Fire-Proof Boston Housing
Fire-Proof Boston Housing
This project, from Jon Jay, was a winner in Track 4 (Identifying Fire Risks) of our 2017 Open Data Challenge and one of the audience-chosen overall winners at the challenge's showcase event.
"This analysis is dedicated to the 17 Dorchester residents displaced from their homes by an early-morning fire Sunday, April 23, 2017.
"The six-alarm blaze started at 8 Marie St, a three-family house overlooking Ronan Park, sometime before 4 a.m. Flames leapt to neighboring houses on either side; the heat alone melted siding on other nearby properties. 80 firefighters were called in. They brought the fire under control without major injuries, but residents of 6 and 10 Marie St. were especially shaken up.
"For those neighbors, the threat had long been apparent: nearby residents told the Boston Globe’s Aimee Ortiz that the house had been unoccupied for at least nine years. Google Street View’s entry for the property, taken in 2014, shows the house boarded, up with the exterior in poor condition.
"Firefighters, however, began by sweeping for residents: “You have to look under beds, you have to look in closets…and then eventually somebody told them, ‘oh, that’s a vacant building,’ but you don’t know that when you show up,” a Boston Fire Department spokesman told the Globe.
"One goal of this analysis is to show how data collected by other City of Boston agencies could assist the Fire Department in situations like these. Just a few years of citizen reports and Inspectional Services Departments records, all captured by the city’s 311 database, would have been enough to flag 8 Marie St. as potentially vacant. Other records, like utility billing records, could have provided even more precise evidence. The department could even try a “civic hack” like Louisville, KY, which uses inexpensive, locally-developed smoke alarm sensors to catch fires early in abandoned properties.
"But the bigger problem has no quick fix. My main objective here is to highlight the need for citywide focus on houses like 8 Marie St. These are the “problem properties” that degrade neighborhoods–sometimes slowly, and sometimes quickly. Between 2012 and 2016, citizens complained to the city 15 times about unsafe conditions at 8 Marie St, according to 311 records. While causes of this fire haven’t been determined, vacant properties tend to attract squatters and other illicit activities that can contribute to fire risk; they may also be targets for arson. In this case, neighbors’ safety concerns were confirmed.
"Business as usual won’t solve these problems. Since 2012, the Inspectional Services Department issued at least five tickets for unsafe structural conditions at 8 Marie St. When a landlord won’t comply, the process for rehabilitating a problem property is long and costly. Boston, to its advantage, has power under 2013’s Rental Registration and Inspection Ordinance to crack down on rental properties that aren’t up to code.
"While inspecting every eligible property is a tall order, not every property poses the same safety risk. That’s the focus of this analysis."