ATLANTA -- The Winecoff Hotel fire in Atlanta, the deadliest hotel fire in U.S. history, killed 119 people 70 years ago this week and led to new and lasting fire safety standards for hotels and other public buildings.
Now investigators are looking into violations of those standards in Oakland, Calif., where 36 people perished at a Dec. 2 concert inside the Ghost Ship warehouse.
"I bet they sweep their city and say 'no more of this,'" said Allen Goodwin, who co-authored the book The Winecoff Fire: The Untold Story of America's Deadliest Hotel Fire.
"It moves it up the priority scale when lives are lost, and that's exactly what happened with the Winecoff fire on a global basis," Goodwin said.
After the Oakland fire, area officials say they're looking to strengthen regulations for smoke alarms and exits. New regulations also are being considered, such as enhanced fire inspections and monitoring illegal events, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said in a statement this week.
Nationally, the Oakland fire is a reminder that fire threats continue to change, partly because of social media, and that learning from the blazes can lead to stronger fire safety standards, National Fire Protection Association President Jim Pauley said in a statement.
"In Oakland, the changing occupancy of that building may have only been known to those who lived or worked there, not to the fire service or other officials," he said. "This is likely a scenario happening in other places around the country. The ability to attract large numbers of people to an unknown venue is easy through new ways of social media. Couple that with the rate of speed, things can go from bad to worse when there are blocked or not enough exits and lots of combustibles."
A firefighter with knowledge of the situation said the illegally occupied warehouse did not appear in a database fire inspectors use to schedule inspections and may never have been checked for fire hazards.
Oakland fire officials are supposed to annually inspect commercial buildings for fire safety, with only single-family homes and duplexes exempted, according to a city website. Officials typically pull addresses from a database to request the yearly checks, said the firefighter Thursday, who spoke only on condition of anonymity.
The Fire Department and Schaaf each said Thursday that they could not yet say when a fire inspector examined the warehouse.
Fire Department spokesman Rebecca Kozak said Thursday that she didn't know whether the warehouse's address was in the database of buildings to be checked.
Kozak said she was processing 40 to 50 public records requests from news media and that confusion over the warehouse's address is slowing the process.
Erica Terry Derryck, Schaaf's spokesman, said the mayor's office was putting together "what contact all city agencies have had with this property."
At a press conference Wednesday night, Schaaf said she had requested the information from the Fire Department but had not yet received it. It was also disclosed that building department inspectors had not set foot in the warehouse since at least 1986.
Jon Narva, with the National Association of State Fire Marshals, said cities generally decide for themselves how frequently to conduct inspections, and some places do use line firefighters to help with inspections.
The Dec. 7, 1946, Atlanta inferno came near the end of a dreadful year for hotel fires. Months earlier, 61 people were killed in a Chicago hotel fire and 19 others perished in a hotel blaze in Dubuque, Iowa.
The burning hotels were huge news, Goodwin said.
Cities across the nation began strengthening their fire codes after the Winecoff fire, Goodwin said, and President Harry S. Truman called for a national convention to find ways to prevent more deaths.
"The great hotel fires of last year again showed that we cannot afford to entrust our citizens' lives to unsafe buildings," Truman said in his opening address to the President's Conference on Fire Prevention in Washington, D.C., in 1947, according to documents from the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum in Missouri.
The conference program urged attendees to "aggressively support this national war against the growing menace of fire."
The Winecoff fire led to new building codes requiring multiple fire exits. The Winecoff had only one staircase near the center of the building, which acted as a chimney to loft smoke and fire into the hotel's upper floors, according to documents from the Atlanta History Center.
Self-closing "fire doors" also came about after the Winecoff fire, which fed on air that was released when guests opened doors and transoms.
Information for this article was contributed by Ellen Knickmeyer, Paul Elias, Sudhin Thanawala, Terry Chea and Tim Reiterman of The Associated Press.
A Section on 12/10/2016