Crackdown On Illegal Housing Urged

Captain Kenny Patterson of Volunteer Hose Co. 2, West Haverstraw, went into a burning house on Jan. 14 of this year to see if there was still someone inside, but instead found the building had been illegally converted into single-room occupancies.

While inspecting one of the 10x10 rooms, Patterson’s air pack alarm went off, signaling he was running out of oxygen. He turned to where he thought the door was and saw the fire had worsened, and he couldn’t find the door. He continued looking for a door, a window, a way out, and couldn’t find one as the condition inside the house continued to get worse. With his air pack completely out, Patterson ripped off his mask and yelled into his radio “MAYDAY, MAYDAY,” the call signaling that a firefighter is down and needs help.

Fellow volunteer West Haverstraw firefighter , a former West Haverstraw fire chief, was also conducting a search of the building at that time. He went to second floor and reached a room he couldn’t see in due to thick smock. He used a Thermal Imaging Camera to try and find Patterson in the room via the down firefighter’s body heat, which he did. Shortly after, Patterson went unconscious while Kolesar carried him downstairs, where he was met by two other firefighters, who assisted Kolsar in carrying Patterson’s limp body out of the house. They were met by members of the Haverstraw and Spring Hill Volunteer Emergency Medical Services and Rockland Paramedics, who gave Patterson oxygen and transported him to the hospital. Patterson was treated for high carbon monoxide levels at Nyack Hospital and Westchester Medical Center, and was able to recover at his home.

Now, Rockland County and New York state are teaming with the Rockland County Fire Code Task Force to try and crack down on building code violations like seen in the building of the Jan. 14 fire.

“That fire was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said John Kryger, a Rockland Deputy Fire Coordinator as well as a volunteer firefighters. “We came very close to losing a firefighter. Enough is enough. One of us is going to die.”

On Tuesday, a seminar was held at the Rockland County Fire Training Center in Pomona where Rockland County Executive C. Scott Vanderhoef, Director of the County’s Office of Fire and Emergency Services Gordon Wren Jr., Kryger, West Haverstraw Fire Chief George Zayas, Rockland County Volunteer Firefighters Association President Frank Voce and members of the New York Department of State Division of Code Enforcement and Administration spoke with town supervisors, village mayors, municipal code enforcement officials and emergency service liaisons about enhancing the county’s code enforcement efforts.

“In my [twenty-plus years] of fighting fire, I’ve never experienced mayhem like that,” Kryger said. “Panic sets in. I don’t care how many years you have on the job, in a situation like that panic sets in. When carbon monoxide takes over, it attacks your brian. Life doesn’t flash before you in two seconds, everything slows down. Everything is in slow motion.”

Wren said that some of the county building inspectors are great, but others are slacking, and that’s made for some dangerous situations for the volunteer firefighters. But he also said it’s not just a problem in areas people might expect and he recently found two illegal rooming setups in million dollar homes.

“The volunteer fire service is frustrated with the lack on enforcement on these code violations,” Wren said. “It makes their job even more dangerous. You’re going into a house on fire, it’s filled with smoke, you could to walk around and boom! you walk into a wall that isn’t supposed to be there that you can’t see because of the smoke.”

Wren said a lot of cases get thrown out for various reasons, or the people who own the houses go into hiding and are hard to find. He also said the most typical action against that type of violation is a $250 fine.

“There was this single-family home we discovered had been converted 14 cubicles where all single men were living,” Wren said. “The going rate to stay there was $125 a week, so a $250 fine isn’t really hurting the person who is running a house like that.”

Zayas walked the crowd through some other illegal home setups volunteer firefighters have run into recently. One came just last week on Railroad Ave. in West Haverstraw, when the owners of the house told firefighters to not go in the basement because nothing was done, raising some suspicion. The owner then said there was a TV and mattress down there for family who come to stay over. When the firefighters went down there, they discovered an entire apartment, with two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, no windows and no way out of the house without having to go upstairs.

“This has to come from the upper echelon,” he said. “We have to hammer them, possible charge them criminally.”

Steve Rocklin, the assistant director for regional services for the Division of Code Enforcement and Administration, said that for violations of code, people can be fined up to $1,000 a day or even put them in county jail for up to a year.

“That has to be done a county level,” he said.

Ron Piester, the director of the Department of State’s Division of Code Enforcement and Administration, and Dan Nichols, the Division of Code and Administration’s fire protection engineer, spoke about state building codes and ways to enforce them.

Wren said Rockland is going to work with the state trying to enforce these codes more strictly, whether it’s trying to increase the fine for them or just pushing harder for the cases to not get continually adjourned. Kryger agreed, saying it was time for them to get “aggressive” about punishing those that run and operate illegal residencies.

“We’re not afraid to speak out, get people angry,” he said. “We’re volunteers. They can’t fire us.”