Trump Tower - No sprinklers installed?

Shoddy construction!

No doubt Trump right now is looking at Supreme Court nominations likely to rule that local building codes are unconstitutional.

Hey, sprinklers cost money, ya know.

The cause of the fire has not been determined. The entire apartment was engulfed in fire. The resident is dead.
There was no sprinkler system and were not required when the building was constructed. The building had no fire code violations. Investigation is on- going.

The above four comments are reasons why we can’t have reasonable dialogues about issues today. First flush Trump bashing is counter productive. Shame on all of you.

Trump once fought legislation requiring sprinklers in NYC buildings

According to a January 1999 article in the New York Post, Trump personally “called a dozen council members to lobby against sprinklers.” He also donated $5,000 to retire the campaign debt of Peter Vallone, then the council’s speaker. Trump told the New York Times he had both ”received and placed calls” to city officials about the sprinkler proposal, including to Archie Spigner, the then-chairman of the council’s Housing and Buildings Committee.


“After the fire at South Park Tower, I was sitting there with the owners when a phone call came in from a certain real estate developer by the name of Donald Trump,” Rose, the sprinkler advocate, recalled to ABC News. “I had gone up there to invite them to a memorial service … and I remember the phone call. They said, ‘Oh, Donald’s on the phone and he was saying that there’s going to be a big movement to retrofit all the high-rise buildings in New York with sprinklers.’”

”People feel safer with sprinklers,” Trump told the New York Times that year. ”But the problem with the bill is that it doesn’t address the buildings that need sprinklers the most. If you look at the fire deaths in New York, almost all of them are in one- or two-family houses.”

The opposition to the proposal influenced the legislation’s final version. When the city council passed the proposal in March 1999, it required sprinklers in all new residential buildings with four or more units in each apartment and the common hallway. Existing structures that underwent renovations totaling 50 percent or more of the building’s value were also required to have sprinklers.


But other older buildings — such as the Trump Tower, built in 1983 — could remain sprinkler-free.

Following the legislation’s passage, Trump did announce he would spend $3 million to put sprinklers in all 350 units at the Trump World Tower, a building the developer was then constructing across the street from the United Nations.

Under the 1999 legislation, owners who already had their building permits filed did not have to add sprinklers, but Trump opted to do so on his new project, which opened in 2001, the Daily News reported.

Following Saturday’s fire, Trump briefly commented about the blaze on Twitter. “Fire at Trump Tower is out,” the president wrote. “Very confined (well built building). Firemen (and women) did a great job.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/04/09/donald-trump-once-lobbied-against-fire-sprinklers-in-existing-new-york-high-rises-including-trump-towers/?utm_term=.f80e156fe4fe

Thank you for the research, Edgar.

Now I can decide if Trump is an asshole or not.

I think calling him an asshole is flattery.

Maybe Mueller can investigate that next.

Probably not. The search warrant on Michael Cohen was executed not by Mueller's office but by the US Attorney's office. Trump's White House appointments have turned into a rat's nest of Russian connections and dealings, and Mueller is concentrating on untangling all that. We can only wish him well.