City, County, Added to Suit in Fatal High-Rise Fire

Calling the Fire Department’s response to the fatal Oct. 17 Loop fire "one calamity after another," attorneys representing victims of the blaze on Tuesday added the City of Chicago and Cook County as defendants in their ongoing lawsuit.

At a news conference held a few block from the high-rise at 69 W. Washington St., where six people died in the fire last fall, relatives of the victims said they were willing to mediate a settlement but that money alone would not be enough.

"I think my family wants what all the families want – and that’s for Chicago to be a safer place." said James Slater, whose brother, John, died in the blaze at the Cook County Administration Building.

Slater said the families want passage of a proposed high-rise sprinkler law, which has been struck for months in the City Council’s Building Committee.

"We’re approaching the one-year anniversary of this fire and nothing has been done," Slater said. "I understand that a number of ordinances have been proposed before that have in fact fallen by the wayside. We want to make certain that doesn’t happen in this case."

The city’s corporation counsel, Mara Georges, said her office had not yet reviewed the suit and could not immediately respond.

"We expect that the City of Chicago would be named as a defendant in the civil lawsuits stemming from the 69 West Washington fire, so today’s filing was not a surprise to us," Georges said in a statement.

Peter Skiko, and attorney representing Cook County, declined to comment, saying he had not received a copy of the complaint.

The addition of the city and county to the lawsuit comes roughly two months after a scathing county report that placed much of the blame for the deaths on how the firefighters fought the blaze.

"Everyone knows what happened that day," said Robert Clifford, an attorney for the plaintiffs.

The original lawsuit, filed just days after the fire, named only the building’s management company and two security companies as defendants. in the months since, the number of defendants has grown to five.

In adding the city, Clifford cited 10 Fire Department "failures," many of which had been outlined in the county report. Among other things, the lawsuit contends firefighters failed to conduct a primary search of the building’s southeast stairwell, where the six victims were later found.

Clifford also cited seven major "failures" by the county, including the failure to adequately train building managers for emergency situations and failing to devise an adequate evacuation plan.

The lawsuit faults the county for lacking several safety features at the building, including pressurized stairwells, sprinklers and automatically unlocking stairwell doors. None of those safety features was required for the building at the time of the fire.

Under current city code, sprinklers are required in all off ice towers built after 1975.

A proposal that sits in the City Council’s Buildings Committee would require commercial high-rises built before that date to retrofit with sprinklers.

Ald. Bernard Stone (50^th), who chairs the committee, said the proposal has stalled because of a clause that deals with how the sprinklers would be wired.