a week. You wait till the last minute. And if everybody else was the last minute, that means that you're not going to make your deadline. You have to have your life safety evaluation completed by May 3 of 2021, which is less than one year from today. And we've talked to the fire department and they've talked to contractors and we know that there are about 150 buildings that have completed their LSE. Now they've completed their LSEs, life safety evaluations, but most of them did not pass. Okay, but that's kind of okay, because they will have another nine years to comply with the statute. And so what you need to know is that you need to get your LSE done by next year, by May 3, 2021, you need to get it done. That tells you what's wrong with your building, okay? And then once you find out what's wrong with your building, your license professional that you used to do the inspection can help you do the fixes, tell you what has to be done, and then you can go out and go to your contractors and get bids and figure out how much money you have to raise. But the thing is, there's a deadline, the deadline is May 3, 2021, less than a year away, your life safety evaluation must be completed, otherwise you're subject to a fine. I've talked to the fire department less than a week ago, and I've been told right now they don't care about COVID. Half the buildings in Honolulu have already completed their LSE unless they see no reason to extend the May 3, 2021 deadline. So don't think that the fire department's going to extend their deadline. And before we take our break, we're going to take our break in about 30 seconds, but next time we do this show, which is about a month from now, June 11th, I'm going to have the fire chief on my show, so that he can answer questions. So if anybody wants to ask questions about compliance and what they can do, and what kinds of things are showing up on the life safety evaluations of 150 buildings who have already completed their examinations. June 11th is a day for you to tune in, send in your questions early, the fire chief is going to be live, and he's willing to answer any questions that you may have about what you have to do, and whether or not you're going to need the extensions, and when we come back from the break, I'll talk about why people will be asking for extensions. Aloha, I'm Kili Akeena, the host of Hawaii Together on the ThinkTech Hawaii Broadcast Network. Hawaii Together deals with the problems we face in Paradise and looks for solutions, whether it's with the economy, the government, or society. We're streamed live on ThinkTech biweekly at 2 p.m. on Mondays. I want to thank you so much for watching. We look forward to seeing you. Again, I'm Kili Akeena. Aloha. Welcome back to Kondo Insider, and my name is Jane Sugimura. I'm your host today, and we're talking about ordinance 1814, the fire safety ordinance that was passed because of the Marco Polo fire, and the ordinance, just to give you a brief summary of what went on in the first section, is the ordinance requires you to have fire sprinklers in your building if you're a high-rise building in Oahu, and it requires you to have the fire sprinklers unless you're exempt or you pass a life safety evaluation. And the deadline for completing your life safety evaluation is May 3, 2021, which is less than a year away. So if you haven't done it, haven't thought about it, I urge you to start contacting an engineer or a structural engineer or an architect, and ask them to help you with the life safety evaluation. And the cost is not that much. I'm being told it runs from $30 to $50 a unit, so that if you have a hundred unit building, it may run about $5,000. So it's not an expensive proposition, but what the life safety evaluation does, it tells you what you have to do to your building to make it safe for the residents who live in the building and safe for the first responders who have to come and help you if there's a fire. And one of the reasons why I'm doing this show today is that in June, June 11th, the next time I'll be doing the show, we're going to have, as a guest, Assistant Fire Chief Socrates Bratacco, and he will answer any questions that you may have about the ordinance, how to comply, and the big issue that I've been getting calls about is extensions. Okay, as I said in the first half of the show, there's 360 buildings in Honolulu that have to get life safety evaluations, and you have to get a passing score, otherwise you have to put in sprinklers, which costs millions and millions of dollars, which nobody wants to do. Okay, so anyway, the deadline for compliance for doing the LSE is less than a year away, so you need to do that. And because more than, almost half of the buildings in Honolulu have completed their LSE, they're not in compliance because they haven't done the repairs, but half of them, about half the buildings have completed their LSEs. Because of that, I talked to the Fire Chief about a week ago, they're not inclined to extend the deadline because of the coronavirus pandemic. The fact that, you know, the state of Hawaii is shut down for two months, it makes no difference. Unless we get really, really close, and you have some compelling circumstances, the Fire Department is not going to give you an extension to complete the LSE. You have to, if you haven't done it, you got to call a contractor, an engineer, and schedule an LSE, so that you've got that done. Now, once you get the LSE completed, and most buildings don't get a passing score, in fact, I only know of one building that got a passing score the first time. Anyway, once you get it, they will tell you what you have to get done. And you know, one building I talked to who completed their LSE, they said, you know, one of the things they dinged us on is we didn't have smoke detectors in the bedrooms. And that's a cheap fix. I mean, the Red Cross will come and install them for free for senior citizens, okay? And you can go down to Costco and buy them in bulk. I think they're a couple of dollars per smoke detector. And so this is a cheap fix. And you cannot pass a life safety evaluation unless every unit in your building has got a smoke detector in every bedroom. And if you have one in the hallway and they're connected in tandem, you get extra points. And so it's now's the time for you to be talking to your residents. And it's going to take everybody in the building, residents, and the board, and your contractors and vendors to pass this life safety evaluation. Because the inspectors are going to have to go in to randomly look at various units. They're going to be checking your doors to see if they're fire rated, your unit doors and your corridor doors to see if they're fire rated. They're