Thousands of apartment dwellers and condo owners will no longer be able to use a grill on their decks, thanks to a change Connecticut's recently revised Fire Prevention Code, which prohibits the use and storage of any type of grill or cooking device on decks, beneath overhangs, or within 10 feet of the building. According to a story in the Hartford Courant, the prohibition covers all multi-family housing – essentially everything but one- and two-family units – and includes certain types of condominiums. About 35 percent of Connecticut housing – the equivalent of 525,000 residences – is classified as multi-family, though not all apartments have balconies, and thousands that do are in complexes that already prohibit their use for cooking. The State of Connecticut Fire Prevention Code was first adopted in 2010, and was modeled upon the 2002 edition of the National Fire Protection Association Code (NFPA 1). The NFPA was revised in 2012, and that was the version Connecticut state officials used during an 18-month review which ended with adoption and publication of the state's revised fire prevention code in May 2015.
