A Vancouver fire captain has testified at a B.C. coroner’s inquest that the downtown SRO razed by a fatal fire more than a year ago had a history of non-compliance with safety rules.
Cliff Lee, who works in fire prevention and urban compliance for Vancouver Fire Rescue Services, said the Winters Hotel in Gastown had repeat violations that required him to issue multiple notices and tickets.
He told jurors in Burnaby that he inspected the building multiple times before the April 11, 2022, disaster, which left two dead and 140 displaced from Abbott and Water streets. In April and June of 2021 in particular, he said the building had “unsatisfactory” inspection results.
“Some of the Atira buildings are some of the more problematic buildings in our portfolio,” Lee testified Monday. “They seem to have the false alarms and the higher rate of fires.”
Monday is the sixth day of testimony in the inquest into the deaths of Mary Ann Garlow, 63, and Dennis Guay James, 53, whose remains were found 11 days after the fire in the wreckage during demolition. The Winters Hotel, a four-storey heritage building, housed the SRO, a women’s shelter and seven businesses.
The building was owned and operated by Atira Women’s Resource Society and Atira Property Management Inc., whose lawyers have questioned the inquest’s witnesses.
Vancouver Fire Rescue Services (VFRS) has said unattended candles were to blame for the fire, which began in a second-storey unit and spread upwards. The building’s sprinklers had not been reset from a fire just three days earlier, and did not activate on the day of the tragedy. Official VFRS records show the fire alarms didn’t go off either, but evidence presented at the inquest last week has raised the possibility of an error.
The inquest has heard that no special accommodations were in place to notify Guay, who had profound hearing loss, of an emergency evacuation.
Lee testified Monday that he never discussed individual evacuation plans in his meetings with Atira. There is no fire code requirement for individual suits to have individual evacuation plans, he added.
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Lee said fire system upgrades can be ordered if there’s a high frequency of false alarms, but that never happened at the Winters Hotel. Fire drills weren’t discussed either, he told the inquest jury.
However, the fire captain testified that every SRO is supposed to have staff designated for fire safety, and no such staff attended a public education meeting between VFRS and Atira, during which they were supposed to receive training.
The deadly fire was the second one in under a week at the Winters Hotel. To date, much of the inquest testimony has focused on an April 8, 2022, blaze that was extinguished by the SRO’s sprinklers.
After that incident, VFRS issued a notice of violation to the property’s owner — Atira Women’s Resource Society — to have the fire safety systems serviced and the sprinklers reset. It put the building under a fire watch until that work was complete.
Lee said after the April 8 fire, his expectation is that the system would have been reset the very same day.
Last week, Winters Hotel manager Gina Vanemberg testified that she didn’t call the only approved company she could to get that work done — Royal City Fire Supplies — right away because it was a Friday evening and she thought she would just receive an automated message telling her she would receive a response on Monday.
Global News called Royal City Fire Supplies, and was told that the company would indeed respond to a weekend call for service, but it would cost a premium rate. Vanemberg told the inquest that staff had been instructed not to use companies that would charge overtime, or any companies not on the approved list.
To date, the inquest has also heard testimony from two people about a chained up door or fire exit in the building. Vanemberg, Lee and other fire officials have said they weren’t aware of, or hadn’t seen such an obstruction in place.
Two Atira staffers who worked at the Winters Hotel, Vanemberg and Jesse Smith, have testified about a lack of formal fire safety training. One VFRS captain, Kris Zoppa, has testified that he had a “bad feeling” about the Winters Hotel, which he found to be in “disrepair” with hoarded items blocking doorways and hallways.
“I didn’t like the fact that the alarms weren’t going off when I got there, I didn’t like the hoarding … there were a lot of problems, a lot of things I didn’t like,” he said Jan. 23 of entering the Winters Hotel after the fire on April 8, 2022.
Last Friday, Juan Rave Soto, a former health and safety compliance specialist for Atira, testified that he visited the Winters Hotel and met Vanemberg in 2022, before the April fire. He said Vanemberg informed him of certain challenges in the building, such as some residents covering or removing smoke detectors that interfered with their indoor smoking, or damaging the fire system on purpose as it would be triggered when they used the fire exits, and some people didn’t want anyone knowing when they were going in and out.
Given the health and safety challenges that tend to arise in SROs, Lee suggested Monday that they should be housed in buildings constructed with the highest safety standards, rather than century-old structures.
In a statement posted to its website, Atira said it looks “forward to the final coroner’s report setting the record straight on the facts, so we all can take the necessary actions going forward to improve safety and provide clarity for everyone.”
“There is still considerable work to be done with BC Housing to support the building and safety upgrades that are desperately needed to provide safe and appropriate housing for this community,” it added.
“As an operator of this housing, much of which is over 100 years old, Atira has the data to show that maintenance and repair is a continuous and ongoing challenge given the age of these buildings.”
Testimony in the inquest is set to continue until Thursday. Jurors will not make a determination of fault, but will document the facts related to Garlow’s and Guay’s deaths, including the causes and circumstances.
Both of their families have attended the inquest, at times, sitting in tears.
Garlow and Guay have both been described as kind souls who gave their time to others. Garlow was considered a mother figure to many living in the Downtown Eastside, while Guay was known as a storyteller and music lover.
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