To the Editor:
While reading the recent column by Anya Kleinman ’30 and Evan Tao ’27 calling for the reform of Rhode Island fire safety codes, I felt it necessary to share my personal experience with the safety codes in question.
I have the unlucky distinction of having been in three house fires in my life. In 1957, when I was six years old, my home caught fire. My father died and my sister was badly burned. My sister’s room was at the top of the inside stairway in our house, and as the fire raced up the stairway, my father and sister were trapped inside her room.
Rousing me out of my sleep sometime in the after midnight hours, my mother was able to take me onto an outside back porch on the second floor. From the second-floor porch, we were able to descend the exterior stairway down to ground level. Had there been only a single stairway, my mother and I would have also been trapped when the fire engulfed the interior stairway.
The safety fire regulations are not for the benefit of firefighters — they are for the benefit of the general public. Do not condemn your fellow citizens who are housing insecure to risking their lives for the sake of greater production of sub-standard units. Residential fire building codes saved my life and the lives of numerous others. To take them away would cost lives.
James E. Scanlan P’17 P’18 can be reached at jescanlan@verizon.net. Please send responses to this letter to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
