Nursing home industry unconcerned about fire safety
By MIKE HENDRICKS
The Kansas City Star
When it came to writing new rules to keep nursing home residents from dying in a fire, whose advice would you follow?
The state fire marshal? Or the nursing room industry?
You’d go with the expert, if you had any sense. Yet a panel of Missouri legislators recently scrapped Missouri Fire Marshal Randy Cole’s recommendations that smoke detectors be installed in the rooms of most nursing and care facilities.
By a vote of 9-0, the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules killed the proposed rule, despite Cole’s contention that smoke detectors would save more lives than requiring only sprinkler heads.
Reason: The nursing home industry complained that the rule went beyond a new fire safety law that doesn’t specifically require smoke detectors in individual bedrooms. And installing them would cost the average care center $25,000 to $35,000, or perhaps as much as $150,000 in the worst case.
When I reached Cole at his office Friday morning, more than a week after the ruling, he was still plenty steamed.
“Obviously, I’m disappointed,” he said. “If we’re going to err, we’re going to err on the side of safety.”
Hard to disagree with that, and the debate is not entirely over. Cole is doing his best to influence the final wording of the regulations that the rules committee ordered rewritten by the Department of Health and Senior Services.
As he interprets a law passed by the legislature in 2007, each nursing home or care facility bedroom at a minimum must have a sprinkler head or a smoke detector, and we’re talking about the kind of detectors that are wired into the main electrical system and have a battery backup.
Then again, he’s not even sure whether that will fly, owing to the objections of the industry, which maintains that most nursing homes already have adequate sprinkler and fire alarm systems.
“The fire marshal came into the process late and created his own rules without statutory authority,” Jon Dolan, head of the Missouri Health Care Association, was quoted as saying by The Associated Press.
I left a message for Dolan with the phone receptionist, who said her boss was on his way to the association’s annual convention in Branson. As of Sunday, he hadn’t called back.
You might remember the impetus for the new rules. A 2006 fire killed 10 residents and one employee of an Anderson, Mo., group home for the mentally impaired.
The facility had no sprinkler system, as one wasn’t required when it was built. Gov. Matt Blunt pushed for tougher requirements, and the legislature did just that by requiring sprinkler and complete fire alarm systems in most care facilities.
One problem. When it came to writing detailed rules, the fire marshal’s office and the nursing home industry disagreed over what the Missouri General Assembly meant by a complete fire alarm system.
There was no mention in the law of having smoke detectors in every resident’s room. A sprinkler system with smoke alarms in corridors and other common areas meets federal requirements.
“But that’s just a minimum code,” Cole told me.
For now, though, the nursing home regulators are siding with the industry, and Cole is the odd man out.
You might be wondering, what’s the big deal? After all, sprinkler systems are designed to put out fires, right?
I asked him the same question, and as he reminded me, there’s a big difference between putting out a fire and saving someone’s life.
By the time the fire is hot enough to trigger a sprinkler system — anywhere from 135 to 165 degrees — a whole room could be filled by smoke.
Smoke that might not reach a hallway smoke detector, if a door is closed, until after a bedridden nursing home resident is already dead or dying of smoke inhalation.
Still, what does he know? He’s just the fire marshal.
To reach Mike Hendricks, call 816-234-7708 or send e-mail to mhendricks@kcstar.com.
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