Ordinance needed on smoke detectors

March 28, 2012

Washington, Iowa

To the Editor:

I am writing this to let the people of Washington know about two safety items that I brought up at the council meeting last week. For some reason The Journal decided it was not newsworthy. The first one was about the building in the 200 block of North Iowa that was moved in last year and just last week the door on the north side of the building was torn off. This made a dangerous safety issue for children and anyone else who might go in. The door was just stuck back on only fastening it on the bottom. This needs to be blocked up with a wall.

Second item is that smoke detectors in all apartment houses need to be hard-wired. The current code calls for hard-wires only in new and remodeled apartments and homes. Many people have been killed in homes with no working smoke detectors. The Journal reported a while back about a five-apartment house on East Third and North Second that caught fire, that had no working detectors. I feel we need to have an ordinance to cover this.

Ed Gray