No sprinklers at site of deadly Las Vegas apartment fire

An apartment complex where a fire claimed two lives did not have automatic sprinklers, according to a Clark County spokesperson, but a fire official said they “would have saved lives.”

On the evening of July 28, a fire broke out in a building at the Riverbend Village Apartments on Spencer Street in central Las Vegas. Kameron Moore, 24, and Vincent Herrera, 23, were killed.

“We believe fire sprinklers, had they been in place, would have saved lives,” said Assistant Fire Chief Danny Horvat of the Clark County Fire Department.

County spokesperson Stephanie Wheatley said the property did not have sprinklers.

Horvat, who works in the fire prevention division, said Monday that the complex was not required to have sprinklers based on its age and code regulations when it was built in 1978. If it had been built after about 2000, it would have been required to have sprinklers.

A person reached by phone at a number for the complex declined to comment and referred media inquiries to Advanced Management Group, which did not respond to requests for comment.

Wheatley said the most recent fire inspection at the property, 18 months ago, did not find any issues.

Assistant Fire Chief Carlito Rayos said authorities are building a timeline and interviewing witnesses. He said the fire did not appear suspicious.

The cause of the fire is still undetermined, Wheatley said.

Sprinklers are generally set off by heat and operate automatically, according to Bob Sullivan, the southwest regional director for the National Fire Protection Association.

Horvat said sprinklers give residents time to escape before a fire gets too large. He compared them to having a firefighter on duty 24/7.

Yet buildings in Nevada do not need to be retrofitted to have them unless they’re high rises — buildings over 55 feet, according to Horvat. A building could also have to be retrofitted if its use changes, for instance from apartments to commercial, he said.

The state law for high rises was enacted after the MGM Grand and Hilton fires in the early 1980s, according to Horvat.

After the 2019 Alpine Motel fire, which killed six people, Clark County commissioners discussed requiring older buildings to be retrofitted with modern fire safety equipment.

Commissioner Tick Segerblom said in 2020 that he wanted county staffers to research the cost of retrofitting and how the county could subsidize it.

He also expressed concern about the impact of those costs on tenants.

“My concern is that if we did some retrofitting, it would raise the cost of the building so much that a lot of these low-income tenants wouldn’t be (able) to live there anymore,” he said at the time. “And we obviously don’t want to drive them out because we’re really limited in affordable housing.”

Segerblom said Monday that the Riverbend fire was in his district, but he doesn’t support requiring sprinklers to be installed in buildings that don’t have them.

Retrofitting is “just so expensive it’s really going to price those apartments out of the market,” he said.

Segerblom said he doesn’t know of any steps that have been taken to retrofit local buildings in the four years since the Alpine fire.

“If the political will is there, it can be done,” Horvat said of retrofitting buildings with sprinklers. “But obviously, retrofitting is more expensive” than installing sprinklers at the time of construction.

Milosh Puchovsky, a Worcester Polytechnic Institute professor who studies fire protection engineering, said sprinklers give residents more time to recognize that there’s a fire and escape it.

He thinks older buildings should be retrofitted to have sprinklers.

“I’m a sprinkler advocate because I believe they work,” he said.

Contact Noble Brigham at nbrigham@reviewjournal.com. Follow @BrighamNoble on X.