Dive Brief:
- Early on Jan. 23, a fire killed 32 people in a senior citizens' housing project in L'Isle-Verte, Quebec. All victims were in a section that did not require sprinklers because the provincial building code defined that section as housing "autonomous" seniors — even though some were in wheel chairs.
- Now, engineers and others are saying that the code fails to look at the reality of a population that is aging and account for realistic situations.
- The owners of Résidence du Havre were able to avoid the expense of putting sprinklers in a three-story section by adding a firewall instead when a two-story addition requiring sprinklers was built. That decision involved a code referencing "autonomous" and "non-autonomous" residents, a distinction based on how much care they require daily.
Dive Insight:
It appears that Quebec's rules are based on medical understandings of people, and engineers like Jacques Béty say that is, in effect, no way to run a building code. Housing for older citizens is becoming a boom industry in Quebec as its baby-boom population ages, and its codes will have to change to better accommodate that shift — and perhaps serve as an example for lagging building codes elsewhere.
