For Needy Residents, A Lifeline To Fire Safety

County Funds Sprinklers For Small Group Homes

Beginning this fall, as many as 40 group homes across Montgomery County will be refurbished with county-financed fire sprinkler systems, as officials seek to make them safe without displacing residents who may have nowhere else to go.

The new program, for group homes with five or fewer beds, will help protect some of the county's most vulnerable residents, officials said, including the elderly, developmentally disabled, chronically mentally ill and children.

It will be funded by a $250,000 special appropriation from the county budget approved in late July by the County Council.

"Everyone agreed that it was a serious problem, and it had to be addressed," said council member Phil Andrews (D-Gaithersburg-Rockville), who leads the council's Public Safety Committee, which had been working on the issue for a year.

Fire inspectors have begun working with county Department of Health and Human Services officials to identify which homes will have the highest priority. Andrews said he hopes "a number of them, if not all of them, will be completed by the end of the year."

The idea to finance the automatic fire sprinkler systems -- expected to cost $6,000 to $10,000 per home -- came after fire inspectors issued citations to about 90 of the 285 group homes they inspected, or almost one in three, Assistant Fire Chief Michael A. Donahue said.

Under county code, the homes must have either sprinkler systems or bedroom windows large enough for a firefighter to climb through and make a rescue: 5.7 square feet for upper levels and five square feet for the ground level.

"Certainly if there was a fire, there would be an issue" otherwise, Donahue said.

About 50 percent of the group homes cited for safety have already made the improvements needed to make them safe, Donahue said. But others, many of them nonprofit organizations that serve clients receiving public benefits, lacked the resources or the landlord's help, he said.

This was especially true in homes for the developmentally disabled, some of them rental properties, in older areas of Rockville, Gaithersburg, Wheaton and Silver Spring.

"It would have meant a hardship for us," said Alan Lovell, chief executive of CHI Centers, a nonprofit organization that operates 25 group homes in Montgomery County.

Lovell said he does not think his clients are in danger as they await the installation of sprinklers.