going to be checking your standpipes. And they'll be making little holes in the wall to check vertical openings. Okay? So they'll be checking for smoke detectors inside the units in the common elements. And they'll be looking at your fire alarm system. And if you have a fire alarm system that talks to your elevator, that talks to the smoke detectors, then you get plus points. But only the newer buildings have that. So the first deadline is you have to get your LSEs done. And once you get your LSEs done, then you can work with your licensed professional to try to fix everything else so that you get a passing score. Because that's the whole purpose of doing the LSE is to get a passing score so you don't have to put in sprinklers. The problem with the LSE is, and most of the buildings in Oahu are older buildings, and if you have a building like mine where the fire alarm system doesn't talk to the elevator, it doesn't talk to the smoke detectors, then we may, you know, you're in a situation where one of the fixes might be to upgrade your fire alarm system. So it talks to your elevator, it talks to the smoke detectors. But, you know, those, that kind of a fix is not cheap. It's almost a million dollars for that. And so maybe before this COVID happened, before this pandemic happened, maybe you were on a plan to increase your maintenance fees, maybe 1%, 2% every year, like my building. We were, we did 9% this year and we were going to do 10% this coming year. We're not going to do 10% because people lost their jobs. People lost their jobs. And so there's no way we're going to be able to do 10% this year. We're going to have to go back and maybe reduce the maintenance fees for 2021 and 2022. And I'm sure my building is not the only one where people lost their jobs and lost their income. And so now, even if, you know, before the pandemic happened, you know, we were on a roll to maybe have the money to make these repairs, now it's not going to happen. And we don't know how long it's going to happen. And that's what I talked to the fire department about. So yes, we have to get our LSEs done by next year. And then once we have that done, we have another six years to comply, which means we have to, we have that time to do all the repairs. And you may say, oh, well, six years, we can do it in six years. But what if you have to raise a million dollars? And you're just coming out of the pandemic where maybe 20%, 30% of your residents or unit owners lost their jobs. You're not going to be able to raise maintenance fees for a while. Okay, so, you know, now you got to go slowly. So, you know, this is what we're going to be talking about in the next show. What kind of things do you have to show as a association to the fire department if you want the extension for compliance? You have to pass the LSE by next year, and then you have six more years to comply, do the repairs. And if it means upgrading your fire alarm systems, fixing your standpipes, fixing your vertical openings, those things, you know, you might, you know, for one thing, you've got 360 buildings you're competing with. You've got contractors and engineers and architects who are all going to be working on LSE repairs. And so, you cannot wait until the last minute because, you know, these contractors are going to be busy working on other buildings. And you have to figure out how you're going to raise the money to pay for these repairs. And right now, the fire department says, well, you know, why don't we wait and see and see what the economy does, and we'll see what the associations are going to do. And so, you know, it's a wait and see because nobody knows how quickly we're going to recover from the pandemic, how quickly the jobs will come back, how quickly people will be able to go back to work, and how quickly the associations, you know, can be in a position to start, you know, raising maintenance fees to pay for the repairs that are going to, you know, that are required to keep this building safe and maintained. And we have, you know, working against us, this is ordinance with these deadlines in it. We have a 10-year deadline to make sure that the common elements are in compliance with the code. And so, you know, these are all concerns, and we don't have any answers as to how we're going to be able to address them. So I urge all of you who are listening today who haven't done their LSEs, or even if you've done your LSEs, but you haven't done the repairs so that you're in compliance to sit down with your board and your neighbors and figure out, you know, what types of issues is your association facing. And join us for the June 11th show with the fire chief. And if you can send in your questions early, you know, we can, I will send them to the chief and so that he can be prepared to address them. And I know from talking to the people who have called me, the big issue is, well, what if we need an extension? And I tell them, well, you know, with the fire department, you know, they're not going to give you an extension just because you ask, they're going to say, well, what have you done? And, you know, number one, you've got to complete the fire safety evaluation. And I would say, once you get the fire safety evaluation, you, and if they say, okay, you got to put smoke detectors in every unit, you got to replace half your doors because they're not fire rated, and you got to fix your standpipes, and you make a list, and then you go out and you get bids from contractors so that you know what the costs of these repairs are. And then you sit down with your board and maybe a reserve specialist, and you figure out how you're going to raise this money. So that when you go to the fire department, you have a plan. Because if you don't have a plan, they're not going to give you an extension. And these deadlines are set in stone, they are in the ordinance, and I'm pretty sure that the city is going to do enforcement. But, you know, the good thing is, is that the fire department has indicated that they have always said they would be reasonable, they understand the issue of raising money from the residents to pay for the repairs, and especially in view now of this pandemic and the fact that many, many, many people have lost their jobs. And that's going to affect the condominium's ability to raise funds to do these repairs. So anyway, this is just a preliminary show as to what we're going to be talking about on June 11 with the fire chief. But I wanted to, you know, talk to all of you about the issues that are out there so that you can join us on June 11 with the fire chief and come with your questions and your concerns. And I hope that you will tune in and join us for that program. And thank you for joining us today.