~"St. Louis city officials said the Center was a 'firetrap' without a single working fire detector"
The Rev. Larry Rice is an outspoken advocate for the homeless in Missouri and a political gadfly of sorts. Rice runs the New Life Evangelistic Center in St. Louis which is among the leading homeless advocates in the state. And in many ways, Rice is a thorn in the side of political leaders.
A fire heavily damaged his homeless center last week. No one was injured in the early morning blaze. But the real damage is not the fire but the fire storm of words that has erupted since the fire.
St. Louis city officials said the Center was a "firetrap" without a single working fire detector. Rice countered with a libel lawsuit to defend the honor of his Center. Rice says that city officials are wrong - there were ample fire detectors and a fully operational sprinkler system. To defend his Center, Rice has filed the libel lawsuit though it's doubtful the action will have much in the way of results.
Here's where it gets interesting to me. The city has released a report from January and last week that said the center had inoperable smoke detectors, inoperable emergency and exit lighting, a missing sprinkler system in the basement (where the fire began), and overcrowding with people sleeping in the lobby and blocking exits.
So either Rice or the city is not telling the truth. Or that's how it appears to me from my limited knowledge of this incident.
The city says that Rice has "put people's lives in danger and he's trying to shift the blame away from his own negligence". Those are pretty tough words unless they can be proven. And I'd be willing to bet that someone will end up with egg on their face when the facts surface.
Rice - ever the man anxious to be in the headlines - did have one parting shot that left us cold. Rice has spoken against the proposal to have public funding for a new downtown stadium for the St. Louis Cardinals. So Rice is trying to assert that someone set the fire deliberately because of his public stance on this issue.
I doubt seriously that Larry Rice's voice is so powerful that someone thought it needed to be silenced on the stadium issue. That flies in the face of logic and common sense. To suggest that his opposition is somehow so crucial that someone would want him damaged falls short of acceptable to me.
This is one fire investigation that may shine the light not just on the damaged building but on the director of that building as well. Either Larry Rice is right and the city is wrong. Or the city is right and Larry Rice has many questions to answer.