Today's News & Record reported, Fire in Greensboro destroys eight apartments. Greensboro is very lucky a lot of people weren't destroyed as well.
In the photograph below, taken from the News & Record, if you look at the top left you'll notice a wall coming up through the roof of that apartment building. That, my friends, is a firewall, designed to stop fires from spreading from one apartment to the next. The problem is: there are no less than 8 apartments, perhaps more, per each firewall.
Some almost new apartment buildings in Greensboro have no firewalls what-so-ever. The fire and building codes allow this based on beefed-up sprinklers and alarms but should a fire be started on the outside wall of a building and work its way up to the roof as might happen when arson is the cause, the lack of firewalls would allow the fire to trap everyone inside the burning building.
Of course, it's cheaper to build apartment buildings with fewer or no fire walls and I guess as long as Roy Carroll and TREBIC remain the largest political force in the Piedmont Triad and the largest campaign contributors to the Greensboro City Council and Guilford County Commissioners that will never change.
That is, until a really big fire claims a whole bunch of lives. Then we'll see the typical knee jerk kind of governance we're used to seeing.
