JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The Jacksonville Beach Fire Marshal says the mixed-use building that caught on fire on Sunday did not have working smoke alarms.
Now, Charles Mcninch, who lost his home, business, two cats and a bird in the fire, is looking to see if he has a legal case.
“This is a piggy bank for him, and it’s cost me everything in the end,” said Mcninch, referring to the property owner.
Mcninch says he’s lived in the building off 3rd Street South for just a year, but has been running his business, Black Label Tattoo & Piercing, there for seven years.
He says he was in the middle of tattooing a client Sunday when his neighbors rushed downstairs and began banging on his door.
“He said, ‘There’s a fire.’ I went into straight panic mode,” Mcninch said. “Only thing I could think about was my animals.”
Blink camera footage shared with Action News Jax from another tenant, Stacy Rogers, captures the panic.
In the video, you can hear yelling, running and banging.
But what you don’t hear is a smoke alarm.
“The smoke alarms weren’t working,” Mcninch said.
Mcninch says this is just one of the many issues with the building he’s brought up to the property owner before.
“He’s like, ‘oh, well, they should work,’ and then that’s been it,” Mcninch said. “There’s nothing, nothing taken care of, nothing done.”
Jacksonville Beach Fire Marshal Steve Sciotto says residential buildings are required by code to have operational smoke alarms in each unit.
He says the responsibility of making sure the smoke alarms work is shared between the property owner and the tenant, but it ultimately falls back on the owner to complete routine inspections.
“When we do our inspection of the building, we need something back, telling [us] that you’ve checked the smoke alarms and they operate,” Sciotto said. “That we have not had, we do not have a current letter from them saying that.”
Sciotto says had the fire happened at night, things could’ve been a lot worse.
“Nighttime could have been a terrible story,” Sciotto said. “People could have died because of the lack of working smoke alarms.”
He said that the building also did not have a sprinkler system, but since it was built in the 1950s, it was not code at the time.
“If they did any major repairs like they’re going to have to do, [it] could trip the fire sprinkler code,” Sciotto said. “There’ll be a lot that has to be done to this building to bring it up to code.”
Sciotto said the Jacksonville Beach Fire Marshal’s Office is still investigating the fire’s cause, but it appears to have started with a cord-related electrical issue and does not seem to stem from the building’s wiring.
He did say, however, that opening doors and windows during a fire can make it intensify quickly, and in this case, the open second-floor door acted like a chimney, drawing the fire up in that direction.
“We just want to make sure the public realizes working smoke alarms do make a difference, and closed doors help,” Sciotto said. “We’re lucky we had no fire fatalities on this one.
Action News Jax reached out to the property owners to address the allegations, but we have not heard back.
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