Connecticut Post columnist MariAn Gail Brown
Published: 11:42 p.m., Saturday, March 13, 2010
It's Tiana Black's fault. And hers alone that she and her three young children died in a fire last November that tore through their apartment at the P.T. Barnum public housing complex.
Black had an elevated blood-alcohol level that "likely" factored into her inability to escape, the state Department of Public Safety states in its much-awaited probe of the late-night blaze that claimed the lives of the 22-year-old mother, her twin 4-year old daughters and 5-year-old son. Black had a bottle of Bacardi rum sitting on her dining room floor, alcohol-spiked juice in the kitchen, the investigators observe, and her fire alarm wailed for at least 11 minutes before anybody summoned 911 for help.
How impaired Black might have been is unknown because city officials redacted that medical information. But it doesn't matter whether Black had kicked back one rum or enough to be three times the legal drinking limit for driving. She wasn't behind the wheel of a car. She was at home. There is nothing illegal about an adult over the age of 21 drinking at home. They write that her alcohol consumption "would likely have impaired her ability to respond appropriately to the initial alarm and to the fire itself."
That's quite the convenient conclusion. Blame the victim. She can't rise from the grave and defend herself. It makes everyone's job so much easier: from the Bridgeport Housing Authority to the City of Bridgeport. Community activists and tenants have bashed P.T. Barnum as being a fire trap, having only a single exit door, lacking fire escapes, sprinklers and sensitive enough photo-electric smoke detectors like the ones required in all Massachusetts and Vermont homes.
Let's say the fire is Black's fault. If that's the case, does anyone have to do anything to make fire safety improvements at P.T. Barnum or any other public housing complex? Blaming Black keeps us from giving meaningful thought to the design flaws in this public housing complex. Consider whether it's acceptable to build a three-story college dorm outfitted like this place. Fire sprinklers weren't required when P.T. Barnum was built.
Keep in mind that retrofitting a 320-unit housing complex with sprinklers costs millions. Portable emergency fire ladders, the kind you can toss out a window and climb two or three stories to safety, aren't expensive, but they're not cheap either. But isn't this an investment worth making? Lives hang in the balance. All of the smoke detectors in Black's apartment were working that fateful night. Yet none of her neighbors picked up a phone to summon the fire department even after hearing Black's smoke alarms for at least 11 minutes. That's because they've long become blase about how often these devices trip off when there is no fire.
Two weeks after the fire, firefighters discovered that 150 smoke detectors were either intentionally disabled or didn't work, Bridgeport Authority Executive Director Nicholas Calace says, and when they returned later in December another 44 were disabled.
So we can understand why the housing authority might scoff at the idea of installing photoelectric smoke detectors, the kind Boston's Deputy Fire Chief Joseph Fleming, pushed Massachusetts to require. In the case of a smoldering fire, a photoelectric smoke detector is capable of detecting a fire up to half an hour sooner than an ionic smoke detector, the kind the housing authority and most homeowners use.
Still, we can understand why a public housing complex might resist installing something more expensive if tenants are disabling what's already there.
Plenty of folks have been waiting for the state Department of Public Safety's report on the blaze, anticipating that it might be a catalyst for improvements to the 60-year-old P.T. Barnum apartments. In the aftermath of the blaze, Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch and fire officials visited the complex, spoke to tenants about the need to come up with a practical plan for how to get out of their apartments in the event of fire. And housing authority brass say they are putting together a video that tenants will be required to view annually to better learn how to protect themselves.
As for structural improvements, Calace says, the Housing Authority is "still weighing its options. We talk about doing a lot of different things," he says, "but it all boils down to educating our tenants. That needs to be done first."
Carmen Lopez, a retired Superior Court judge, is a member of the Shadow Task Force, a residents' group formed to pressure city officials to make safety upgrades.
"There've been no meaningful steps taken to make the place any safer. Nobody's talking about how the single doors people have get stuck and you can't get out," she said. "When I look at this report, I definitely see a `blame-the-victim' theme. There's no mention in it of any of the design flaws for getting to safety if you can't get out the front and only door. Mostly, what I see in this report is malign the dead."
Connecticut Post columnist MariAn Gail Brown can be reached at 203-330-6288 or mgbrown@ctpost.com.
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