im posting this because ANY of you could find yourself in this same position. see
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for the details. the charges have since been dropped, but they NEVER should have happened to begin with. Now its my turn; civil action pending. for the record, i have asked for an apology and assurance that policy would be changed so that this cannot happen to anybody else. since the FD is unwilling to give me either, court action is the ONLY way i can bring change.
One is that fire inspectors tend to take their own interpretation of codes. Sometimes not at all meaning what the code says, but usually much more restrictive and difficult. They may even think they are doing the right thing, although exercising authority over other people does seem to be a prevailing trait in people who claim to be "serving" the community.
There is a whole class of contractor out there that looks for spec discrepancies and if they find any they low ball the bid knowing they will have the client by the short hairs on change orders. Being from the "east coast" I'm sure your property owners are quite aware of the way some contractors do business and immediately took steps to keep from having their short ones jerked.
If you were every introduced as the building or property manager, or manager was ever used in reference to you and your position you may be found more responsible than your real position.
I'm not a lawyer and I am not playing one on the internet. These comments are purely for conjecture and are worth less than you paid for them.
I think there's more to this than meets the eye. Consider the sequence of events. A local contractor's plans have been approved by the FD. Doubtless the local contractor has been around the area for some time and is acquainted with the FM like any contractor in a small city. Heck, they're probably friends.
After starting work the contractor tries to rip the customer off, tripling the price of the work. The customer rightly seeks to get away from said rip-off. If this situation was straight-up, no shenanigands, any FM in his right mind would have simply given the guy time to comply. Instead, this character comes down like a ton of bricks on whoever he finds on the site. Note that he's not doing anything to the local contractor whose actions caused the delay. He goes after the customer? Like that medical examiner said in the OJ trial, "Sump-sink wrong!"
I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but this really looks like the FM and the original contractor are in cahoots. There's no way he does this sort of thing regularly.
Most Fire Marshals are just decent guys trying to make sure we do our jobs according to code and that nobody gets burned up. Some of them can be unreasonable. A few are a royal pain, lording it over people to feed their egos. But this situation is so far beyond outrageous it stinks of collusion. I hope I'm wrong about this because if the FM really is corrupt then this customer is going to have to fight in court for what should have been a routine matter.
I think a call to the appropriate states attorney generals office should be made on this one as well as state firemarshal or who ever the FM answers to.
when the FM mandated the property in question go under fire watch he asked me to put my name on the field marked "Responsible Party". i politely told him "no" and explained to him that i was in fact NOT responsible for ANYthing on the property. this was a month prior to being cited for failure to comply with IFC.
heh....you are not the first to suggest this, sir. i didnt want to say it because i didnt want to lead the conversation in any particular direction to see where it goes on its own. without exception, every time this has been discussed this possibility is brought up.
I think so, too. However, first things first. This is, after all, an electronic security related newsgroup. Perhaps the gentleman should look at his options in the area of covert video recording prior to his next meeting with the local FM and/or the contractor who pulled this stunt.
Just a thought. I don't want to turn this into a plug for my website so I won't mention that I sell CCTV equipment... :^)
I just tried it yesterday and the damn battery was already dead from having it unplugged for 24 hrs. I charged it for a minute, then managed about 5 seconds of video. It was very sharp and the audio was good too. I put it on a USB port of my PC to charge and I'll try again.
I've read about it on the web (some review) that it will drain the battery in 24 hour of no use.. better keep it connected on the computer all the time;-)
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