Reducing risk in hotel fires

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about how to make hotels safer

for trusting customers.

Sen. David Thomas, R-Fountain Inn, is pressing his legislative colleagues to find a way to make hotels safer. Hotel customers often get a room for the night without ever considering what would happen if a fire were to break out during the predawn hours.

Such a fire occurred Jan. 25 at the Comfort Inn on Congaree Road. Six people died and 12 were injured in the third-floor fire in a hotel that did not have a sprinkler system. Fire department officials have said that if sprinklers had been at the hotel, more people would have had a chance of surviving the fire. The hotel was built before building codes required a sprinkler system.

Thomas is calling on his legislative colleagues to make such public buildings safer. A trusting public deserves nothing less.

"We've got to have sprinkler systems in those buildings," he told this newspaper. "We need to look at what we need to get them to retrofit (the buildings)." He is looking at a carrot-and-stick approach to this public safety issue.

The stick would be a state requirement for hotels without sprinkler systems to inform the public — with a conspicuously placed sign — when this potentially life-saving safety device is missing from a facility. After the Comfort Inn fire, hotel patrons should understand that they are literally taking their lives into their own hands in such cases.

The carrot would be state incentives to encourage such hotels and other public buildings to retrofit their buildings with sprinklers. Thomas told us he is looking into tax credits and other positive incentives, such as the possibility of lower insurance premiums.

Thomas plans to introduce legislation in the Senate this week, and he said Rep. Bob Leach, R-Greer, will introduce companion legislation in the House.

Making the Greenville hotel fire all the more tragic is the suspicion that someone intentionally set the fire. Better safety features could have saved lives, however, and other legislators should join Thomas in his crusade to make hotels safer.