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Mobile home safety rules elusive
The wind-driven Sayre Fire was so fierce that firefighters were pelted with softball-size chunks of burning debris as they struggled against the flames that eventually consumed nearly 500 homes at the Oakridge Mobile Home Park, officials recalled at a recent meeting. The ferocity of this and other recent mobile home park blazes has drawn new attention to safety measures at parks across California and prompted lawmakers to propose stricter regulations. But the battle could be slow-going because any significant changes to mobile home park rules would require action on the part of local, state and federal authorities who govern different aspects of the parks. State Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Van Nuys, has introduced SB 23, which calls for mobile home parks to come up with evacuation plans and training for disasters like the recent wildfires that destroyed two San Fernando Valley mobile home parks. Stories surfaced about elderly or disabled people barely making it out of the Oakridge park before their homes burned. "We shouldn't rely on luck to make sure people are evacuated from mobile home parks in instances like this," Padilla said. The senator doesn't expect the bill to be controversial. "I can't imagine there would be any opposition," he said. "We hear anecdotally that a lot of parks already have their plans in place." There are about 125 mobile home parks throughout the San Fernando, Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys, according to state records, ranging in size from 10 units to the 600 that Oakridge had before the fire. Most of them are clustered in the northeast San Fernando Valley around hillsides and areas with heavy brush that are particularly vulnerable to wildfires. The state housing department is also considering new fireproofing requirements for mobile homes, but officials worry residents of existing manufactured homes wouldn't be able to pay up to $15,000 to have them retrofitted. "Lots of people who live in mobile home parks are old and may not have funds for this," said John Tennyson, a consultant to the state Senate committee on manufactured housing. "In some cases you're going to force these people out of their homes if they can't afford it." Glenn Bell, president of the Sylmar-based Neighborhood Friends advocacy group for mobile homeowners, said the state should require retrofitting at park owners' expense. The state would be more aggressive to protect owners of manufactured homes "if these were million-dollar condos on the other side of the tracks, so to speak," he said. Legislators also should address concerns that many mobile home parks don't have enough fire hydrants or exits, nor do they offer a way for emergency crews to find disabled or bedridden residents, he argued. "How do you take a society's oldest and weakest and treat them like this?" Bell said. One reform scenario envisions restrictions imposed on new homes as residents eventually give up their old ones, which could take decades. Even if lawmakers were to enact immediate, sweeping mobile home reforms, enforcement could be difficult. The California housing department employs 52 inspectors throughout the state who primarily focus on making sure most of California's 4,700 mobile home parks - with their 356,165 lots - are abiding by state laws, said Chris Anderson, chief of field operations. Local government officials can take over enforcement of the state laws at the parks if they want, but only a handful do, Anderson said. City and county governments have control over zoning and rent control. The state government must approve of any modifications or additions to a mobile home's structure. The federal government, meanwhile, has a say on the specifications to which mobile homes are manufactured. Officials have scheduled a mobile home safety hearing for Jan. 6 in the San Fernando Valley, though the exact time and place have not yet been determined, Tennyson said. brandon.lowrey@dailynews.com 818-713-3699 http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_11227665 |
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