Fire personnel to inspect bars, restaurants

The Department of Public Safety’s Fire Prevention Unit personnel will be inspecting bars, restaurants, and other business establishments operating at night to inform them of fire safety code requirements.

In a news briefing yesterday, DPS Commissioner Claudio K. Norita said the Fire Division and DPS want to educate the community especially businesses about the existence of a fire code.

“[Fire Division personnel will be] going out as a courtesy and work with businesses to find out the deficiencies and show it to them and they have so many days to fix it so next time [the inspectors] come back when the regulations become effective, businesses won’t get slapped with monetary penalty,” Norita said.

“We want to let [businesses] know that we want to work with you and work with us on this and allow us to come in and inspect and give you our assessments,” the commissioner added.

Firefighter 2 Daniel Suel said they want to inform the community, particularly business owners, that there is a law on fire safety.

“We are going out to the business establishments and conducting fire safety inspections [on] concerned businesses that operate at night such as bars and restaurant operators and so forth,” Suel said.

He said they are in the process of amending the regulations to create fees and fines that would be levied on businesses if fire inspectors determine that the operators do not comply with fire safety rules.

Suel said they would also be enforcing the occupancy law.

He said they would be talking with the business managers to see how many people are in the establishments to avoid a situation where people are killed during a fire because of crowding.

“Once our regulations have been adopted by the Attorney General’s Office, that’s when we go out and start enforcing it,” Suel said.

Firefighter 1 Combin Taisakan said that nder Public Law 11-56 or the CNMI Fire Safety Code Act, some provisions authorize the division to inspect business establishments.

Taisakan said they would like to inform the public that because of the existence of such law, they are going to actively conduct public education on fire safety.

“When we speak about fire safety issues, we are talking about fire extinguishers, making sure that each establishment has the required number of extinguishers, [and] the number of exits depending on the number of occupants that would be occupying the building in any given time,” he said.

Taisakan said would also check for smoke and fire alarms if required and any other fire protection systems that are required under the provision of the uniform fire code.

“We have already started. This is actually an ongoing process. We have found out that some businesses are still failing to comply with the law because they say they are not aware that there is such a law,” he said.

“We put them on notice that this is more of a courtesy inspection that we are doing now. Everyone should take advantage of it. Let us know if they do need an inspection. Because at this time, there will be no charge,” he said.

Taisakan said the existing rules and regulations have several flaws “so we are amending them to address our concerns as well as the businesses’ concerns that were brought to us during our inspection period.

He said they have already come across several establishments that have violations that need to be corrected. The violations, however, are not major, he added.