By DANNY ROBBINS
Associated Press Writer

DALLAS -- Fire officials failed to identify serious safety concerns, including a lack of smoke detectors and proper exits, when they inspected an east Texas homeless shelter where five men later died in a fire, according to records obtained by The Associated Press.

"Looks OK" was the only thing written on one report prepared after an April 2005 inspection, one of the documents provided by the city of Paris in response to the AP's request under the Texas Public Information Act.

None of the five inspections conducted in the 10 years before the Jan. 5 fire was by a state-certified fire inspector, and all failed to notice that the facility lacked the basic safety requirements for overnight occupancy. Dozens of men lived amid containers of used clothing and other highly flammable material.

Facilities such as nursing homes and daycare centers require regular scrutiny by certified fire inspectors for state licensing, but since Texas does not require homeless shelters to be licensed they are subject only to local ordinances and often get less attention.

"That's incredible," said Anthony Love, president of Houston's Coalition for the Homeless. "I mean, these are real lives. If you're going to have a group of people sleeping in one place, at a minimum you should have working fire alarms or whatever."

The cause of the fire in Paris, a city of about 26,000 about 95 miles northeast of Dallas, remains under investigation by the state fire marshal's office.

The blaze broke out as 28 men slept in cubicles built into a 25,600-square-foot structure that also served as a collection point for items that could be sold or recycled. The building, once a department store, was operated by a local nonprofit organization, Seed Sowers Christians in Action.

Since the fire, authorities have found that the building lacked smoke detectors, a sprinkler system and proper exits, Paris fire chief Ronnie Grooms said. Those deficiencies were never noted when the building was inspected.

The last time the facility was inspected was June 2006. That report noted that the building's fire extinguishers were out of date and that some of its wiring was improper. There is no indication whether those problems were corrected.

Grooms said cuts in budgets and personnel have forced his department, which has never had more than two certified fire inspectors, to concentrate on inspecting state-licensed facilities.

"Any other inspections, the guys have to work those things in," he said. "And when you have the number of structure fires we have in a year, they're heavily into investigations and fire calls and all that. I mean, they're just overwhelmed."

The signatures and initials on the reports indicate that the inspections were conducted by firefighters who had not been certified as fire inspectors, a designation that in Texas requires passing a course that involves more than 200 classroom hours.

Under Texas law, regular firefighters can conduct building inspections, but can't write citations for code violations.

Grooms said it's possible that the inspectors who examined the shelter may have been in the building at times when it wasn't clear people lived there. However, he acknowledged that the inspectors likely lacked the "trained eye" that scrutinizing such a structure requires.

"There were a lot of things that didn't happen that should have happened with this case," he said.

State Rep. Mark Homer, D-Paris, said he is working to see if homeless shelters can be added to those facilities covered by state regulations. At the least, he said, they should be required to have smoke detectors, fire exits and proper wiring.

"If those three things had been met, I'm convinced this tragedy could have been averted," he said. "The fire might still have happened, but we probably would not have had the loss of life that we had."

One of the fire's survivors, Edward Earl Morgan, said it was obvious to him when he moved into the building early last year that it lacked working fire extinguishers, smoke detectors or multiple exits.

"I thought, `If this place catches on fire, everybody's gone,'" he said.

Don Walker, the founder of Seed Sowers Christians in Action, did not respond to phone messages from the AP.

The city of Paris said it has no record of the organization obtaining a building permit, although on the group's Web site there is a photo of what are described as "new rooms" at the shelter.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.