E ven as fire raced through a six-family apartment building in Beverly the day after Christmas, several neighbors said they had heard about potential problems with the structure's electrical wiring.
When smoke cleared from the heavily damaged Cabot Street building, an electrician from the city's inspections department found wiring changes throughout the top floor that he said were of questionable quality and would not have passed inspection.
Yet city officials could find no records indicating that anyone had ever inspected the century-old structure, despite a state law requiring multifamily buildings be inspected at least once every five years. No wiring permits were found, either. The state fire marshal's office has since concluded that the fire was probably caused by an electrical malfunction.
Two other century-old buildings had been destroyed by fires earlier in the month. Less than two weeks before the Beverly blaze, fire roared through an apartment building in downtown Gloucester. One resident died, and the 25-unit complex was destroyed, along with the city's only synagogue. Gloucester officials could find no record that the required five-year safety inspection had been conducted. A week before, fire had gutted a 17-unit condominium building in Haverhill. There, too, officials said they had no record that the state-mandated inspection had been completed.
Precisely how many municipal inspections departments are meeting state mandates is unclear. The head of the state agency that oversees local departments said he didn't have the answer because his agency is too short-staffed to conduct thorough reviews - a refrain heard from building commissioners in Beverly, Gloucester, and Haverhill.
"We have several hundred multifamily units and two full-time inspectors to inspect them, and that's in addition to schools, nightclubs, restaurants, and all the new construction," said Steven Frederickson, Beverly's building commissioner, who took the job six months ago.
Frederickson's counterpart's in Gloucester and Haverhill say they face a similarly lopsided equation, with hundreds of buildings to oversee, at least a dozen different types of inspections that must be performed, and just a handful of staff, including electrical, plumbing, and health inspectors, to do the job.
The state has completed only six full department reviews in the past four years, said Rob Anderson, chief of inspections for the Massachusetts Board of Building Regulations and Standards. State law mandates that Anderson's agency do "periodic reviews of all local building inspection practices," but does not stipulate the frequency of those reviews.
"Based on our staffing and manpower, we decided [reviews] would be complaint-driven as to when a full department review be done, and instead . . . we try to lend a hand and try to resolve what the complaint or complaints might be and continue to offer education through district meetings," Anderson said.
Anderson's agency has received 106 complaints in the past four years about local departments that resulted in "some review," he said, including the six full studies in Dennis, Easthampton, Groveland, Merrimac, Westford, and Wilmington.
In Beverly, rows of file cabinets are crammed full of papers containing decades of data, but there is no computer system to store and track it. Frederickson said his department is in the process of going digital, with hand-held devices that will allow inspectors to instantly call up data about buildings from the field.
The problem, however, is that someone has to first enter the department's data. In addition, a lot of basic information is missing, said Frederickson, who has spent weeks since his arrival driving the city, street by street, to create a master list of all buildings with fire escapes. Part of the state's complex code requires building owners to furnish proof to local departments that their fire escapes and exterior stairways have been inspected by a licensed engineer at least once every five years.
"I'm told that my predecessor sent out letters saying they needed to fill out applications and schedule inspections, and I think we got very few responses," Frederickson said.
In Gloucester, building department chief William Sanborn thinks he was the last staffer to complete a full inspection of the Lorraine apartment complex that was gutted by fire Dec. 14. Sanborn said he remembers that inspection was in 1998, shortly after he started with the department. But he could not find that 1998 record in the building's folder or in the department's computer system.
The five-year review checks a variety of health and safety issues, including whether a building's exits and fire escapes are blocked; that emergency lighting and sprinkler systems are working; and that building owners have proof of working fire alarm systems.
The Lorraine file did include a December 2004 letter from Gloucester's inspectional services department to the landlord indicating that the building was due for its five-year review, and that the landlord, 80 Middle Street Partners of Winchester, was required to contact the office within seven days to schedule an appointment. The file did not contain any indication that the landlord complied with the order, or that the inspections department ever followed up.
The file did, however, contain several records about renovations since 2000, but few indications of required follow-up inspections. For example, the records show a permit granted in September 2006 for new electrical wiring in Apartment 2, but no record of an inspection afterward. Sanborn said his department does not have a uniform method for recording follow-up inspections. Some of his inspectors note their follow-up on the back of a permit, while others enter the information into the computer, he said.
"We have a new software program to connect all the city departments, and if it gets up and running it would solve a lot of our problems," Sanborn said.
Unlike Gloucester and Beverly, the computer system in Haverhill's inspectional services department is able to provide staffers with detailed information, including dates of inspections, permits granted, fees paid, and other issues that may have been flagged by various city departments.
Still, Haverhill officials said they lack the staffing to complete safety inspections every five years. Instead, the department relies on collaboration between several city agencies, including the health and fire departments, to alert each other about potential safety problems.
"Someone from one of these departments is usually in these buildings," said Bonnie Dufresne, manager of Haverhill's Health and Inspection Services.
Computer records do show several visits in the past two years by various inspectors to follow up on resident complaints at the Emerson Street condominium complex that went up in flames Dec. 6.
Yet officials say it's an open question whether compliance with state-mandated inspections would have prevented the electrical malfunction that ignited Beverly's fire, or mitigated damage in Haverhill or Gloucester. The state fire marshal's office concluded that an unattended candle sparked the Haverhill blaze. At press time, the marshal had not announced the cause of Gloucester's deadly fire.
Kay Lazar can be reached at klazar@globe.com.
