We are Lone Star Fire Extinguisher Co., family owned since 1993. Our shop and our parts stock sit on the I-30 frontage in Mesquite, immediately south of Garland, so a truck reaches a Garland property already loaded with the classes and sizes the city asks for. Inspection, certification, recharging, mounting and equipment, handled on site at your building.
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If a Garland inspector has already written you up, the fix is usually smaller than the letter makes it sound. Extinguisher findings land in four buckets, and all four are same-visit work:
Call us with the notice in front of you. We walk the property, service or replace what failed, and tag every unit. We carry replacement units, cabinets and signage on the truck, so a shortfall found during the walkthrough gets filled the same visit.
Most cities around here adopt the international fire code, amend a handful of sections, and leave portable extinguishers to the model code and NFPA 10. Garland does something different.
Garland enforces the 2015 International Fire Code, in effect here since September 2016. It carries more than a hundred local amendments to that code, and not one of them touches the portable fire extinguisher section. Instead, the Garland Fire Marshal’s Office publishes its own extinguisher standards sheet, and that sheet is what an inspector works from.
What the sheet sets out:
None of that lives in Garland’s fire code, which matters when a vendor tells you their work meets code. It can meet the code and still miss what the Fire Marshal’s Office publishes. We size, rate and place to the city’s sheet.
A Certificate of Occupancy is required for every use in Garland other than a single-family home, and a new one is required when ownership changes, when the use of the business changes, or when a business expands into adjoining space.
Here is the part most operators do not see coming. The CO application packet contains the Garland Fire Department’s fire and life safety self inspection checklist, and you fill it in yourself, before the inspection, with the business already operating. One of its line items asks whether one or more operable extinguishers are in place, mounted and tagged by a licensed company within the last twelve months, at a minimum 2A10BC.
That is a written question, on a city form, with your name at the bottom. The rest of the sheet covers address numbers, fire lane striping, hydrant clearance, Knox box keys, exit signage, extension cords, electrical panel clearance and sprinkler clearance. Extinguishers are the one item on that list you can fully resolve in a single afternoon.
Garland publishes separate CO packets for general business, automotive and convenience store uses, each with the fire department’s self-check bundled in. Automotive gets its own packet because the hazards are different, and so is the extinguisher rating the occupancy table asks for.
In Garland the fire review keeps going after the certificate is issued. City ordinance requires the Bureau of Fire Prevention to inspect every site that has been issued a new Certificate of Occupancy, and to do it within 60 days of that certificate being approved.
So the sequence for a new Garland tenant runs: complete the self-check, clear the CO inspections, open the doors, then see the fire prevention bureau again inside two months. Two looks at the same extinguishers, with your opening in between, and it is not an edge case. Garland is essentially finished growing outward, and its own comprehensive plan describes a nearly built-out community that needs infill and redevelopment rather than expansion. Most new commercial activity here is a new tenant moving into a building that already exists, which is exactly what the change-of-ownership trigger and the 60-day follow-up were written for.
The practical move is to get the extinguishers right once, at the front of the process, instead of twice under a deadline.
Garland’s industrial zoning district is written for manufacturing, processing, assembling, research and development, and warehousing and distribution, and the comprehensive plan’s industry center type expects semi-truck traffic, loading docks and outdoor storage. The Fire Marshal’s extinguisher table was built for that fabric: dedicated rows for factory use and every storage classification, plus spray booths, asphalt kettles and heating equipment, with ratings stepping up to 4-A:40-B:C and travel distances tightening as the hazard does.
Racked storage adds a layer. High-piled storage takes an annual operational permit, and the Fire Marshal’s submittal sheet asks for commodity classification, in-rack sprinkler valve locations and flue space dimensions before it issues. Extinguisher placement in a racked building has to work around all of it.
Cooking operations get their own treatment. Every new UL 300 listed hood system has to be accompanied by a 2-A:1-B:C:K extinguisher, and existing hood systems were required to be retrofitted with one under a deadline Garland set back in the 1990s. If your hood predates that and nobody ever hung the K unit, you are not approaching a deadline, you are past one.
Then there is the multifamily side, a larger share of Garland than of the cities next to it: more than a quarter of the city’s housing units sit in multifamily buildings. Those properties carry extinguishers by the dozen, in corridor cabinets, breezeway mounts, laundry rooms, equipment closets and clubhouses. The Fire Marshal’s table puts residential occupancies at 2-A:10-B:C on a 75 foot travel distance, which across a garden-style property means real unit counts, not one cabinet by the leasing office. Garland runs an annual multifamily inspection program with a public score card too, but that one belongs to Code Compliance as a housing standards matter, not to the Fire Marshal.
Large unit counts are the work we are set up for. One scheduled visit, every building, wholesale and bulk pricing on whatever needs replacing, and records kept by address so each property’s paperwork stands on its own.
Every service line runs out of the Mesquite shop and onto your Garland property in one visit:
We also stock ABC dry chemical, Halotron and CO2 extinguishers, cabinets, commercial first aid kits and fire safety signage.
Three decades in the Metroplex and the Brantley family name behind every tag. Our field technicians, Branden Cook and Zack Tapp, hold state-issued Fire Extinguisher Licenses, which is exactly the credential Garland’s checklist means when it asks whether a licensed company did the work.
Standard on every Lone Star job:
A dated tag from a state licensed extinguisher company, on every unit, within the last year. Not a receipt, not a staff visual check, and not an old tag on a unit you inherited with the space. The checklist also names a minimum of 2A10BC, so an undersized unit answers the question the wrong way even with a current tag. We inspect, tag and replace in one visit.
Not yet. Garland ordinance calls for the Bureau of Fire Prevention to inspect every site issued a new Certificate of Occupancy, within 60 days of that certificate being approved. Plan on a second look at the same extinguishers shortly after you open.
Start with the Fire Marshal’s sheet. It sets a city minimum of 2-A:10-B:C, at least one unit of A capacity per 3,000 square feet of floor area, and then a required rating and a maximum travel distance by occupancy. Most spaces land at 75 feet of travel; a cooking area drops that to 30. We walk the building, do the arithmetic, and supply and mount whatever the count comes up short.
A 2-A:1-B:C:K extinguisher with the hood system, and the suppression system itself inspected every six months with an annual recharge and full check. Garland amended the code to require that certificate of inspection be sent to the fire code official, not just filed. And if you cook out of a truck, the city’s food truck checklist asks about the Class K unit and its tag by name.
The Fire Marshal’s sheet is plain about it: a yearly inspection by a state licensed extinguisher company, and maintenance no more than six years apart or whenever an inspector calls for it. Staff should eyeball gauges and pins monthly in between. Those dates ride on the tag, so nobody has to guess which unit is due.
The same trucks, the same technicians and the same pricing cover Garland’s neighbors, and each city runs its fire code its own way:
