By Kristen Taketa
The San Diego Union-Tribune
SAN DIEGO — Thousands of San Diego apartment or condo buildings and schools are overdue for an annual fire safety inspection as required by state law.
More than 2,700 properties that are supposed to be inspected by San Diego Fire-Rescue every year have not been inspected since at least 2023, The San Diego Union-Tribune found after reviewing inspection data obtained via a public record request.
There are roughly another 880 for which Fire-Rescue has no inspection date on record — meaning the department doesn’t know if or when it last inspected the property, data show.
Those 3,600 properties that either have no recorded inspection date or have not been inspected since 2023 are mostly residential buildings or hotels, and they also include 76 public and private schools.
These are not complete tallies of the department’s inspection responsibilities, however, as there are as many as thousands of additional properties that Fire-Rescue needs to inspect, but is not inspecting because it doesn’t know that they exist or where they are, the department’s deputy fire chief said.
Fire-Rescue’s records that identify the properties it needs to inspect are missing potentially thousands of them, largely because there is no single central database that can tell Fire-Rescue about all the properties that exist and need to be inspected in the city, fire officials said.
In addition, San Diego Fire-Rescue has for years lacked an active program for inspecting facilities that hold or process hazardous materials, such as gas stations, auto repair shops, battery storage facilities and biotech labs. That inspection program folded when the COVID-19 pandemic began and was restarted last year.
The delays in inspections are largely due to a shortage of staff, according to Anthony Tosca, deputy fire chief and fire marshal who heads the Fire-Rescue division that handles inspections, wildland management and other fire prevention measures.
“It’s very difficult to grow so quickly,” Tosca said.
“The Fire Marshal’s office has a duty to protect our public from these fires and other hazardous conditions. It’s a concern for me that we can’t get to all these properties.”
Thousands of buildings uninspected
State law requires all city and county fire departments and fire protection districts to conduct annual safety inspections of all apartment and condo buildings, K-12 schools and lodging houses such as hotels and motels.
And fire departments have been required to report their inspection compliance under a state law passed in 2018 in the aftermath of the deadly Ghost Ship warehouse fire in Oakland.
The fire, which killed 36 people during a concert held at the warehouse, was attributed to electrical issues and became a harbinger of what can happen when fire code violations go unaddressed.
A subsequent investigation by The Mercury News found that many Northern California fire departments were failing to complete most of their required annual inspections — and because there was virtually no enforcement of that requirement prior to the 2018 law, some departments weren’t even tracking their inspection progress. After that investigation, lawmakers enacted the inspection reporting requirement for fire agencies.
“If we’re not able to inspect something, and we’re not able to show we’re enforcing codes and standards, we may have another Ghost Ship fire on our hands,” Tosca said.
San Diego Fire-Rescue only completed 42% of those required annual inspections in the 2023-24 fiscal year, the department reported in its most recent adopted budget.
But the actual completion rates are even lower, according to Tosca — because those percentages only account for the properties that the fire department knows about.
He estimates there are as many as 20,000 more properties around the city that need to be inspected but are not listed in the fire department’s inspection inventory.
Those include not just ones that need to be inspected annually per state law but other types of properties that are not state-mandated but officials say should still be inspected regularly, such as restaurants and other businesses.
San Diego Fire-Rescue inspectors don’t just conduct inspections. They spend time physically scouring the streets for properties that are missing from their inventory, and then tracking down the owners by digging through business records, utility bills and more — much like investigative work, officials said.
It’s also tough to keep up with all the properties in the city, officials said, because they are constantly opening, closing, moving or changing ownership. As a result, Fire-Rescue’s inventory is outdated, containing many duplicate properties and properties that no longer exist.
As for hazmat inspections, San Diego has no requirement that hazmat properties be inspected annually. The city’s municipal code says only that hazmat inspections should be conducted periodically, without specifying how often.
Fire- Rescue shut down its hazmat inspection program completely because of the pandemic, Tosca said, and it left the program shuttered for years because it has still been behind on the state-mandated annual inspections. The department has only recently been able to restart the program.
“We’re slowly getting back to those hazardous properties to build up those inventories, but we just don’t have enough staff to get all of those,” Tosca said.
San Diego is an outlier in the county in failing to inspect so many buildings. Other fire departments around San Diego County have far fewer properties to inspect, and all of them reported far higher annual inspection compliance rates last year, documents obtained by the Union-Tribune via public record requests show.
