The St. Paul Public Housing Agency spent two decades adding sprinklers to every unit on every floor in each of its 16 high-rise apartment buildings.
That’s why St. Paul’s retired fire marshal, Steve Zaccard, believes public housing residents in that city would have been saved from the kind of fire that killed five people in Minneapolis last week. If the sprinklers are maintained, a deadly blaze like the one in Minneapolis is “not possible,” Zaccard said in an interview this week.
The Cedar High Apartments, where last week’s deadly blaze occurred, is one of 42 high-rises operated by the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority. That 25-story building at 630 Cedar Ave. S., had partial sprinkler coverage on the main floor and lower mechanical equipment rooms, but lacked them on the upper levels where people lived.
Zaccard sees what happened in Minneapolis as a “teaching moment.”