Rod Ammon: Welcome to the CFITrainer.Net podcast. As everyone is now aware, the news cycle is moving very fast and of course dominated by the Covid-19 global pandemic. Just a quick reminder at the start of our podcast that all fire investigation professionals should conduct scene safety assessments at every scene and select PP according to identified hazards at that scene. Coronavirus transmission precautions should now be part of your scene investigation protocol. Respiratory protection and cleanliness have probably never been more top of mind, so please take care of your own safety as you serve the public interest or fulfill your client's mandate. There's a Covid virus resource dashboard available from the International Association of Fire Chiefs. I checked it out this morning and there's plenty of resources to assist you there. There's also daily updates related to fire departments across the country. Again, that's at www.iafc.org/.

We appreciate the service that all of our responders, healthcare workers and others are providing us with our daily safety and essentials. I saw the FedEx driver in my neighbor's driveway yesterday and said, we appreciate what you guys are doing. He stopped and said, I never really appreciated what people think or how they rely on us sometimes, it feels good. When we have our editorial meetings to decide what to discuss on this podcast. We often look to recent news stories for emerging topics in fire investigation. We had intended to make this podcast one of our news roundups where we amplify a variety of stories that may be of interest to fire investigation professionals. This month while researching stories, one topic caught our eye amidst all the Corona news. Fires at sober living facilities. It feels both timely and a bit late since the opioid crisis and the resulting proliferation of addiction treatment resources has been an ongoing issue for two decades and intensified in the last five years.

Sober living houses trace their roots back to the 1930s, so it's not that it's a new idea, but the growing popularity of sober living run by addiction recovery peers, the presence of these homes in otherwise single or multifamily residential communities, the uneven nature of licensing and regulation and informal sober living arrangements between friends in recovery is creating fire protection, firefighting and fire investigation issues that we thought merited some specific attention. So here we are.

Some quick Googling turns up a variety of fire incidents in sober living facilities. Here are a few examples. A member of a sober living house in Northern California who had recently moved out was arrested for reckless arson for causing a fire at the home. The home was left uninhabitable. Sober living homes in South Portland, Maine, Patterson, New Jersey, and Lansing, Michigan had been damaged by electrical fires, all displacing residents. Three female residents of a sober living home in Nashville died in a massive fire in 2018. The fire remains under investigation.

The fire department says no working smoke alarms were in the home. There are a lot of issues raised here, including regulation by States and municipalities, code application and enforcement, unregistered and unlicensed or informal facilities, fire safety and nonstandard occupancies of single family residences. Then if a fire incident occurs, there will be unique fire investigation challenges like interviewing persons who may not have permanent contact information, possible electrical system over burdens or jury rigging, a potentially transient population, increasing the witness list, lack of inspection records, if the sober living house was not registered or did not have to be registered and the possibility of having to investigate multiple potential fire causes arising from an occupancy of adults in dormitory style bedrooms with shared common areas such as cooking or heating equipment in rooms and smoking in multiple bedrooms or rooms like basements and closets illegally converted into bedrooms.

Here to talk with us about some of the issues with fires in sober living homes, is Fire Marshal Peter Lennon an IAAI member and fire marshal from Manchester, New Hampshire, where Chief Dan Gounan has been working on this issue. Thanks for being with us today.

Peter Lennon: Thanks for having me.

Rod Ammon: I appreciate it. Peter, how are you and your people doing with this Covid thing?

Peter Lennon: We're doing good. We're still ramping up here in the city, but we're doing good. So far we're running a lot of testing sites and just maintaining what we have.

Rod Ammon: Well wanted to make sure we checked in on that and we're glad to hear that for you. I know a lot of cities, it's just about the timing and preparedness and we appreciate you taking the time to talk to us today.

Peter Lennon: No problem.

Rod Ammon: So let's start out when we're talking about these sober living arrangements, just to get an idea of what's out there. From what I understand that facilities range from hundreds of residents to small groups. What are you seeing out there?

Peter Lennon: The biggest thing we're seeing is we're seeing these sober living places that are popping up in more of a residential setting that we don't anticipate them being at. So meaning that we're coming up to an apartment building that usually has like three apartment buildings in it and they've illegally converted the apartment or the apartment building into essentially one dwelling unit with anywhere from 20 to 30 people inside the building at one time.

