One of the most important votes in fire and firefighter safety will be held next week. Everyone’s participation is needed.

The fire service must participate with full force in the International Code Council’s code-development process. We must take the long-overdue historical measure and revise the 2009 edition of the International Residential Code to require residential fire sprinkler systems in all new homes at the ICC final action hearing in Minneapolis on Sept. 21.

The residential fire sprinkler requirement is on the hearing’s agenda as proposal RB-64. In the ICC process, anyone can debate the merits of a proposed code change, but only the government members (fire and building officials) can vote. It is of utmost importance for the fire service members of the ICC to attend this final action hearing. Every single vote is important; to pass, this recommendation will require support by a two-thirds majority of the voting governmental members present at the meeting.

All of the major fire service organizations in our country made history by pledging their full support for the movement to require residential fire sprinklers in one- and two-family dwellings. In its resolution dated Feb. 14, the International Association of Fire Chiefs declared its support for requiring residential fire sprinklers in new one- and two-family dwellings and town homes.

Under the proactive leadership of U.S. Fire Administrator Greg Cade, the USFA clearly stated its stance on this issue in its USFA Position Paper–Residential Fire Sprinklers:

“It is the position of the U.S. Fire Administration that all citizens should be protected against death, injury, and property loss resulting from fire in their residence. All homes should be equipped with both smoke alarms and automatic fire sprinklers, and all families should have and practice an emergency escape plan. The USFA fully supports all efforts to reduce the tragic toll of fire losses in this nation, including the proposed change to the International Residential Code that would require automatic sprinklers in all new residential construction.”

And during its annual conference in Las Vegas in August, the International Association of Fire Fighters voted in favor of Resolution 16 in support of the residential fire sprinklers. The IAFF recognizes the importance of residential fire sprinkler systems in protecting our communities across the land and our own firefighters.

The National Fire Protection Association’s “Fire Loss in the United States During 2006” reports that “with home fire deaths still accounting for 2,580 fire deaths or 80% of all civilian deaths, fire safety initiatives targeted at the home remain the key to any reductions in the overall fire death toll.” Similarly, the Home Fire Sprinkler Coalition claims that “installing both smoke alarms and a fire sprinkler system reduces the risk of death in a fire home by 82% relative to having neither.”

The fire service indeed knows where and on what we should be focusing our efforts. We see the target and we have both the know-how and readily available life-saving technologies, such as smoke alarms and residential fire sprinkler systems. But while 96% of homes have smoke detectors installed in them, only 2% have residential fire sprinkler systems installed.

What is holding us back? Why aren’t there residential fire sprinkler systems in all newly constructed homes? Why don‘t we put all our support behind installing such life-saving technology in all our new houses nationwide?

Installation of the residential fire sprinkler systems in all of the new homes may not have an impact on the fire losses in the more than 100 million existing homes throughout the country. But it would definitely have a long-term positive impact on the more than 1 million new homes constructed every year. And if we don‘t address this problem now, it will be in these new homes where we will be fighting the fires of tomorrow, and where we will be collecting our future fire fatalities and loss statistics.

Change will only come about through mass participation in the established process. By participating in the ICC final action hearing next week in Minneapolis, we in the fire service will have a unique opportunity to take a monumental step in addressing the root of the fire problem in our country, the home fires. To succeed, we must face the opposition with full force. It is time for the fire service to stand up and be accounted for.

The ICC hearing will begin Sept. 20, at the Minneapolis Convention Center. The agenda can be downloaded here.

On the evening of April 1, after two very productive days of intense brainstorming and in-depth discussions, the curtain finally came down on the first act of the Vision 20/20‘s National Strategic Agenda for Fire Loss Prevention. This forum gathered more than 170 participants who represented the who‘s who of fire safety from across the country, the United Kingdom and Australia.

“This project is unprecedented in scope and depth,” said Jim Crawford, fire marshal for the city of Vancouver, Wash., and the Vision 20/20 project manager. “We have assembled an incredible array of experts from a diversity of fields to help craft a national plan to reduce the loss of life and property from fire. Through our collective efforts we will develop strategies that will save lives, now and for the future.”

Vision 20/20 was conceived last year when the Institution of Fire Engineers–U.S. Branch received a DHS Fire Prevention and Safety Grant to develop a comprehensive national strategy for fire prevention. This project’s goal is to help bring together fire-prevention efforts to collectively and effectively address the fire problem in the United States.

