No sprinklers installed before Holyoke fires — and none required

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Around 8 a.m. on Dec. 2, 2025, Glorisel Cordero was making scrambled eggs for her three children when she smelled something.

“Like a faint, sweet burning plastic,” she said. “Maybe a minute later, the alarms started going off in the hallways.”

A neighbor outside her family’s second-floor apartment at 733 High St. screamed that there was a fire.

“I opened the door, and it was very heavy, thick, blackish-gray smoke already coming up into the hallways,” she said. “I quickly slammed the door.”

Cordero grabbed her keys and herded her children out the back door, down the stairs, and across the street.

“I deal with anxiety, and I had to work really hard not to get a panic attack because I had my kids,” she said.

The three-alarm fire at 733 High St., connected to 27 Franklin St., broke out nearly 16 hours after a fire about a half-mile away at 131 Roberto Clemente St. Both four-story, early-1900s apartment buildings were left uninhabitable, according to Holyoke Fire Department Capt. David Rex.

Jeffrey Trask, the city’s emergency management director, said the two fires displaced between 120 and 130 people. About 36 to 40 apartments were affected. 

“While it is tragic that dozens lost their homes, we are thankful that no one was injured or lost a life,” Rex said.

He credited working alarm systems that warned residents in time to escape.

Neither building, however, had an automatic sprinkler system, according to fire department incident reports obtained through public records requests. Rex and Holyoke Building Commissioner Leslie Ward said Massachusetts law did not require sprinklers at either property. 

Rex said the same rules apply to many of the city’s older apartment buildings.

“It makes me angry,” Cordero said. “I feel like sprinklers should be a mandatory thing.”

After the fire, Virgilio Property Management, which manages Cordero’s former building, paid for her family’s hotel costs for more than a week until they found a new apartment a few blocks away.

“I don’t know if it’s something we’ll ever really be able to fix,” Cordero said in mid-December, describing lingering fear in her daughters, 14 and 10, and her 7-year-old son. “My son is scared to be alone, even in the daytime.”

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Fire sprinklers are meant to control a blaze in its early stages and buy people time to get out. Research shows they sharply reduce fire deaths and limit how far flames spread. But they are not a guarantee. In Amherst, town officials said the Olympia Drive fire in November started at a nearby construction site and spread to an occupied apartment building. They said sprinklers were activated, but the system was designed to suppress fires that start inside the building and was not effective against a blaze of that size that began outside.

Investigators with the Massachusetts Department of Fire Services have not determined the exact cause of either Holyoke fire but expect to wrap up the investigations in the next few weeks, according to agency spokesperson Jake Wark. They said the blaze at 733 High St. and 27 Franklin St. began in a first-floor bedroom, where they found a power strip plugged into a multi-plug adapter amid numerous electrical wires. They said the other fire started in a second-floor apartment at 131 Roberto Clemente St., but clutter and damage made it difficult to pinpoint an exact origin.

“Investigators are looking at accidental causes in both, but they have multiple potential factors, and they are trying to narrow them down,” Wark wrote in a Jan. 7 email. Rex said arson had been ruled out, and investigators were also considering discarded smoking materials in the Clemente Street fire, though the damage made it difficult to be certain.

Harrison Bonner, who represents the ownership group tied to 131 Clemente St., said upgrades beyond what code requires, including sprinklers, can demand “substantial structural work and financing.”

At 733 High St. and 27 Franklin St., Greg Virgilio, an owner representative and president of Virgilio Property Management, said sprinklers were not installed because of cost.

“[It’s] prohibitively expensive,” he wrote in an email. “The people who live in these apartments … often fall behind in rent as it is. If the cost of sprinklers is added to the rent, most simply could not afford it.”

In 1996, Holyoke opted into a state law that requires sprinklers in residential buildings with four or more units if they are newly constructed or “substantially rehabilitated so as to constitute the equivalent of new construction.” However, neither of the properties in question has seen upgrades that would meet the standard, Ward wrote to The Shoestring.

“I went back to 1933 on 131 Clemente and 1959 on the 727-733 High Street property,” she wrote. “The improvements to the buildings have been on the level of a new roof, rebuilding the porches, the occasional refacing of the facade and some minor alterations to interior spaces.”

Rex said the same limits apply across much of Holyoke’s older housing stock, but neither he nor Ward could say precisely how many older buildings lack sprinklers.

“At this point, I would say we have a few dozen buildings that are in the same situation,” he explained in a Dec. 15 email.

Debate over the application of the sprinkler law in Holyoke even made it to the state’s Supreme Judicial Court in 2016. In that case, Robert MacLaurin, a property owner, sued the city after the fire chief ordered sprinklers during rehabilitation work on two vacant, abandoned apartment buildings.

The court sided with MacLaurin and said the state sprinkler law’s “equivalent of new construction” language sets a strict standard, requiring renovations “considerably more extensive” than “major alterations” before sprinklers can be required. It said the work must be so substantial that the building is “in essence as good as new.”

Michael Joanis, the chief operating officer of the National Fire Sprinkler Association, said most apartment renovations don’t meet that standard, leaving many older buildings without sprinklers.

“Right now, the threshold is really high,” he said. “I mean, you basically have to completely take that building apart, put it back together.”