Rod Ammon: And what was the capacity at the time?

Peter Lennon: Usually, most of the apartment buildings only probably have like a small family of four or five people in at the max, but we're actually seeing these apartments that have seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven people in it. It's very common for these places to just put lots of people into a residential space.

Rod Ammon: Wow. I'm glad I clarified that because when I said at the time I wasn't too clear, what I meant was, what's the typical standard appropriate occupancy and what you're saying is it's going from two, three, four people, which would be normal, what these places are developed for up to 10 or more.

Peter Lennon: Correct. We're seeing some apartments that actually have over 10 people in them. Basically any place they have a room that they're putting beds down and having people stay in there.

Rod Ammon: So I'm sure that a lot of people who listen to us already know what some of those issues, what that would lead to. Why don't you talk a little bit about the regulatory fire protection and code enforcement issues?

Peter Lennon: Yeah, so the code part of it that we're running into is basically they're just popping up. They're not letting the city know they're there, they're not going through any of the permitting process. And they're basically just out there and looking for us to kind of find them. The big thing we're really running into is no code really will define the definition of family. There's some definitions out there, but that's our biggest hurdle right now is that they're calling themselves a family. And so sober living really doesn't fit, in New Hampshire we enforce the life safety codes from NFPA. Sober living really doesn't fit in the categories, so we're using the dormitory rooming lodging chapter, which actually requires sprinklers and fire alarm systems because it's a new occupancy. And that's the big stumbling block is these occupancies don't want to spend the money to put those life safety features in to make the building safe and code compliant.

Peter Lennon: So we've been working with the state trying to get either variances for these properties or maybe come up with a additional classification of sober living. But essentially the risk with that is we're essentially lessening the safety requirements. So that's a big thing that's going on right now with us as far as the code part of it.

Rod Ammon: As I can imagine, this is a state by state issue.

Peter Lennon: Yeah. Unfortunately, there's a lot of big companies that run these places and they have a lot of money and they're fighting us all along the way with any enforcement that we try to do. And it's getting tied up in the courts.

Rod Ammon: As I've heard, or I've read, I should say from Chief Gounan's comments, it's not that you want to shut these people down, you just want to make sure they're safe.

Peter Lennon: Absolutely. And we want to make sure that they're safe. We want to make sure we know where they're out there. A typical response for us for a residential unit is only an engine in a lot of company versus if we know there's going to be multiple people in there, we'll increase the response. Just to be safe, time is very important. Trying to get the people out of the building. So that's one of our big stumbling blocks is just knowing they're out there and just adjusting appropriately for us as far as responses.

Rod Ammon: So what I've heard is, you've got a couple ideas out there that looked pretty unique from what we read. Could you talk about that? Because again, my understanding was you were looking for cooperation, not to put people in need out of a place.

Peter Lennon: Oh, absolutely. I mean we are pretty much ground zero for the opioid crisis and we understand the recovery part of it is very important, and we're not trying to close these places down, but we want to make sure that they're safe. Everybody should be in a safe building, especially people in recovery. So we're working on compartmentation fire alarm systems. Some not really alternatives but some other measures that we can at least get in there at least to make the building safe. But we are not at all looking to close these places down. But with that said, there are some good ones. There are some bad ones and we do have some enforcement stuff against some of the bad ones that we have to move forward on.

Rod Ammon: Sure. As with any business. So what are the challenges, you spoke a little bit about apartments and I'm sorry if I missed you speaking about single family homes, because I'm thinking a little bit here. What are the specific challenges in single family homes? What are you seeing in terms of occupancy, usage, utilities, that kind of thing? Housekeeping?

Peter Lennon: It's the same thing. We're getting complaint calls from neighborhoods that single family home, house went on the market, somebody buys it up, pays cash, and next you know that there's people outside all hours of the day and there's multiple tenants there that usually is not indicative of a single family setting. So the single family are usually the ones that get reported to us quicker than an apartment building. Because usually apartment buildings, the people are kind of always out and about and stuff, but it's not fitting some of these neighborhoods and that's what's drawing our attention to it, not just the code part of it.