It is a noble cause, but the fire service has been down this road many times before. The President‘s Conference on Fire Prevention in 1947, the release of the America Burning report in 1973, the update with the America Burning Revisited report in 1987, and the release of the America Burning, Recommissionedreport in 2000 all focused on the very same issue.

So what‘s different about the Vision 20/20 plan? According to the forum’s Web site:

1. This project involves a large number of participants representing all areas of fire prevention, as well as other advocates and stakeholders to the plan and its recommended outcomes.
   


2. This project is committed to action, with a few strategic recommendations being converted to a national plan that stakeholders will be asked to support with documentation of specific actions and benchmarks instead of a long list of recommended practices that everyone agrees are important (but then never get completed).
   


3. This project will not create recommendations in a vacuum. Other existing efforts that have identified significant progress toward achieving prevention goals will be taken into account to avoid competing efforts.
   


4. A long-term monitoring mechanism will provide regular reports on the progress of the strategic initiatives that arise out of Vision 20/20.
   

If commitment to action is the litmus test, then the fact that despite many challenges Vision 20/20 was able to pull such a high-caliber team together in such a productive forum is a major accomplishment. This forum is a significant step in the right direction, but this is only the first step in beginning the journey. More is still to come.

Reviewing the reports from the previous national conferences, a common theme for increasing efforts in fire prevention is always emphasized as a key component to the fire-safety problem in the United States.

Recognizing the importance of fire prevention, IFE invited panelists from Australia and England to share their experiences. The “International Perspective” panel discussion was quite interesting and of tremendous value in disseminating information about the incredibly innovative approaches and programs that are currently being done overseas, which we could learn a lot from.

Neil Bibby, chief executive officer of County Fire Authority, Victoria, Australia; Philip Hales, head of community fire safety of Cheshire Fire & Rescue Services, Winsford, England; Phil Schaenman, president of Tri-Data Systems Planning Corp.; and Mick Ballesteros, epidemiologist/team lead of the Home and Recreation Injury Prevention with the Centers for Disease Control; shared their experiences and successes in reducing fire fatalities and losses, which only underlined the fact many of us in the United States are only beginning to realize about how far behind the rest of the world we are in our fire prevention efforts.

At the end of the two days, the participants of the Vision 20/20 Forum identified five specific strategies and developed action plans for reducing fire fatalities and losses in America. The specifics and the details of these strategies will be posted on the Vision 20/20 Web site in the very near future, but here are the outlines:

• Advocacy. Get on the agenda to make America safe from fire.
  


• Public education. Establish a consistent, sustained, multi-faceted educational/social marketing campaign to reduce risks and losses from fire by getting people to change their behavior toward fire safety.
  


• Fire service culture. Shift the organizational culture within the fire service so that prevention is accepted and supported as a primary service for public safety.
  


• Technology. Promote and leverage existing and new technology to enhance fire and life safety.
  


• Codes and standards. Development and application of codes and standards to enhance public and firefighter safety and preserve community assets.
  

“Everyone wants to see something happen,” said Crawford. “They just don‘t want another report sitting on the shelf. They want to see action. They want to show that taxpayers‘ money was not wasted.”

According to Ed Comeau with writer-tech.com, “Everyone was in agreement that it will be critically important for there to be an ongoing commitment to this project and its ideas. Many people signed up to continue working on the various strategies as this project continues to move forward, demonstrating such a commitment.”

I hope that this level of excitement and commitment continues in the future, and just like the participants, we all recognize that this forum was not the conclusion, but merely the beginning of our journey in addressing the fire problem in our country. Back in the 1947, at the conclusion of the Conference on Fire Prevention, it was stated “we have enlisted not for a brief skirmish, but for the whole campaign. In winning that campaign we shall have the satisfaction of knowing that we are saving lives and putting an end to the wanton destruction of our nation‘s resources.” It just can‘t be said any better than that.

I am amazed and very grateful for the hard work and long hours that Peg Carson with Carson Associates and Bill Kehoe with the IFE–USA spent to bring this first act to the national stage. Without their admirable commitment to the cause, this indeed would not have been possible.

Previously, I looked at how clusters of homes on smaller plots of land increase fire hazards. In some cases, these homes are less than 10 feet apart. Fire chiefs also must view the challenges associated with the narrow streets in cluster developments from yet another angle — the actual fireground operations and tactics. Apparatus placement is significant in fireground operations. The narrow streets and long dead ends present major challenges to response and further delay rescue and suppression efforts.