Almost all other fire departments reported 100% compliance for state-mandated annual inspections, except for Chula Vista Fire and Heartland Fire.
Chula Vista Fire has an 84% inspection rate, as it has conducted all state-mandated inspections except for condo buildings. The department just recently completed the work of identifying all the condo buildings and their respective homeowners associations in the city, said Chula Vista’s Fire Prevention Director Justin Gipson.
Heartland Fire, which covers El Cajon, La Mesa and Lemon Grove, says it has not yet reported its percentage of completed state-mandated inspections, as required by law. It will report its inspection compliance this summer for the current fiscal year, Chief Bent Koch said in an email.
Unlike San Diego Fire-Rescue, most fire departments in the county have fewer than 1,000 state-mandated properties to inspect. San Diego also has more complex properties to inspect, fire officials said — including more high-rises and more biotech facilities.
What do inspections reveal?
The responsibility for keeping buildings up to fire code ultimately lies with the properties’ owners, said Assistant Fire Marshal Alex Kane.
But safety inspections by Fire-Rescue help ensure owners are following the rules, alert them to deficiencies and educate owners about fire safety.
Indeed, the vast majority of inspections reveal fire code violations of some sort, Tosca said.
“When I do an inspection on a high-rise, it’s normal to have 30 violations,” he said. “I would say 95% of buildings are going to have a fire code violation — which is normal.”
Some of the most common fire code violations San Diego Fire- Rescue finds include missing fire extinguishers, failures to test and maintain fire alarm and sprinkler systems, locked or blocked exits or exit paths and flammable items that are improperly stored.
According to inspection reports, recent Fire-Rescue inspections conducted in just the past two months have found:
- A Mission Valley hotel with a fire alarm system showing 11 unaddressed deficiencies, door key cards that don’t work and an elevator lacking inspection documentation;
- A Mira Mesa school with storage bins stacked so high they block the fire sprinklers, and fire hydrants and fire dampers lacking paperwork that shows they were serviced;
- A Hillcrest apartment building with sprinkler and fire alarm systems that have never been serviced; and,
- A Gaslamp Quarter hotel with a dozen violations, including unsecured canisters of carbon dioxide, broken exit signs and missing certifications for its smoke control and kitchen hood systems.
The point of safety inspections is to improve fire prevention and fire safety awareness. Building owners are only fined if they fail to fix fire code violations after receiving their third warning.
“It’s an opportunity for education — it’s not to say, ‘Gotcha,’” Tosca said.
A severe staffing shortage
The department is so far behind on inspections largely because it is severely understaffed, according to fire officials.
San Diego Fire-Rescue doesn’t have enough inspectors to inspect all the properties in its current inventory, let alone the other properties that are not yet in its inventory. As a result, the department relies on overtime to address its current inventory, Tosca said.
Tosca estimates he needs at least 10 more inspectors just to complete the annual inspections it’s required to complete by law — and that’s not including more inspectors he would need to find and inspect the rest of the city’s properties.
On top of that, Tosca estimates he needs at least five more hazmat inspectors, on top of the five the department currently has. Tosca said there used to be 16 hazmat inspectors before the pandemic, but the department has since had to shift some of them over to the state-mandated inspections.
But getting any additional staff is proving difficult this year, given the city is facing a $350 million budget deficit and is mulling layoffs. “It wouldn’t be prudent to ask for additional fire inspectors while other city departments are facing layoffs,” said Tosca. He did not request funding for more inspectors for this budget cycle.
San Diego Fire-Rescue not only needs additional inspectors but also at least five more staff for brush management in order to comply with a 2023 city audit that found the city failing in that area.
Mayor Todd Gloria has not proposed funding for any staffing increase for the department — not even the required brush management additions that Tosca did request — because of the budget shortfall.
Despite the staff shortage, however, officials said Fire-Rescue is on its way to increasing inspection rates.
Last year, the city granted the department funding for 11 additional inspectors — the biggest jump Tosca said he has ever seen.
As a result, Fire-Rescue is now projecting that by year end it will have a 70% completion rate for this year’s annual state-mandated inspections — an improvement over last year’s 42%.
“We don’t want to have what happened in Oakland happen in San Diego,” Tosca said. “We want headlines showing success and improvement, and I think we’ve been doing that, and we’ll get there.”
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