The devastating fire at the Cobalt Apartments in Wesley Chapel exposed potential weaknesses in the way apartment buildings are protected from fire, but Pasco County fire and building officials told county commissioners this week that fixing them may be largely out of their hands.
The workshop, framed by Fire Chief Ryan Guynn as a “factual education session” rather than a policy debate, came after board members requested a briefing on the apartment building and fire codes governing multifamily construction.
Investigators have confirmed the fire was caused by a lightning strike.
Guynn told commissioners the strike simultaneously knocked out fire alarm panels in three separate buildings, destroyed roofing systems and triggered multiple structural collapses. Crews poured nearly 2 million gallons, or 16.7 million pounds, of water onto the blaze and the wood-frame construction, leaving the building so waterlogged it is now structurally unsound.
“Water in many cases is worse than the fire that predicates it,” JP Murphy, the county’s building construction services director, said.
The county has posted the building as unsafe and meeting the threshold for demolition. It is now waiting on the property owner to decide whether it can be salvaged or must come down.
Roughly 200 residents were displaced by the fire, which broke out in August.
Much of the session focused on what the county could do to prevent a similar disaster, and how little authority it has to do it.
Guynn stressed that multifamily fires are relatively rare. According to his presentation, multifamily residential structures have a death rate one-sixth of single-family homes. Of the 364 residential structure fires in the county in the last 365 days, only 31 were multifamily.
Murphy told commissioners they have limited power to act unilaterally.
Local governments can adopt narrow “technical amendments” to the state fire and building codes, he said, but state statute prohibits singling out specific construction types or materials, meaning any change would have to apply to every apartment building in the county, whether wood or block, or two stories or four.
“Local technical amendments are a scalpel,” Murphy said. “They are not a hammer.”
That left commissioners looking at some of the weaknesses exposed by the Cobalt fire and asking what, if anything, could be done about them.
Murphy addressed public concerns about the failure of sprinkler and alarm systems during the fire, as well as safeguards against a lightning strike, which in this case crippled the apartment complex’s response system.
He said the apartment buildings were equipped with National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) 13R sprinkler systems, which are a lower cost residential standard limited to buildings of four stories or fewer (but adopted by every state in the country).
Officials said the systems are designed primarily to control fires and give residents more time to escape.
A full commercial-grade NFPA 13 system would cost roughly three times as much, while adding lightning protection — which Murphy said is not required for any Florida building except hospitals — would add 1-3% to total project costs.
He added that the state considered mandating lightning protection in 2018, but the proposal failed to gain enough support although “the conversation is ongoing.”
Commissioner Seth Weightman questioned officials about whether affordability and higher post-Covid construction costs may have played a factor.
“Has the state watered down the building code to try to make product more affordable for folks to live in,” he asked, citing the less expensive sprinkler system and non-mandatory lightning detection devices.
Guynn said that was not the case.
Prior to 2021, he said, multifamily apartment complexes of less than three stories weren’t even required to even have sprinkler systems at all before that code was updated.
“So, I think that’s an example of how it’s not getting watered down,” Guynn said.
Another sticking point for commissioners was what happens above the living areas.
Sprinkler heads are not required in attics, though draft stops or smoke barriers must be in place every 3,000 square feet.
Commissioner Jack Mariano pressed officials on whether more substantial barriers could have limited the Cobalt blaze.
He asked whether extending fire-rated walls through the attic, rather than relying on non-rated draft stops every 3,000 square feet as currently required, might have contained the blaze to one section of the roof.
Guynn said that would be speculation given what he called “a data set of one.”
“An act of God, unfortunately, that creates this kind of devastation…. I can’t speak to whether a firewall would have slowed that down,” he added.
He acknowledged, however, that a properly functioning firewall could have helped.
“Common sense says that it would work.”
Mariano also asked whether alarm systems could be hardened against a similar strike, but Guynn said the wiring in this case was severed outright and no shielding would have prevented that.
He did say independent, building-by-building alarm systems might have kept two of the three towers’ monitoring online.
The investigation into the fire remains ongoing.
Commissioners directed staff to research potential recommendations that could be sent to the state for consideration in future building and fire code changes.
Guynn said those codes are always being reviewed and updated, and generally become more stringent with time.
“And they rarely ever go backwards,” Guynn said. “It’s usually a stepping-stone as to what next level we’re going to increase to in conjunction with the builders.”