Too Much of a Good Thing?
Not too many years ago, the primary rationale for installing sprinklers was property protection, pure and simple. At about the time firefighters came to realize that people weren’t dying in buildings protected by fire sprinklers, they began promoting them in earnest almost everywhere.
As American firefighters are celebrating victory in their efforts to get provisions requiring fire sprinklers in one- and two-family dwellings into the International Residential Code, their colleagues in Australia are caught up in a much different fight with the building industry and its regulatory overseers over fire sprinklers. In Australia, at the moment at least, the fight is not about whether to install sprinklers but whether or not sprinklers must have water supplies sufficient to continue operating after people have escaped a building.
One might wonder how something like this happens. And yes one should!
Australians know better than most what a terrible foe fire can be. The country’s rapidly expanding urban areas remain under almost constant threat from wildfires in or near the urban interface. Persistent drought has compounded the pressures of urbanization forcing most communities to restrict water usage at least part of the year. At the same time, faced with rising costs of providing fire service and increasing construction costs, Australians have embraced regulatory reform eagerly.
Australians, like Americans, have an overwhelmingly positive view of firefighters and place a premium on safety and security by supporting increased wages and improved job security for them. Like their U.S. counterparts, Australian firefighters have aggressively promoted the installation of fire sprinklers, arguing like we have that these systems provide both highly effective and reasonably efficient protection.
Limited resources, both in terms of money and water, but mostly money, have forced Australians to wonder whether they can really have their cake and eat it too. If life safety is the paramount goal of building regulation, and firefighters support fire sprinklers as a means of saving lives, then why not rely on firefighters to save the building once everyone’s out? After all, isn’t that what they are paid to do?
Clearly, it is not that simple. Fire sprinklers do save lives: those of firefighters included. But now Australian firefighters are being forced to argue that their lives depend upon fire sprinklers, and that they cannot afford to fight fires in buildings equipped with sprinklers if they cannot be relied upon to continue operating effectively. This brings us back to where we started, the real benefit of sprinklers is and always has been their ability to contain fires at or near the point of origin, not the building or block of origin.
Firefighters are right to recognize the life saving value of automatic fire sprinklers, but emphasizing life safety as the paramount rationale for sprinklers has a down side when people feel compelled to choose between their lives and the lives of firefighters purely on account of cost. Fire sprinklers make firefighting easier and more effective by protecting property. Without the property protection argument for sprinklers, we may discover the true cost of getting too much of a good thing is a misplaced reliance on firefighters and unreasonable expectations of what we can achieve.
Related Topics: Public Education, Health & Safety, Leadership
November 27th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Good article….Sprinklers are necessary for life protection and as you point out in your article, they’re a great deterrent at the point of combustion. However, while they don’t go far enough….for example, in Nth America we are trying to establish the need to have pressurized air systems into egress areas in tall buildings. In tandem with sprinklers, it will provide better opportunity to escape distressed buildings. While sprinklers help put out fire they’re not adequate in the elimination of smoke and unfortunately, smoke kills!
Owen Slowey
Nth American Sales Manager
DuraSystems Barriers Inc
(905) 660-4455….ext 223
owen.slowey@durasystems.com
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