More than four years after a massive blaze destroyed an Edgewater apartment complex and temporarily displaced more than 1,000 residents, legislative attempts to better protect residential structures from fast-spreading fires have stalled.
A panel of firefighters, fire safety experts, activists and builders at a public forum in Teaneck weighed in Wednesday night on how best to address the issue.
“What we’re saying, from the fire service perspective, is we’re being presented with a problem that we can’t deal with,” said Glenn Corbett, a longtime Waldwick volunteer firefighter and professor of fire science at John Jay College. “These are buildings that were literally built to burn, from our perspective. We don’t have the manpower and we don’t have the ability to get ahead of these fires.”