Fire Chief: Apartment Fire was Biggest in Over 40 Years, Offered Important Safety Reminders

This month's apartment complex offered a number of life-saving lessons for the community, said Albany's fire chief, Marc McGinn.

Knowing your surroundings, having an exit strategy, good housekeeping and closing doors on a fire are prevention tips everyone needs to be prepared with in case of an emergency, he said.

McGinn said the fire, on March 12, was the biggest with impact the city has seen for more than four decades; the last fatal fire took place in 1987 when a woman in a single family home fell asleep in bed smoking, and died as a result.

Officials said moving boxes placed too close to a heater caught fire on March 12, causing about $400,000 in damage and taking the life of 80-year-old Nicole Paschetta, who lived in the unit above the apartment where the fire started.

McGinn said, had a number of different decisions been made that day, there likely could have been a different outcome March 12.

"Closing doors on fires can save lives," he said. "If there is a fire in your unit, and you must leave the premises, close the door. It confires the fire and starves it of oxygen. Closing the door behind you is the most important thing."

A family fleeing the fire at Evelyn Gardens left the door open, which allowed the fire to spread from the second to the third floor, and engulf two hallways, said McGinn. 

At least one other resident of the apartment complex passed the open door, saw the fire inside, and failed to close it, he added. 

"The most important thing you can ever remember about a fire, if it's in your room, close that door," McGinn said. "Every door that you can close, you will confine that fire. Just by closing the door, it would have bought us 10 minutes. We need to get the message out to apartment owners about this."

McGinn said the will be sending letters to apartment owners about closing doors, and other steps to take in case of fires, and is working with to ensure that every unit in the large complex has self-closing doors.

He said residents who live in an apartment complex need to take special care, because of their proximity to neighbors. 

"It's basically communal living," he said. "How one person lives affects the others. In a single family home, there's more separation between owners. The threat of fire is much less."

McGinn said residents should first take note of whether their building is fully sprinklered; he said most in the city are not, because sprinklers were not required when they were built decades ago. 

Residents should make sure to have a fire extinguisher inside their home, and not rely on an extinguisher at the end of the hallway, which may be hard to reach if fire breaks out. By law, an apartment complex needs to have an extinguisher within 75 feet of each unit, essentially one per floor. 

A general rule of thumb is that, if a fire is smaller than you are, try to put it out with an extinguisher. If it's not, fleeing and alerting professionals, as well as neighbors, is the right option.

Know your surroundings and plan an escape route in case of an emergency; he said the floor you live on will play a role in your escape plan, and that it's important to be sure you can reach the ground from a window if access to the front door is cut off.

"Know your exits," McGinn said, both at home and when you travel. "How well will you know the area when it's pitch black?"

Good housekeeping, and keeping all combustibles at least three feet away from heat sources, can prevent fires, too, he said.

"Know what the fire hazards are," McGinn said. "Wall furnaces, kitchen stoves, electrical outlets. Fixed or portable heaters. All those pose a threat. You can have electrical fires, kitchen fires and fires from any heating source."

Don't overload electrical outlets with too many plugs. Use power strips and surge protectors.

Having an early-warning system in place, , is vital as well, said McGinn. Every unit must have smoke alarms in each living area: the living room, the bedroom and possibly the hallway.

"Redundancy is our friend," said McGinn. "If something happens, you want it to be backed up by something else and something else and something else. People have to get it into their mind, if there's a fire, where would I go and what would I do? What would my actions be? You have to role play it."

If you hear an alarm, he said, assume it's the real thing. One resident heard an alarm on March 12, got out of bed, looked down the hallway and saw nothing, and went back to bed, said McGinn. 

"Five minutes later, they smelled smoke, got up and left," he said. "Fire grows by a factor of five every minute. You always must treat an alarm like there's a fire underway."

If you do leave, be sure to call 911 and, if in an apartment complex, make sure to pull the manual "pull station" to alert others in the building. 

"A number of people just ignored it. We hear so many alarms that we all become immune to it," McGinn said. "Don't just sit back. That alarm is going on for some reason. Go research it. Get out of your unit and be prepared to leave. You must always think of the worst."

McGinn said fire departments need to do a much better job getting out the message of prevention. Though America has more firefighters per thousand people than other nations, there's much less emphasis on community education about how people can avoid fire in the first place, he said. 

"We failed to get those messages out," he said. "We are all culpable in this situation. Everybody has to be trained on what to do if there is a fire."

Do you feel prepared for an emergency? Tell us in the comments.

Everybody makes mistakes ... ! If there's something in this article you think should be corrected, or if something else is amiss, give editor Emilie Raguso a ring at 510-459-8325 or shoot her an e-mail at emilier@patch.com.

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