National Fire Protection Association research found that the civilian fire death rate per 1,000 reported fires was about 90% lower in properties with automatic sprinkler systems than in those without. The association also found that when sprinklers are present, fire spread is confined to the room or object of origin in about 94% of reported structure fires, compared with about 70% without an automatic sprinkler system. 

Arguments over sprinkler requirements often come down to cost. The National Fire Sprinkler Association points to retrofit examples it says show that sprinkler installations can be added in occupied buildings, including a 180-unit high-rise in Philadelphia, where installation was estimated at about $2,866 per unit. But Joanis said retrofits can be “expensive” and “a huge mountain to climb” for many owners, with costs ranging from “$2 to $10 a square foot,” depending on factors like water supply and asbestos. The association’s guide also lists three low-rise, three-story projects at roughly $13,800 per unit.

“It’s cheaper than your granite countertops. It’s cheaper than going in and putting all new carpet in,” Joanis said. “But … it’s a significant investment.”

Doug Quattrochi, the executive director of MassLandlords, said adding sprinklers can keep some renovation projects from moving forward, especially for small landlords. He estimated a retrofit can cost $10,000 to $30,000 per project, including new water service lines and connections.

“It’s not that we’re flush with cash and we’re refusing to pay out,” Quattrochi said. “It’s not that people don’t want to have a nice modern apartment with all the latest safety features; it’s that we can’t.”

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The fight also plays out at the State House, where real estate interests have resisted bills to require sprinklers. 

The state’s lobbying database, however, does not show exactly how much any group spent on a single bill. The filings report what groups paid in lobbyists’ salaries and fees during a year. Debra O’Malley, a spokesperson for the Office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth, said lobbyists must disclose their activity and, when practicable, list bill numbers and positions. Many filings, she said, use broad topics that “can be very vague,” or cite large measures like the annual budget bill, making bill-by-bill searches incomplete.

One proposal, House bill 2289, would let cities and towns require sprinklers in new one- and two-family homes. The Massachusetts Association of Realtors, the Greater Boston Real Estate Board and the Home Builders and Remodelers Association of Massachusetts, which tagged the bill in state filings, reported paying about $447,000 in total lobbyist salaries and fees in 2023 and about $435,000 in 2024, state records show. Those totals are not bill-specific, and the disclosures do not make clear whether a group supported or opposed a bill, though the Home Builders and Remodelers Association of Massachusetts testified against H.2289.

Fire service and fire-safety groups reported about $233,000 in lobbying in 2023 and about $211,000 in 2024. Those totals are not tied to any single bill, and none of the groups tagged H.2289 in their filings. The Fire Chiefs Association of Massachusetts and local fire officials backed the measure in committee testimony.

After passing the House in June 2024, H.2289 was sent to the Senate Committee on Rules, where it saw no further action. Former Rep. Ruth Balser, a Newton Democrat, was one of the bill’s sponsors. She attributed the stalemate to politics. 

“As I understand it, the Senate president has consistently sided with the real estate industry, rather than with the fire professionals,” Balser said.

A spokesperson for Senate President Karen Spilka said the bill “did not receive enough broad support to advance past the Rules committee last session.” Asked whether the committee took a formal vote or recorded any tally, Spilka’s office and the office of Sen. Joan Lovely, the committee chair, did not provide details.

Campaign finance records compiled by OpenSecrets list real estate among the top donor industries to Spilka’s campaign committee. The industry ranked sixth in 2023 with $7,300 and fifth in 2024 with $7,700, according to the site. The donations do not show whether contributions affected the bill’s path, and Spilka’s office did not address the figures when asked for comment.

Cordero, meanwhile, said the fire cost her family nearly everything: clothes, books and keepsakes, including irreplaceable photos of her mother. She said her daughter’s school tablet was ruined, and for a while, she and her husband thought they had lost their cat, Binx. He was found alive two weeks after the fire, hiding in a closet.

“I really think that it shouldn’t matter how old the buildings are. You want the safety. These are people’s lives living there,” she said. “I understand it might bring up the cost of rent, but our cost of rent went up, and we didn’t see anything change because of it. So I don’t understand why they can’t just suck it up and just do it. In the long run, it might save the building, and it will cost them less when it comes to fixing the damages.”

Records Cordero provided show that on Aug. 1, 2025, the rent for her three-bedroom apartment increased from $1,195 to $1,245 a month. Asked about the increase, Virgilio pointed to rising operating costs, but did not provide specifics.

“The market rent for a 3 Br apartment with heat and hot water is $$1395 and up,” he wrote in an email. “Why didn’t she have renters insurance?”

Cordero confirmed her family didn’t have renters’ insurance before the fire but has it now for $30 a month.

Federal housing data shows higher rents in the area than Virgilio described. In Holyoke’s 01040 ZIP code, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development lists the fiscal 2026 small-area fair market rent for a three-bedroom apartment at $2,110 a month, a figure used to help set voucher payments.

Despite the fire, Cordero said her family’s new apartment does not have sprinklers, either, and she has rarely seen them in Holyoke unless a building is brand new. Asked whether she could prioritize fire suppression systems when searching for a new home, she was blunt.

“Unfortunately, we can’t,” she said. “We can’t be picky at all.”

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