Rod Ammon: So how about advice for other people who aren't at ground zero that are maybe seeing a little bit of this? My understanding is you have quite a few of these places that have sprung up. Any advice that you could share to others around the country?

Peter Lennon: The big thing I would do is just get to know everybody in your community as far as the other departments, whether the police are noticing calls for service, complaints to the health department, you really need to work together with all the other agencies within your jurisdiction. They may have information that something's going on, but that's key is being able to share information with other resources that are in your community. Get out there and see what's going on. It's pretty easy to find these places if you start doing Google searches, you can find pretty much any of these places, especially addresses. And a lot of these places have Facebook, there's a lot of Facebook stuff out there for recovery places. You can find a lot of the information. Another good resources, probation and parole for us, they're actually putting people in there. So they're a great resource as well. So just reaching out to the stakeholders and see where they're putting these people.

Rod Ammon: As with so many other issues. And again, I keep hearing in the background of a lot of the things that you've said in it and what I read about the chief that you're trying to do the right thing here to make people safe and help them out during some incredible challenges in their lives. When you have to investigate a fire at one of these places, what are some of the unique challenges that you might face?

Peter Lennon: We have had a couple of fires in these places. We probably guesstimate, we have about 60 of them out there. We know of about 40 of them, but we're being told specifically that some of them are underground purposely just to avoid us. But the incidents we've experienced is, usually everything has been accidental. Smoking is a big part of the recovery process and that's what's been pretty much the driving factor as far as fires relating these places is smoking, careless disposal smoking. We've also had a couple of incidents with people that were placed there that shouldn't have been there, that should have been supervised having small kitchen fires. But everything we've experienced has been accidental in cause.

Rod Ammon: What am I missing?

Peter Lennon: I don't think anything.

Rod Ammon: That's awful nice. Frankly this subject came out of nowhere. We started doing some reading and as I said in the stories previous as I was reading the intro for this, this sort of came up and we hadn't really thought of it and I hadn't even thought about what a sober living home was. And then I thought, well maybe halfway house was the old terminology.

Peter Lennon: Halfway houses are more for your people that are coming out of your prisons and stuff like that. But they're still, our probation and parole will place people in sober living that is essentially coming out of some type of substance abuse program or drug court or something along those lines. They'll place them in there. Big thing, and there's a big case right now that somebody that probation parole placed actually went missing. They went on a crime spree, so that really brought a lot of this to the forefront as well, as far as these people being in neighborhoods where they're not supposed to be.

Rod Ammon: Okay. Well I'm very grateful for your time. All of us are and that's Fire Marshal Peter Lennon.

Peter Lennon: Thanks for having me. It was great to talk to everybody.

Rod Ammon: Thanks for helping us understand this issue better. We encourage the fire investigation professionals listening to this podcast to educate themselves on the sober living and other group homes in their community and the applicable state and local regulations.

We will close today with some other relevant information from the IAAI. The ITC is canceled this year and the IAAI is surely saddened by this. So many people were looking forward to the gathering in Vegas. This year's ITC was tuning up to be a great conference with excellent content and record attendance was expected. We hope you're doing well during this time of isolation. It looks as though many of you are coming and learning during this time. We've had some of our highest usage analytics recently and we're glad you're here. Please spread the word. We believe this knowledge is motivating and helpful during this time. Updates on training will be posted at the IAAI's website located at www.firearson.com where there'll be information about how this year's mandatory issues related to, that are normally handled at the ITC, will be done virtually.

So things like the election for officers and the AGM will be things that you need to check in to find out how they'll be handled at www.firearson.com. Our thoughts are with all of you and your families as we each do our best during this virus.

This podcast and CFITrainer.Net are made possible by funding from a fire prevention and safety grant from the assistance to firefighters grant program administered by FEMA and the US Department of Homeland Security. Support from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives and voluntary online donations from CFITrainer.Net users and podcast listeners.

Thanks for joining us today on the podcast. Stay safe. We'll see you next time. For the IAAI and CFITrainer.Net, I'm Rod Ammon.

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Napoliello, Alex. This sober living home promises a safe haven. Residents say they're being exploited. NJ.com 16 Jan 2020.

McElhaney, Lisa. There are up to 60 sober living houses in Manchester, fire chief says. NADDI.org. 12 Jan 2020.