Building inspectors and fire department leaders are disputing whether an apartment building that burned to the ground Saturday met state safety codes when it was constructed. Eight fire trucks and 30 firefighters were dispatched at 3:03 a.m. Saturday when building five of The Gables, an apartment complex at 1909 Creason St., caught fire, destroying 12 apartments home to 48 Western Kentucky University students. Bowling Green Fire Chief Gerry Brown said the building should have had a sprinkler system installed, but city Building Inspector Glenn Burns said the building met state codes for such a complex when it was inspected during construction. From our end we felt like the building, as far as fire-safety-wise, should have been sprinkled and it wasnt, Brown said. There is some debate over interpreting the codes, but we see it as strictly a three-story building. Building regulations are often satisfied by saying a three-story building is actually a two-story building with a basement, Brown said. There is school of thought that it could be argued that the first floor may in fact be a basement area, he said. That changes the code requirements, but I dont see that at all. From a fire safety standpoint, basement or not, the building, to protect it and to protect the people inside it, should be sprinkled. The building code allows for structures to count ground floors as basements if at least 50 percent of the bottom floors perimeter is exposed by no more than six feet from ground level to the bottom of the next floor, Burns said. Basically, you can have as little as 2 feet below the ground on half the perimeter and still count that floor as a basement, he said. When The Gables was under construction, inspectors looked very closely at this matter, but certified the building because it met the code, Burns said. It was one of those cases where we feel like the owners kind of designed around the code to get the levels they wanted, but it did meet the letter of the code, he said. Buildings for which sprinkler systems were not required when the structure was built can be ordered to add them later by the state fire marshals office, but that rarely happens, said Carvon Hudson, branch manager for the fire marshals office. Wed have to find a lot of things wrong to make a guy install a sprinkler system under our inspection guidelines, he said. The Gables ownership in Memphis, Tenn., said it has not yet received a report of the fire, according to Tom Hickey, vice president of management services for Allen and Ohara Education Services, which manages the property. As you might expect, until we see it, and have had time to read it and analyze it, we are not commenting at all about anything we might do down the road regarding fire safety of the property, Hickey said. When the complex was built in 1996 it is was built to code, Hickey said. The structure received certificates of occupancy for the entire property from the city as well as every other level of authoritative approval of construction and the company has documentation of the certifications, he said. As far as The Gables ownership is concerned, it was built to code at the time it was built, Hickey said. The possibility of putting sprinklers in the building will be discussed, but right now efforts are focused on relocating the displaced Western students, he said. Hickey said his organization is very impressed with the efforts of the Bowling Green and Western community to assist the students, he said. A disaster similar to the one Saturday morning was likely avoided May 26 at Western Place Apartments because those were built with sprinklers, according to Richard Story, Bowling Green assistant fire chief. It was a cooking fire, he said. The sprinkler head went off and put the fire out. It made a heck of a difference. Weve had four fires in sprinkled buildings in the past year-and-a-half and you didnt hear about them because they didnt amount to anything: a motel, an apartment, a factory and the twin towers on College. In addition to fighting a fire without proper sprinkler systems installed, the construction material used at The Gables apartments was also a contributing factor in how fast the blaze spread, Brown said. The buildings are built with vinyl siding that does not sustain combustion well, melts without direct flame contact and exposes the wood to the fire. From a firefighters standpoint, it is relatively a low temperature when (the siding) starts to move away, he said. That allows the fire to get to other parts of the building. The building also had prefabricated roof trusses that were put together with metal plates. When that plate starts getting hot it expands at a much quicker rate than wood and it literally pops free, Brown said. You no longer have a connection between the roof trusses or other structural members. That leads to early collapse of the roof and other parts of the building. The problem of the trusses breaking apart so rapidly could be avoided if they were also nailed during the buildings construction, Brown said. But that generally doesnt happen, he said. Any building with that type of construction is subject to early roof collapse, Brown said. In this case, had we had people on the third floor we were trying to get out, not only would they have been in great jeopardy, but the firefighters themselves would have been working against the clock to get in there before the collapse occurred, Brown said. Without sprinkler protection for the building, it makes it extremely difficult for us to stop the fire without a great deal of damage. Of course, that also includes risk of occupants to the building and the firefighters that respond. The fire at The Gables started on a first floor balcony in the rear of the building, Brown said, adding that the cause of the fire is still under investigation.