Friday, March 12, 1999 | 11:42 a.m.
Clark County building inspectors have ordered the builder of the $1.5 billion Venetian hotel-casino to prove the walls in its suites are safe before the megaresort can open.
The walls don't conform with building-code guidelines brought to the attention of the county by a fired employee who is now suing the construction company, officials said.
The Venetian issued a statement today saying its life-safety consultant, Rolf Jensen & Associates Inc., has issued an opinion that the walls "meet both the letter and the intent of" the Uniform Building Code.
Therefore, the statement said, "This matter will not delay the opening of the Venetian, since all construction is per code and applicable."
A spokesman for the construction manager, Lehrer McGovern Bovis Inc. (LMB) said the company will argue that county inspectors have already approved the disputed work.
A county official, however, said that doesn't constitute sufficient proof the walls are safe.
County building inspectors issued a correction notice this week after the International Conference of Building Officials said walls separating suites at the Venetian don't comply with the Uniform Building Code adopted by all 50 states.
In particular, the ICBO said the code requires electrical outlet boxes on opposite sides of walls between rooms to be separated by at least 24 inches. The purpose of the separation is to ensure the integrity of the walls' resistance to fire.
An LMB spokesman acknowledged that electrical outlet boxes in some suites don't meet the UBC guidelines. The Venetian has 3,036 suites, but the spokesman didn't have information on the number of nonconforming walls. Independent sources said the number could be in the thousands.
"Because of the architect's design, they wanted to have a data port in each room," LMB spokesman Sam Singer said Thursday. "In some instances, there are less than 24 inches of separation, and the determination was made that to meet safety codes, they'd have to put in fire pads."
Singer said LMB and the Venetian's architects, the Stubbins Associates of Boston, "are submitting to the county documentation that shows LMB and its subcontractors put fire putty pads behind the outlet boxes, each and every one of them."
"All this material has been approved by the county's on-site inspector as the building was being constructed, so it already has approval from the county," Singer said.
"This is nothing new and not a big deal and won't affect construction or opening of the hotel," he said. "No one has any reason to believe this submittal won't be approved.
"The county's on-site inspector has signed off on each floor with the knowledge that there was a variance there but knowing it was a safe variance," Singer said. "So LMB and the architects will provide the documents showing that."
But the county said the contractor will have to provide more than documents signed by an on-site inspector.
"That's not going to work," said Ron Lynn, assistant director of the county's building-inspection department. "They have a correction notice on them.
"We cannot approve through error or omission or conscious action anything that's illegal or wrong," he said. "The obligation for meeting the code is on the contractor. And if we have an impasse, we won't issue a certificate of occupancy.
"It's true we do inspections there, but we could have made a mistake," Lynn said. "And they have a legal obligation to comply with the code."
The county's correction notice says the 1994 Uniform Building Code requires the 24-inch separation but that the Venetian's South Tower room walls "are not in compliance with this section. Call for a reinspection when the discrepancies have been corrected."
"They have to address that," Lynn said. "They did put putty on the back of the outlet boxes, but I don't know what kind of putty it is. They may actually be OK if they got the right putty, but they've got to prove it.
"If they simply come back and say, 'Hey, you guys didn't notice until too late,' that's not going to work. I'm going to assume they're going to studiously address this situation in a professional manner."
Lynn said that means LMB or Stubbins "will have to conduct an analysis based on what's actually there and compare it with a wall built with 24-inch separations, but we can't tell them how to do it."
John Prendeville is a former LMB procurement manager who has filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that the Venetian has defects. Prendeville's allegations about the safety of the resort's walls prompted the country to seek the ICBO's opinion, Lynn said today.
"Prendeville is accurate when he says it doesn't comply with the code," Lynn said. "The question is, 'Are there mitigating features that make it OK?' The jury is still out on that."
Prendeville, an electrical engineer, said one way to test the walls is to compare them with an experiment performed by Underwriters Laboratories Inc. last June 25.
The test concluded that a wall built to the specifications of the Venetian's nonload-bearing walls "will afford one-hour protection against the passage of flame and dangerous transmission of heat when exposed to fire from either side of the assembly."
But Prendeville said the UL test was on a blank wall sample that contained no electrical outlet boxes or other so-called "membrane penetrations." He said a fire-resistance test of a wall with boxes less than 24 inches apart may be the only way to ensure the structure is safe.
Lynn described the UBC as a "living document," noting that technological advances and other factors can mitigate nonconformance with the code's guidelines.
"It makes provisions for alternate methods of material or construction or design," Lynn said. "In such cases, we can require sufficient evidence or proof to be submitted that would substantiate any claims made regarding the alternatives."
In the Venetian's case, sprinkler systems, alarms, concrete bracing and fire-resistant materials are mitigating factors that could allow the walls to "conform with the philosophical intent of the code without lessening its fire- and life-safety integrity," he said.
"What they need to do is perform the required analysis and provide us with documentation that we can then analyze," Lynn said.
"That needs to be completed prior to opening. In my opinion, it's firmly back in their court to complete the analysis. We aren't going to allow something that's manifestly unsafe."
Once an analysis is provided to the county, "We look at what they've done to make sure it's a scientifically verifiable process," Lynn said.
"The Venetian is perhaps the largest nonpublic-works structure being built anywhere in the world today," he said. "If the walls conform with the philosophical intent of the code, we'll write it down and say it's an acceptable technique. Other people can use it if it works.
"The bottom line is that we want a safe building. And I'm certain that the owner wants a safe building. But if there are discrepancies, they need to be addressed."
The county says about 70 percent of the hotel-casinos built since county building codes were revised after the MGM Grand fire in 1980 have received construction correction notices.
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