Holy Cross neighbors sue state fire marshal over faulty sprinklers in New Orleans Port grain project

The Holy Cross Neighborhood Association (HCNA) is suing two state agencies and the state fire marshal over the decision to allow Sunrise Foods to install a fire sprinkler system that does not meet fire code in the company’s planned grain storage warehouse at the Alabo Wharf.

The neighborhood association filed the lawsuit on Thursday in the 19th Judicial District Court in East Baton Rouge. Jeffrey Wittenbrink Jr., a Holy Cross association member who lives near the Sunrise project, is also named as a petitioner. The Office of the State Fire Marshall (OSFM) and Chief Fire Marshall Chad Sonnier are named as defendants, as is the Louisiana Department of Public Safety, which oversees several regulatory agencies including the OSFM.

The suit was filed by attorneys from the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, which is representing the neighborhood and Wittenbrink in the case.

The lawsuit challenges the fire marshal’s decision last month to allow Sunrise Foods to rehab its warehouse on the bank of the Mississippi River with a “dry gridded pipe” sprinkler system — a sprinkler design expressly prohibited by fire code, as first reported by The Lens.

“The community is dumbfounded that we’d even have to go this far,” said Bette Perez, president of the HCNA, a nonprofit community organization dedicated to preserving the historic Holy Cross neighborhood, the portion of the Lower 9th Ward bounded by the river and St. Claude Avenue. The group does not oppose economic development, Perez said, but they want to see the project moved to another location that is less densely populated, such as Avondale.

“As a community of old timers who’ve been here so many years and been through so many battles,” Perez said, “we just want a safe neighborhood. And this is not safe for us.”

Fire marshal decision “endangers lives”

The fire marshal’s decision to exempt Sunrise “from compliance with fire safety requirements will result in significant fire safety risks” to the historic Holy Cross neighborhood, the lawsuit contends. 

The suit stems from renovations that Sunrise Foods is making at the property on Alabo Wharf, which the company began leasing from the Port of New Orleans in 2024. 

The company claims that it is building the nation’s first organic grain port facility at the Alabo Wharf.  Ships on the Mississippi will offload grain, including wheat and soybeans, which will be stored in a 150,000 square foot warehouse, then put onto trains and shipped out of the neighborhood.

The project has met with intense local opposition, in part because it will bring some drastic changes to an historically vulnerable residential neighborhood. Nearby residents have raised concerns about pests, pollution, and train traffic on tracks that have not been used in years, which would pass within several yards of some homes.

As The Lens first revealed, Sunrise’s initial fire protection system plans were rejected by the OSFM in August. The fire marshal’s reviewer gave two reasons. First, Sunrise’s planned sprinkler system uses a design expressly forbidden by fire code. Second, the proposed system is insufficient for covering the warehouse’s square footage. 

Multiple fire protection system experts told The Lens that they had never seen approved use of Sunrise’s proposed sprinkler design, known as a “dry gridded” system. 

In a gridded sprinkler system, pipes are laid out in a grid. In a dry sprinkler system, the pipes remain full of air until a fire starts, when water rushes in. But these two designs are never supposed to be used in combination, because, as water travels through the web of dry gridded pipes, air pockets can get trapped in the pipes and seriously delay the water from reaching the sprinkler heads.

The design is expressly prohibited by standard fire code. The Louisiana OSFM is responsible for enforcing compliance with National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) standards, which clearly state that “gridded dry pipes shall not be installed.”

It was therefore no surprise that the fire marshal initially rejected Sunrise’s fire sprinkler plans.

But after that rejection, Sunrise asked the fire marshal for an equivalency. An equivalency is a kind of exemption from building code, which the fire marshal can grant if the project would face “practical difficulty or unreasonable economic hardship.” An equivalency also requires a finding by the fire marshal that the proposed alternative is equally or more safe.

Louisiana statute says the fire marshal’s “board of review shall be the final authority on issues of practical feasibility.”

But the fire marshal’s office told The Lens that the agency’s board of review has not had any meetings this year. 

The board is responsible only for reviewing requests for alternatives to laws and regulations – not adopted codes (such the NFPA sprinkler code), the fire marshal’s office emphasized.

Sunrise’s equivalency request argued the cost of bringing the system up to code was “prohibitive.” But in the request, Sunrise did not actually provide any documentation of the cost or financial hardship, as the lawsuit notes. The request also didn’t discuss any of the alternative sprinkler system options.

The Port of New Orleans purchased the Alabo Wharf in the 1970s. In its 2024 lease, the Port provided Sunrise with an “industrial inducement” of $10 million in renovation money. That sum set aside at least $600,000 intended for renovation of the wharf’s mechanical systems, including the sprinklers, the suit notes.

The fire marshal granted Sunrise’s request on August 25th.

The fire marshal’s decision lacked sufficient documentation to justify its decision, the lawsuit asserts: The decision contains no findings about difficulty or unreasonable economic hardship besides repeating Sunrise’s claim; it did not demonstrate that Sunrise’s sprinkler system would still be safe; and it did not address the agency’s earlier finding that the sprinkler system would not be sized correctly to cover the whole warehouse.

“The use of a gridded dry pipe system is per se unreasonable,” claims the suit, “and its use endangers the lives and property of nearby residents of the Holy Cross neighborhood.”

Consequently, the suit alleges that the fire marshal’s decision to allow that design “was unreasonable, arbitrary and capricious, and amounted to an abuse of power.”

The suit asks the court to review the Office of State Fire Marshal’s decision under the Louisiana Administrative Procedure Act, vacate the equivalency, and require Sunrise to comply with standard fire safety requirements. Alternatively, it asks the Court to vacate the fire marshal’s decision with a finding that the “OSFM acted unreasonably, arbitrarily, and capriciously and violated Petitioners’ constitutionally-protected rights” to life, liberty, and property.

Holy Cross neighbors would like to see the Alabo Wharf property turned into a Lower 9th Ward community resource center instead, Perez said.