Independence apartments that burned in fatal fire lacked a key safety feature. Why?
While modern building standards dictate that living spaces like the Independence apartment building that burned in January — killing a family of four and displacing a swath of residents — have automatic sprinklers, that structure was not required to have them, Independence city officials said.
The Jan. 22 blaze began as a resident of an upper-level apartment was cooking in a kitchen, left and returned when they heard a smoke alarm, officials said. The resident attempted to extinguish the fire and then ran from their unit, leaving their door open. The fire spread throughout the building, and a family of four who lived in a unit next to the one where the fire started was killed in the blaze.
DeVante McShann, 32; Katelyn McShann, 28; Bella Edwards, 8; and Aaliyah McShann, 3, all died in the fire. Memorial services for the family took place Saturday.
As is the case in many home fires, residents of the Independence Ridge building that went up in flames did not have the benefit of a sprinkler system, a key safety feature experts see as a valuable tool in containing fires before they spread.
City officials said the complex would have been required to add safeguards like sprinklers if larger updates had been made at the property. The site had passed its most recent inspection under the city’s rental unit review program, and overall, the building met code and did not have any outstanding issues the city was aware of, city of Independence spokeswoman Rebecca Gannon told The Star in an email.
“Since the apartments were built in 1980, no sprinklers were required,” she said. “Around 2004, sprinklers were legislated, but Missouri did not require that buildings be retrofitted with sprinklers.”
While individual units in the building did have smoke alarms, the structure also did not have an interconnected alarm system or warning strobe lights when it was built and those features weren’t required to be added, Gannon said. Had the building been remodeled, it would have gone through the city’s permitting process and those safety features would have been required, she said.
“When the building was built, sprinklers, alarms, strobes were not required - therefore the building was grandfathered in,” she said.
Representatives for the complex did not respond to a message seeking comment.
Independence Ridge passed inspection through the city’s Rental Ready program, which is designed to ensure rental units around the city meet a list of basic health and safety standards, in April 2023, according to city records. An inspector looked at 36 units and all passed for standards like exposed electrical wires, smoke detectors and sanitary drainage systems, according to a screenshot of the city’s inspection portal that was provided to The Star.
A day before the fire, Independence expanded the program after buildings that had passed inspections under the old guidelines gained publicity for substandard and dangerous living conditions. The list of guidelines Independence rental sites will have to meet in order to pass the inspection will grow from nine to 16 starting May 1.
But despite the apartment building being considered up-to-code and having passed city inspections, it — like many older, unrenovated buildings — still lacked key fire prevention and awareness features, including sprinklers, that might have saved lives, because it was grandfathered out of the requirements to install them.
Deadly fires
Between 2017 and 2019, cooking was the leading cause of home fires and home fire injuries and was responsible for about half of all residential building fires across the country, according to the U.S. Fire Administration.
An average of 187,600 cooking fires were reported each year, and those fires caused 165 deaths, 3,325 injuries and $444 million in property loss during that period. The leading contributing factor — in 37% of cases — was unattended equipment, the administration said.
Fire experts see sprinkler systems as a key tool in fighting those fires.
“It’s the ultimate life-safety feature in many ways,” said Daniel Madrzykowski, senior research director at the Fire Safety Research Institute.
“If the fire starts in a room that you’re not in and for whatever reason you can’t get out, certainly that buys time for the fire department to get there and get you. Keep in mind that depending on the response time in your jurisdiction, it could be three minutes, it could be five minutes, it could be six minutes. That’s pretty valuable time.”
From 2017 to 2021, civilian death and injury rates in home fires in which sprinklers were present were 89% and 31% lower, respectively, than in home fires that didn’t have such systems, according to a 2024 report from the National Fire Protection Association. Sprinklers were present in just 8% of home fires during that period.
When sprinklers were present, fires were contained to the object or room where the fire began 96% of the time, compared to 72% in homes that didn’t have those systems, the report said.
Madrzykowski said sprinklers are becoming more common in “garden-style” apartments like Independence Ridge, and in other multi-family housing.
“In many parts of the country and newer building codes, with multi-family residences like this there’s requirements for automatic residential sprinklers,” he said. “They’re really incredibly effective because they go beyond warning people and actually go to mitigating the hazard. Sprinklers are wonderful.”
The deadly Independence blaze extended into a common attic that had no firewalls preventing its spread and reached out into open stairwells made of wood and filled with oxygen, officials said after the fire.
Open attics like the one in the building that burned are very common, Madrzykowski said, as are open stairwells.
Enclosing stairwells could allow smoke to build up faster in those areas, but on the other hand, their current state allows for an unlimited supply of fresh air — fuel for a fire, he said. One way to make stairwells safer is to construct them of noncombustible materials like brick or concrete, he said.
“If you have an open facility that may have wood paneling or vinyl over some kind of foam plastic or something like that, that’s not very fire resistant,” he said.
Fire officials emphasize the importance of closing doors at night or in case of a fire in a home. Doing so creates an extra barrier that could slow the spread of a fire, even by a few seconds.
“By closing that door, that limits the amount of air that a fire can get and will slow down the fire growth, … to make it a more tractable situation or a situation where the fire department’s got a better chance in terms of saving life and saving property,” Madrzykowski said.
What’s next?
Under the city’s expanded Rental Ready program, rental sites must now meet a longer list of requirements and more units must be inspected before they can gain approval. Those requirements include things like carbon monoxide and smoke alarms, properly maintained electrical systems, window fall protections, hot and cold running water and secured drywall, among other items.
Units must be inspected every two years or when tenants change over, whichever occurs later. Sites with more than four units must have 50% of the total units inspected.
Gannon, the Independence spokeswoman, said property owners were sent a letter from the city requesting a plan for the burned-out building, which now sits boarded up behind a fence. The city will then review a proposed plan for the site and determine if it would be allowed under code.
“The city steps in when it is determined that the building is either not being dealt with correctly in a timely manner, or if there is a danger of imminent collapse or a danger to the public in general,” she said. “In this case, the building has been secured, so we will await the engineer’s evaluation before proceeding.”
The Star’s Noelle Alviz-Gransee contributed reporting to this story.