In fighting fires, the actual battle is against time. Considering that fire grows exponentially with time, the longer it takes for firefighters to be dispatched, arrive at the scene, set up, and finally put water on the fire, the bigger the fire we have to face.

Before putting the wet stuff on the red stuff though, we need to vent the building. Considering narrow street frontage, laddering the front of these cluster homes in itself is challenging even on flat grade. Raising a 28-foot ground ladder to the second-story window on the side of these cluster dwellings might be impossible. And the 35-foot ground ladder would not be adequate to safely get to the roof of a 3-story dwellings.

Of course, that is even more challenging when the exterior wall is only three feet from the property line. Even trying to raise the 35-foot ground ladder from the neighbor‘s house (which is also only three feet away, on the other side of the property line) to reach the roof would result in a very steep and unsafe climbing angle of around 80 degrees.

One way or another we will eventually get it done, but all that takes time. Do we have much time to spare, considering the lightweight truss construction of these clustered dwellings and their collapse potential? The more time we spend on setting up, the less time firefighters have for interior search and rescue and roof ventilation.

Using aerial units is much safer for our rescue and ventilation operations, but trying to get a ladder truck in these narrow streets is itself a challenge. If the engines arrive first and are staged in front of the dwelling, getting the aerial in a usable position would be even more challenging.

Fire station locations and area coverage, apparatus allocations and staffing, future planning, and the new fire station design, are the other important angles that the fire chief should consider in reviewing the challenges associated with these cluster developments. In the west, most aerials were stationed around downtown areas where the majority of the commercial mid-rises or high-rises were constructed. With the urban sprawl of the past decades, the suburban fire stations generally were designed the house a couple of fire engines and a rescue unit. After all, most of those tract developments were far apart and only two stories high.

But with these new 3-story cluster housing developments, aerials are much more essential, and the extensive travel time to get them to the suburbs from the downtown stations is detrimental to operations.

The solution might not be as easy as merely relocating the aerials to suburban fire stations. More than likely, the aerials are too long and won’t fit in the bays of the existing fire stations. Unless, of course, parking the aerials outside is an option that you are willing to entertain. Again we might be able to mitigate this situation if these cluster dwellings were protected with fire sprinklers.

Also most fire departments use their cookie-cutter fire station designs for their future stations as they had done in the past, so fitting the aerials into the fire stations might still be an afterthought.

The fire service needs to get actively involved in planning commission meetings and public hearings, especially when such cluster developments are being proposed. Fire station location, apparatus placement, equipment, and staffing requirements are very important and costly factors that the fire chief and the jurisdiction must consider upfront.

Often for the larger master-plan communities, the developers must pay impact fees or are required to provide land or even build a new fire station for their development. Fire chiefs must have a strategic plan and should evaluate such proposals in great detail. Inadequate fire station design will not be the answer, and insufficient staffing, equipment and apparatus only compound the problem.

Elected officials and the top administrators must be fully aware of all these long-term risks and the expenditures. A detailed cost/benefit analysis would prove to them that residential fire sprinkler systems are invaluable in saving lives and the most efficient and cost-effective way to protect our communities.

Economic development and tax-base increases are indeed the absolute necessities for the thriving communities. But then the key is having long-term strategic view for the community‘s development and nourishing sustained smart growth.

These cluster developments are going to be with us for a very long time. We can and must be proactive and provide for the highest level of fire protection and life-safety both for the occupants and for firefighters. Allow for economic growth and high-density design, and yet provide the most efficient and highest level of life-safety and fire protection. Residential fire sprinkler systems are an essential part of the community‘s smart growth.

Take a look at the article about hidden war costs on CNN’s Web site. Based on a report from the House Joint Economic Committee, “the total economic impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is estimated at $1.6 trillion by 2009.” This article also says that “the committee calculated the average cost of both wars for a family of four would be $20,900 from 2002 to 2008.”

The committee’s report estimates that the cost of war is “nearly double the $804 billion in direct war costs the White House requested so far from Congress…. [T]he higher total economic impact comes from, among other things, the cost of borrowing money to pay for the war, lost productivity, higher oil prices and the cost of health care for veterans.”

Let‘s do a similar calculation to find out how much money an average family of four pays for the total cost of fire in the United States during same six-year span that the congressional report covered.

