ASHLAND — It’s hard for Captain Mark Miller, who is in charge of fire prevention at the Ashland Fire Department, to go anywhere.
When he steps into a building, he can’t help but notice fire code violations that he’s spent years finding as an inspector at AFD.
“Once you kind of see these things, it’s hard to unsee them,” he said.
The most common violations he finds are emergency exit signs that don’t light up, sprinklers that haven’t been tested, combustibles close to heat sources, and buildings that don’t have addresses visible from the street.
In 2021, Miller and the AFD conducted 311 fire inspections out of 553 commercial buildings in Ashland, according to data from Ashland’s water department.
AFD tries to get every building inspected once every two years, but some can go un-inspected longer than that, Miller said.
Since the department can’t get around to every building every year, AFD focuses on required inspections of licensed facilities like daycares, foster homes, and schools, and then it targets buildings with a higher likelihood of fires, like warehouses.
The AFD also inspects every food truck at Balloonfest and the Ashland County fair, in addition to lengthy, sometimes 20-hour inspections on Ashland’s many new construction projects.
There are 10 firefighters at the Ashland Fire Department that are allowed to perform fire inspections. One of them is the fire chief who “doesn’t really do a lot of inspections himself,” another is a shift captain who also doesn’t often find himself pen-in-hand, inspecting buildings.
Of the remaining eight inspectors, only two conduct them regularly; Capt. Mark Miller, who handles inspections of new construction, and Capt. Ben Burr, who focuses on annual inspections of businesses.
“I’ve been here 23 years. And it’s almost always been an army of one,” Miller said of his role.
The main problem with getting more inspectors is the staffing required. It takes months or years of training for a firefighter to join the force and then at least a few more years before they’re ready to do inspections, Miller said.
“Our staff that are inspectors are typically inspectors or firefighters that have been on a shift or operating on a crew for five years, probably minimum,” he said.
“I mean, if I look at our list of inspectors, every one on that list is probably in that (category) maybe even more like seven to eight-plus years. We’ve got guys on here that are 15 years, 20 years.”
Even if a firefighter has been on the force long enough to become an inspector, every staff member assigned to inspections is one less out in the field, fighting fires.
“So, we may have 10 or 11 people on a shift and you go, ‘Hey, we’ll use one or two of those to do inspections,’ but those guys are doing 12, 15, 20 calls a day. So it’s very difficult to kind of balance how we can do more,” Miller said.
When an inspector goes into a building, they look for a number of violations outlined in the Ohio Fire Code, a hefty 677-page collection of regulations that takes up a significant portion of Capt. Miller’s bookshelf.
The fire code is “built around tragedies” and designed to protect property and lives, Miller said.
“So, historically, when there’s been a large loss of life, or a large loss of property, the industry, this is going back, what I would say is more than 100 years, whether it’s insurance companies, or the fire service, or things like that, they look at these large losses of life. And they go, what can we do to prevent those in the future?” he said.
