February 19, 2009
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ehhh…. what ???
nytimes article. so there’s a fire in an apartment that has illegal partition walls and two responding firefighters died jumping out of that apartment’s windows because “illegal partitions in two of the apartments left them disoriented and forced them to jump to their deaths.” a jury found the landlord guilty of criminally negligent homicide, i.e. the landlord should have known the illegal partitions endangered people’s lives.
are these particularly malevolent partitions? do they have retractable, spring-loaded iron spikes? do they dissolve into millions of droplets of corrosive acid? do they have feet and move round trying to block people’s exits?
it’s pretty terrible that these firemen died, but to say that the landlord — who by the way didn’t even erect the partitions — should have known that partitions would “disorient” firemen in case of fire seems crazy unreasonable to me. i don’t know the particulars of this case, so i can’t say for sure but on the surface this seems like total bullshit. is it just me? am i not getting something here?
why should a fireman be disoriented by the presence of a wall? those wacky, unpredictable walls. aren’t firemen trained to feel around in the dark to search closets and around furniture? do they have blueprints of every apartment memorized before they enter? i find that unlikely, but, for the sake of argument, if they did memorize the apartment layout, should an unexpected wall really be faulted as the culprit in their deaths? the wall as opposed to…. say…. the unpredictable, raging, burning fucking fire???
what if you happen to be cleaning your storage room one day and you stack rows of boxes filled with old magazines around your apartment. you put off throwing them out for a few months so they effectively become pieces of furniture around your place. or say… new walls. “partitions”, if you will. is it your fault if a fire breaks out and the firemen start tripping and falling over your unexpected rows of boxes? you could be called a slob, but “criminally negligent”? remember criminally negligent = jail time. should we all live in preparation of firemen walking through our homes in the dark? perhaps we should start legislating the size and precise layout of furniture allowed in our own homes to maintain open and predictable lanes for the firemen?
or maybe we should just acknowledge that fires are incredibly unpredictable, are hard to to fight, are nearly impossible to navigate through, and sometimes kill people, including firemen. it sucks that they died, but just because they died does not necessarily mean that someone needs to be punished.
Comments (4)
i concur
just to be devil’s advocate. What if someone was reading the blueprint out to the firefighters by radio and they said, pass through 3 rooms and turn left. What if the firefighters turned incorrectly because the “illegal partition” created a room that wasn’t on the original blueprint. From then on, any instructions given to the firefighters could have caused them “disorientation”.
I agree that its not the landlords fault (especially since he didn’t build the partition and was unaware of it), but lives were lost because of an illegally placed partition. And the owner of such illegal partition is the landlord. Possession will always get ya.
have you ever been to a tiny nyc with illegal walls? if you had, you might understand. it’s very typical up here for people to convert 1 bedrooms into 2 brs (or a studio into a 1br) by putting up temporary walls. if done correctly, you usually can’t even tell that they’re fake walls. but done haphazardly, or if you put up too many in an already tight, awkwardly shaped space (ie trying to force more rooms than really possible), you can end up with bizarrely shaped “rooms” with 8+ walls, strange corners and nooks and stuff. i can easily see how someone could get disoriented, especially if it’s dark and smoky. depending on the egregiousness, landlords who knowingly let tenants do that should be punished. i don’t think it’s much different than not clearly marking exit stairwells in your building, blocking exits, or any other fire code violation. just saying – there’s a different pov.
a: these guys broke the rules. they carved up his building to make mo money and now they got mo problems. b: think about it from a fireman’s point of view, ur in a burning building with a map in your head that doesn’t match the location your in, u think ur hitting up 2 bedroom units and now there are a million studios and all these doors and hallways are popping up all over the place….did i mention everything is on fire?