The NFPA‘s The Total Cost of Fire in United States report indicates that for 2004, “the total cost was estimated at $231–278 billion, or roughly 2 to 2-1/2% of U.S. gross domestic product.” Based on the statistics available from the U.S. Census Bureau, the total estimated population of the United States in 2004 was 293,655,404.

Now divide the total cost of fire by the total population to calculate the total cost of fire per capita in the United States in 2004:

$278 billion/293,655,404 = $946.69

That is $946.69 for every single American. Now multiply that by four to calculate the total cost of fire in the United States for a family of four in 2004:

$946.69 X 4 = $3,786.75

That is the total cost of fire in 2004 for a family of four. Now multiply that by six to get the total cost for the six-year span:

$3,786.75 X 6 = $22,720.56

Notice that the estimated total cost of fire of $22,720 is more than the $20,900 that the calculated cost of war that the congressional committee reported.

The calculation in the congressional report has many additional factors that have inflated the actual cost of war thus far. Obviously our simple mathematics don’t cover the inflationary impact of those parameters, yet still the total cost of fire was higher than their predictions for the war.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has said that the actual cost of war is about $12 billion a month. Divide $278 billion a year by 12 months and you get $23.16 billion a month for fire. That is twice the cost of war.

As of Wednesday morning, the total number of American casualties in Iraq was 3,863 in four-and-a-half years. This number is similar to the number of fire fatalities the United States has every year, which add up to about four times as the fatalities of the war.

If only people knew about our fire statistics. I only wish our politicians could put things in perspective and compare our total cost of fire to their total cost of war. It is up to us to provide them with that information.

Recent increases in interest rates have had an adverse effect on the housing market, and new-home construction has slowed significantly nationwide. This current valley follows nearly 10 years of peaks for the housing industry that resulted in a significant surge in land prices and new home costs.

Higher-density construction emerged as a means to reduce the sticker price for new houses. The developers built houses that were smaller and closer together, with the narrow street frontage (35 to 40 feet) facing much narrower streets (20 to 25 feet wide), some of which are dead ends. This way the developers could build more units per acre. In theory, this would decrease the cost of land per unit, thus lowering the cost per house and making homes more affordable to the consumers.

But as we all know, supply and demand is the name of the game in our market-driven economy. Needless to say, the altruistic facade of affordability faded away as fast as the rapid pace of the construction boom. And throughout the country the prices for new houses continued to soar at record rates.

These cluster subdivisions not only challenge the fire protection concepts of the construction codes for residential dwellings, but even push the envelope for the good old-fashioned common sense of general community safety. It is easy to figure out that on a bad fire day, lots of dry lumber piled up very close together could result in much bigger fires.

The International Code Council publishes the International Residential Code that governs construction of one- and two-family dwellings not exceeding three stories in height. Based on the provisions in the 2003 edition of the IRC, the exterior walls of the house were not required to have fire-resistive rating if they were not closer than three feet to the property line.

Fortunately, ICC eventually recognized the significant fire exposure problems, and its 2006 edition of the IRC, modified the 3-foot requirement to a minimum of five feet away from the property line. If the houses are designed closer to the property line, the exterior wall must be a one-hour fire-resistive rating.

Out here in the West, these non-rated exterior walls are mostly constructed of 2 x 4 framing, with a layer of 1/2-inch gypsum board on the inside, expanded foam in the middle for insulation, chicken wire, and then finally a layer of stucco on the outside of the wall. Generally, the major difference between the non-rated wall and the one-hour rated wall is that the 1/2-inch gypsum board is little thicker (5/8 inch).

Remember that the one-hour fire-resistive rating doesn‘t necessarily mean that the wall will last for one hour during an actual fire. The fire-resistive rating was established decades ago during the laboratory testing. An even more important fact to remember is that when the exterior wall is between three and five feet from the property line, the IRC allows for 25% of the one-hour fire-resistive exterior wall to be unprotected openings such as windows or vents.

Having all these areas of unprotected openings should make us think twice about the fire-exposure problems. In these cookie-cutter tract home cluster designs, the windows and vents are in close proximity to or directly facing each other. The closer together they build these cluster dwellings, the higher the chances of fire jumping from one house to the next.

In a fire scenario, especially with wind conditions, the heat from the fire in one house could definitely create fire exposure hazards for the neighboring house. The heat could begin melting the expanded foam insulation inside the exterior wall of the second house, getting that one involved also. That is, of course, if the fire has not already jumped across those unprotected bedroom windows and vents to the neighboring dwelling.

