In Chicago and Illinois, efforts to make sure modern, reliable smoke alarms are installed in every home have been halting and slow.
Chicago firefighter Felix McAfee passes out smoke alarms with a 10-year battery life to residents in the 1600 block of North Mayfield Avenue on Dec. 22, following a fatal fire on the block.
Snow blankets the 4000 block of West Potomac Avenue in the West Humboldt Park neighborhood in January. Last year, four children were pulled from a fire in a unit where there was no working smoke alarm. All four later died. “If you don’t have working smoke alarms, your awareness that there is a fire is going to be somewhat delayed,” said Lorraine Carli, vice president of outreach and advocacy at the National Fire Protection Association. “And the longer that delay is, the less time you’re going to have to escape — if you can escape at all.”
In 2015, advocates from the Illinois Fire Safety Alliance went to Springfield, arguing Illinois’ law was due for an update. Many landlords, they said, were still installing the kind of detector that required tenants to buy a new battery for the alarm every six months. “We were initially strongly opposed to the bill,” Greg St. Aubin, a lobbyist with the Illinois Realtors, said in an interview. “We all care about fire safety, but c’mon now — you’ve got a smoke detector company coming to the General Assembly basically saying, ‘I want you to pass a law that requires everyone in the state to buy a new smoke detector.’”
“I wish it would have gone into effect sooner, but I understand the need for us to do it gradually,” said former state Rep. Kathleen Willis , who sponsored the bill in the House. “We knew fire departments had stockpiles of thousands of the battery-operated ones. We didn’t want those to go to waste.”Department leaders said they feared the higher price tag on the sealed-battery detectors could deter some landlords and homeowners, according to Fire Department spokesperson Larry Langford.
Officials were “concerned that due to the cost being four times higher, CFD might not be able to get as many units as before to distribute to the public for free,” Langford wrote in his statement.“We hand the constituent a 99-cent smoke detector, but we don’t know if it gets installed properly — or gets installed, period,” Villegas said. “In some instances, there’s been fires, and they find these smoke detectors that have been given out sitting on the kitchen table or in a drawer.
It also doubled the fine for smoke alarm violations from $500 to $1,000 per offense for homeowners, and from $1,000 to $2,000 for apartment landlords. Shah said he saw a range of portable alarms for sale, including hard-wired detectors, modern sealed-battery detectors and cheaper devices with slots for 9-volt batteries. After weighing his options, he sprang for the sealed detectors.
St. Aubin said legislators and lobbyists planned in 2017 to launch aggressive public awareness campaigns, but he acknowledged that the follow-through hasn’t materialized. Two years later, in 2019, New York City banned the sale of removable-battery smoke detectors. And the Chicago ordinance passed in 2021 included a ban on the sale of the old devices.
“We encourage everyone not to wait to go ahead and make the changeover to these new alarms,” Zaleski said at the news conference. “Do that now for your homes and your families to be safe going forward.”No representatives of the Chicago Fire Department were present. The fire department’s Twitter account, which has more than 87,000 followers and typically posts multiple times a day with updates on various fire events around the city, made no mention of the new law taking effect on New Year’s Day. In asent Jan. 1, the department merely urged residents to “choose a 10-year sealed battery alarm” when they need to buy a new device.
“All they need to do is call 311, and we go out there and install them,” Thiel said. “It’s not a giveaway — we don’t just hand them to people. We go in, do a fire safety check and install the smoke alarms to make sure they’re installed properly and in the right places. “The fire department has come here before, even before the fire, giving out these detectors,” said Ariel Garcia, 55, who lives on the block. “I just don’t know what people are doing with them.”
Contacted by reporters, a representative of the landlord declined to discuss the fire or conditions in the building. Efforts to reach the mother of the four children were not successful.
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