Part 3: Writing their own rules

In the predawn hours of Aug. 14, 2004, a fire swept through the Twin Spruce home for the elderly near Sunbury, Pa.

Of the 43 frail residents, three - two women and a man - didn't make it out alive.

One of the two Twin Spruce employees on duty that night, a recent hire, told state regulators that she had never participated in a fire drill. She said she had been briefed for a total of five minutes on the home's evacuation plan.

Both employees wrongly believed that the home's fire alarm automatically notified the fire department, a mistake that delayed firefighters' arrival by at least 20 minutes.

It didn't have to happen that way.

More than two years before, in March 2002, stronger regulations for personal-care homes had been formally proposed in Harrisburg.

Under the rules, all homes would have been required to thoroughly train new employees about emergency exit procedures on their first working day. Within five days of a new hire, the home would have been required to hold a fire drill.

These proposals were grounded in bitter experience: At least 55 people died in personal-care-home fires statewide from 1983 to 2002 - part of a larger record of abuse, neglect and preventable deaths in Pennsylvania's assisted-living industry.

But at the time Twin Spruce burned, those new regulations had been discarded, beaten back by intense pressure from the personal-care industry and its allies in the Pennsylvania legislature. And Gov. Rendell, who took office in January 2003, had not gotten around to proposing his own version.

He eventually did, three months after the fire. His rules finally became effective in October 2005.

But the provision requiring new-employee fire drills was gone - removed at the industry's request.

The new regulations were far better than the old ones, experts agree - featuring more stringent fire-safety provisions, tougher staff-training requirements and other improvements.

However, they were weakened significantly by legislators and the Rendell administration after an intense lobbying campaign by the industry, an Inquirer investigation has found.

"Nobody's fighting for these little people," said House Speaker Dennis O'Brien (R., Phila.), who opposed weakening the rules.

O'Brien, in an interview before he became speaker, added: "I think it's campaign contributions and lobbyists. It's an inside game."

In one of its largest concessions, the administration agreed to exempt existing homes from some of the new rules. Homes open before October 2005 aren't required to have fire-retardant mattresses and more qualified staff, for example.

The Department of Public Welfare, which regulates assisted-living homes, also agreed to:

A moratorium on enforcing the new regulations - or levying any fines, including for violations of the old rules - for a year.

A host of exemptions for 20 percent of the state's personal-care homes, those that house fewer than nine residents. Small homes escaped requirements to have interconnected fire alarms, walkie-talkies for emergencies, and evacuation diagrams.