In these situations, residential fire sprinkler systems could be a great solution. Clearly, by extinguishing the fire in the incipient stage, fire sprinklers save the occupants lives. But then for most fire scenarios — other than the attic fires, as codes do not require installation of fire sprinklers in the attics of one- and two-family dwellings except as needed to protect fuel-fired equipment — fire sprinklers could also significantly reduce the probability of conflagration. That would then decrease the fire exposure intensity for the neighboring structure, thus reducing the probability of fire jumping from one building to the other.

In one- and two-family dwellings, regardless of the fire-resistive rating of the exterior walls, residential fire sprinkler systems could provide a much higher degree of life safety for the occupants of an involved house than can the passive fire-resistive rating of their exterior walls. The fire rating of the exterior wall is merely important for the fire exposures from the outside.

With the fires on the outside, the inside of the house would still be tenable, at least to a degree to afford the occupants of the house the chance to safely evacuate. If the fire in your neighbor‘s house is controlled by the residential fire sprinkler and contained, the fire rating of your exterior wall maybe of importance for the property protection purposes, but of less value for your life safety.

Also, by stopping the fire progression, fire sprinklers provide a much higher degree of safety for the firefighters. In confronting a fully involved structure, firefighters could face a higher probability of structural collapse, especially with the newer built houses that have lightweight wood trusses. And as you know, the fire service has long been concerned about the structural stability of these lightweight wood trusses under the adverse fire conditions.

As a result of these concerns, Department of Homeland Security recently awarded Underwriters Laboratories a grant to study the structural stability and performance of the engineered lumber and lightweight wood trusses under adverse fire conditions. The results of this study will be quite valuable and could even further highlight the importance of residential fire sprinklers in protecting our own firefighters. After all, by discharging water at the earliest stages and containing the fire, structural members would not be exposed to the flames; therefore, risk of structural failure is eliminated.

In part two, I’ll discuss the need to get aerials on the scene and some of the forces at work against this goal.

Recently the National Academy of Public Administration released its Department of Homeland Security–commissioned report, Assistance to Firefighters Grant Program: Assessing Performance. I was interested in reading the report, as it had similar themes to an article I had published in January. The academy’s report provides valuable information on a very important subject, and all fire chiefs should read it in detail.

Though there are many useful statistics in the report, I want to bring your attention to an area that the fire service needs to focus a tad more on — the socio-economic demographics of fire. Research is weak in this area and as a result public-education efforts aren’t up to par.

Page 28 of the report states that “African-Americans are three times more likely than whites to die in residential fires.” Recent multiple-fatality fires around the country support that statistic. So why aren’t we doing more to educate this demographic? Why don’t we get the NAACP onboard with our efforts?

Similar logic could be used for educating our elderly population, who might not have the mobility to evacuate during a fire, even if they might have been alerted by their smoke alarms. This population would be best protected by residential fire sprinklers, which would extinguish the fires in the early stages and limit smoke inhalation. So why don’t we sell residential fire sprinkler concept to the AARP?

We don’t educate the public the best that we should; these examples show missed opportunities. We need to educate these organizations about the fire problem and specifically tailor fire department efforts to their members. We have a great opportunity with NAACP and AARP, for example, because these organizations have tremendous political power; when they talk, Capitol Hill listens. We must focus on such issues if we want to better succeed in the 21st century.

Don’t you think support of such organizations could help secure better funding for the fire service?

I’ve written many articles about the great need for fire sprinklers, but let me make it clear that I also strongly believe in the need for the three Es of fire prevention: education, enforcement and engineering. All three are very important, but if I had to put them in order of priority, I would have listed them just as I did.

Education is most important because it targets the three main contributors to the fire problem in our country, who also are the main benefactors of our mitigations efforts: men, women and children. During his presentation at the 1947 President‘s Conference on Fire Prevention, NFPA‘s legendary Percy Bugbee said, “once every man, woman and child realizes and accepts in daily life the responsibility for simple fire prevention measures, death, injury and destruction by fire will be substantially reduced.”

Enforcement, or the carrots-and-sticks approach, reminds the recipients of these pub-ed efforts of the consequences and the associated liabilities of their failures. Engineering tries to decrease the risks and failure consequences and reduce the damage by limiting the fire growth and progression. I’m not referring to only the fire sprinklers here, but all available passive and active built-in fire protection technologies. In my mind, fire sprinklers are the means, not the end.

Generally, we in the fire service in general don’t put as high a priority on fire prevention as we should.

