Pierina Sanchez presses FDNY on interagency data sharing for fire prevention

So a significant increase, as we've said before.

Thank you.

Chair, may I just ask a quick follow-up?

We're on the same team here.

We want New Yorkers to be safe and avoid these situations.

On that vein, FDNY, you folks throw yourselves at the hardship.

yourself at the emergency.

So let me take it to the to a different place, which is what information does FDNY share with buildings and HPD?

And are you actively, at the FDNY executive level, are you actively talking about, hey,

Buildings are having electrical shorts all over the place.

You all should really have this in your scopes of work when you're putting out preservation grants or tax incentives.

Are you having that conversation with your sister agencies?

Because as the housing chair, it does not feel like what we're getting on the council, what we're approving, the scopes of work that we're approving for tax incentives are not covering these electrical causes of fires.

So I just want to understand what the conversation is.

Thank you for your question.

We recently met with the Commissioner of DOB and discussed those issues.

Electrical fires have been consistently the leading cause of fire within the city.

And our buildings continue to get older and older, and we continue to see these electrical fires.

We are working on developing new technologies that may potentially alert us to these fires prior to them occurring.

There are some...

You know, hopeful items out there that we're going to work on and work with some national laboratories.

We've already consulted with Underwriters Laboratory to try to develop some of these products for use within the city.

Obviously, we are a huge city with a complicated

complicated.

set of buildings here.

We're one of the oldest cities in the nation.

So we do work with other agencies as well and make sure that we address these problems prior to them starting.

And to the Commissioner's point, we never want to blame anybody for any actions that cause these fires, but we do want to make sure

We take that risk with the idea that somebody else won't die.

And fire prevention does a tremendous job to issue violations prior to the fire as well as after the fire.

So we do do a post-fire inspection, and all those violations do go to the owner of the building.

And a lot of those issues that we addressed at the press conference, those are directly related to the fire that just occurred right before that press conference occurred.

So we want to strike while the iron's hot.

And some of those things we don't know at the time of the press conference either.

We have our marshals go out and they investigate whether the smoke detectors were installed properly.

That's not information we may have at the time of those press conferences.

So we want to make sure that we get the information out to the building residents immediately so that doesn't occur again.

Thank you.

Thank you, chairs, for the time.

Thank you.