Who’s at fault for Richmond fire? Code violations date back years
RICHMOND, Ind. — The fire is out, the smoke is gone, chemicals are no longer in the air and formerly displaced residents have been moving back into their homes over the last week or so. While plenty still face challenges, the road to recovery, as well as back to normalcy, is underway.
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In this new reality — one that doesn’t have a black cloud of smoke looming over the city threatening the safety of its citizens — we can start to answer the question seemingly everyone has been asking since the fire started April 11: Whose fault is it?
As far as Richmond city officials are concerned, the answer has been clear from day one.
“Everything that’s ensued here — the fire, the damages, the risk our first responders have taken and the risk our citizens are under — is the responsibility of that negligent business owner,” Richmond Mayor Dave Snow said during a press conference April 12, the morning after the fire started.
That business owner’s name is Seth Smith. He runs My Way Trading, a recycling company that packages and resells plastics. Smith had not responded to requests from the Pal-Item for comment as of Tuesday morning.
And just so we’re clear, day one of the “Who’s at fault?” debate wasn’t April 11; it was four years ago.
In September 2019, Richmond’s city building commissioner and fire prevention chief presented to the Unsafe Building Commission results from a May 2019 inspection at multiple parcels on NW F Street, the ones that burned down earlier this month. Those results revealed several fire and building code violations, including materials sitting too close to property lines, no easy access to the parcels for Richmond Fire Department (RFD) vehicles, roof damage, a lack of utilities and sprinkler system and more.
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In October 2019, the Unsafe Building Commission ordered Smith to clean up the property within 60 days. In response to Smith’s claim that it would be impossible to do so in that time, city officials said they would give him leeway as long as he showed progress toward making the necessary changes.
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In November 2019, Smith requested a review of the order in Wayne County Circuit Court and listed several reasons why it should be overturned, one being that his properties weren’t unsafe.
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With this pushback, city officials realized dealing with this fire hazard would take longer than anticipated.
“It’s very frustrating for all of us,” RFD Chief Tim Brown said during a press conference the night the fire started. “We knew it wasn’t a matter of if; it was a matter of when this was going to happen.”
In March 2020, a Wayne County judge sided with the Unsafe Building Commission, upholding the cleanup order.
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“The city didn’t create this problem, and when it became aware of the magnitude of the issue, it immediately began the unsafe building process, and there was the ensuing litigation,” Richmond City Attorney AJ Sickmann said during an April 13 press conference. “As far as legal responsibility is concerned, from a legal perspective, that remains with the property owner, and the court documents reflect that.”
As Smith continued to stand his ground, the city began a lengthy process to bypass Smith in cleaning up the My Way Trading complex. Sickmann explained this process during the April 13 press conference:
Later in 2020, the city secured two of the parcels through a tax sale process to eliminate interference by Smith. Then, it began the process of getting a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to help identify and categorize the materials; in a previous Pal-Item article, Smith stated he had over 12 million pounds of plastic in one of his buildings. After that, the city came to an agreement with Smith that he could continue to sell his materials as long as he didn’t bring any more in, that being a way of removing them.
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It was a process that took a lot of time, and it wasn’t as if the city could just go in and start removing the materials itself because First Bank had security interest on all of it.
“It was hard to specify a deadline because this was a massive undertaking. If you’ve seen the aerial photographs of the size of this site, there’s a lot of material there,” Sickmann said. “Our deadline was just as fast as possible. We wanted to make sure we were continuing to work diligently on this …
“The city, as soon as it had the legal ability to do so, began the process of remediating. It’s just such a massive amount of materials.”
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That’s why, once the fire started, it spread quicker than RFD could control it. City officials sounded strong and confident in their case against Smith during the week of the fire. At the time, that wasn’t their main concern — it was putting out the fire and making sure everyone was safe — but they did make it clear where they stand.
“When someone makes this colossal of a mess, our intention was always to not let that mess end up in the laps of taxpayers,” Snow said. “It’s his mess. It’s been shown again and again that this is his mess, his responsibility, his money to clean it up, and it was all to avoid this type of disaster … and here we are today.”
Zach Piatt is a reporter for The Palladium-Item. Contact him at zpiatt@gannett.com or on Twitter @zachpiatt13.
This article originally appeared on Richmond Palladium-Item: Who’s at fault for Richmond fire? Code violations date back years
