How short-term vacation rentals use a decades-old internet law to dodge safety concerns

It has been just over two years since Zach Wiener awoke to the sound of glass breaking and his parents’ screams from the floor below him.

He was in an unfamiliar bedroom, staying in a short-term rental home in Sag Harbor, New York, for a weeklong family vacation with his mother, father and two younger sisters.

Believing the disturbance was due to a home invasion, Wiener jumped out of the window of his second-floor bedroom and called the police.

It wasn’t until he got to the home’s front yard that what actually happened became clear: A fire had raged through the home as the Wiener family slept. The windows had shattered from the heat of the blaze. Zach Wiener’s father, Lewis Wiener, had sustained serious burns trying to save his two daughters, Jillian and Lindsay, who were trapped in the burning home. But they didn’t survive. They were 21 and 19 years old.

For Zach Wiener, who is now 26 years old, questions about that night in August 2022 linger. If a single smoke detector in the home had made a sound, would Jillian and Lindsay have had time to escape? The house had been advertised as having smoke detectors “outside each bedroom door and inside each bedroom,” but many of the home’s smoke detectors were disconnected, contained lifeless batteries or none at all, according to a lawsuit filed by the Wiener family.