A few years back, I surveyed 32 major metropolitan fire departments from all across the country for my Executive Fire Officer Program research paper, “Fire Prevention in America at the Dawn of the New Millennium.” I found that an average of 3.5% of these departments’ budgets went toward fire prevention and about 3.8% of their personnel worked in their fire prevention division. If cities with smaller departments and townships with volunteer departments had been incorporated into these statistics, the results would have skewed even further down. That, my friends, is still the reality of fire prevention in America.

The book Public Budgeting: Politics, Institutions, and Processes states that “budgets are about values … budgeting is concerned with the translation of financial resources into human purposes. A budget then is a concrete expression of the values of society.” The book Public Administration in America explains that “budgets also should reflect the mission or purpose for a bureaucratic agency‘s existence. This suggests still another function of budgets, intentional or not: they represent the priorities of those who formulated them.” It is only fair to say that “intentional or not” based on the available statistics, fire prevention still isn’t a high priority for this country‘s fire service.

We focus extensively on fire suppression and are always in reactive mode responding to fires. Until that paradigm changes, our ability to do conduct education and enforcement is very limited because we don‘t have the resources. Therefore, it makes sense to focus more on the fire prevention parameter that we have some limited control over — engineering.

We must focus on the construction codes to provide for passive and active built-in fire protection technologies to reduce fire fatalities and decrease fire loss in our country, and that is precisely why I focus so much on fire sprinklers. I believe that based on the feasibility and availability of the current fire protection technology, automatic fire sprinkler systems present the most effective means of saving both occupants and firefighters. For now, sprinkers are the biggest bang for the buck.

As I watched the memorial service in Charleston with the nine flag-draped caskets, I thought about the legendary Francis Brannigan, who said, “When a combustible structure is involved in fire, the building is the enemy, and you must know the enemy.” But I believe that we need to take that even a step further. The problem doesn‘t start with the building; it starts with the construction codes. The building is an object, not an enemy. Our real enemies are the ones who allow such buildings to be built with little regard for the occupants‘ safety and even less regard for the firefighters‘ safety.

Considering that investigations still are underway in Charleston, I won‘t be specific to that particular fire. Some of their earliest reports, though, mentioned that multiple human errors and failures in housekeeping policies and procedures contributed to the ignition and the fast propagation of that fire. Those same human factors historically have been at the root of most commercial and residential fires. Take a look at the recent catastrophic multiple-fatality fires. Through June, there have been a total of 247 total deaths in 60 fires, and 142 (57%) of those fatalities have been children.

And it is precisely because of these failures and human errors that I strongly believe in fail-safe, built-in automatic protection.

I think that the Charleston Fire Chief Rusty Thomas might have been correct, in a way, when he said, “sprinklers would not have put out the fire but would have at least slowed it.” Had the fire sprinklers been installed, they would have most likely slowed if not stopped the fire progression. At the very least, they could have prevented flashover and catastrophic structural failure.

While fire sprinklers can‘t prevent fires, they can minimize the adverse consequences of failure once the fire has ignited. That is why I believe so strongly in fire sprinklers.

Also let me explain my use of the term “enemy.” I realize that it has a strong negative connotation and that it might sound contrary to what I have been writing about the importance of working with building officials in the International Code Council process and with the builders in the National Association of Home Builders to educate them to cooperatively change construction codes.

In my mind, the word “enemy” doesn‘t exclusively mean prolonged antagonistic relationships. Having an enemy, opponent or adversary truly calls for more diplomacy and negotiations. I don‘t view sprinkler opponents as mortal enemies in a classical term, but as adversaries that we must defeat with sound logic and science in the various code arenas.

With all due respect to our worthy adversaries in the code development process, their delay in acknowledging the value of fire sprinklers and embracing the use of such technology in all new construction is only prolonging the agony. They know quite well, especially after ICC final code hearings a couple of months ago, that it is only a matter of time before fire sprinkler systems protect all newly constructed homes in America. But the postponement is causing thousands of civilians‘ and firefighters‘ lives to be lost nationally each year.

I‘m not pointing the finger and merely blaming sprinkler opponents for the fire problem. We should first look at ourselves before blaming others. We in the fire service share that burden, too, and our low priority for fire prevention and lack of strong participation in the code development process are significant contributors to the magnitude of the fire problem in our country. If we truly want to address the fire problem in our country, we must first rearrange our priorities. Fire sprinklers save firefighters‘ lives, too.