Fire Chief

Fire protection professionals have been working for nearly 30 years to promote the installation of residential fire sprinklers in U.S. homes. It is the one way to reduce home fire risk, short of actually preventing fires from starting. Teamed with smoke alarms, residential sprinklers nearly eliminate fire deaths in homes. Only those who are intimate with the fire are at risk.

Smoke alarms have been a very effective means of alerting residents to fires if they are installed properly and are operational. Despite the requirements for smoke alarms in building and fire safety codes, they are not installed or functional in all housing units. According to one white paper on the subject, home smoke alarms are absent in approximately 4 million housing units. These 4 million homes are where 50% of all fire deaths occur. The paper further presented that another 21 million housing units have alarms that are missing batteries or are otherwise not operational.

One way to provide long-term protection against fire in homes is through the presence of residential fire sprinklers. But we need to start now so that the United States includes this effective safety technology as new homes continue to be built. One way to obtain a national requirement for residential fire sprinklers is to make it part of the building code. This could happen this spring in Rochester, N.Y., where hundreds of fire service representatives will be fighting to include residential fire sprinklers in the International Residential Code as part of the International Code Council’s code cycle hearings. They want to move it from its current place as an appendix and voluntary to a mandatory requirement.

Providing requirements for residential sprinklers in the residential building code removes the necessity for each individual jurisdiction to exercise the legislative or regulatory influence to create local code language. It has been very difficult to achieve this, in part due to the overwhelming opposition of the building industry to the inclusion of sprinklers. If we depended on a strictly local approach — one township, city or county at a time — it is difficult to imagine that we would ever get to the appropriate critical mass of sprinkler-protected housing to make a big difference in fire safety. Residential sprinkler technology has been around for close to 30 years, and we have made little impact in the housing stock that has been built since that time.

According to the National Fire Protection Association, in 2005 there were 396,000 residential fires that resulted in 3,055 deaths and 13,825 civilian injuries. Four out of five fire deaths occur in homes. We know that a significant number of these casualties could have been prevented if the residents had been afforded the opportunity to escape their home before a fire had grown to the point where it either blocked their escape or rendered them physically unable to react. Residential fire sprinklers offer residents more time to react to fires in the home because sprinklers are designed to contain a fire and reduce its potential for flashover. We need to start now to provide this protection in homes for the future. Eventually redevelopment for more density and modernization will allow us to increase the presence of sprinklers in all homes.

Residential fire sprinklers also have become a focus for national efforts to reduce firefighter casualties. Clearly a significant number of firefighter deaths occur either on the scene of fires or en route. Reducing the fire’s growth and preventing flashover makes the fire more manageable and results in a safer environment for firefighters. The requirement of residential sprinklers in homes is one of the 16 Firefighter Life Safety Initiatives identified by the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation’s Everyone Goes Home program. Initiative #15 says, “Advocacy must be strengthened for the enforcement of codes and the installation of home fire sprinklers. Progress toward this goal could begin to be realized with increased installation of residential sprinklers.

You can learn more about the efforts to include language requiring residential fire sprinklers at the IRC Fire Sprinkler Coalition Web site.