Credit: Tyco Fire & Building Products
In mid-September, the International Code Council (ICC) will hold the Final Action Hearing for its 2009 edition of residential and commercial building codes. At that meeting in Minneapolis, proponents will once again attempt to muster support among ICC’s membership for inserting into the model International Residential Code (IRC) a provision mandating the installation of automatic fire sprinklers into all new one- and two-family homes. (It’s currently in IRC as an appendix whose compliance is optional.)
Anyone at that event will hear the same arguments for and against a residential sprinkler code change that advocates (primarily fire service agencies) and opponents (primarily builders) have been debating for more than 30 years. In late March, U.S. Fire Administrator Gregory Cade endorsed sprinkler installation in all homes. But home builders’ clout across the country so far has been an effective deterrent. However, more municipal politicians have been open to approving sprinkler ordinances, especially where recent fires have proved fatal.
One- and two-family homes accounted for around one-fifth of the total number of fires in 2006, the latest year for which data are available, according to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA). But two-thirds of all fire-related deaths that year occurred in home fires. Each year, about 25 firefighters die trying to put out home fires, accounting for 45 percent of all firefighter deaths annually. Fire prevention officials claim that a combination of sprinklers and smoke alarms in a home can reduce occupant fatalities by 97 percent. They point for evidence to Vancouver, British Columbia, which hasn’t had a home fire death since it passed its sprinkler ordinance in 1990.
Roy Marshall, executive director of the Residential Fire Safety Institute (RFSI), is confident that momentum is shifting and that sprinklers will one day be as common in new houses as water heaters. There are about 300 municipalities that have passed sprinkler ordinances, nearly half of them in California, including the town of Galt, whose city council voted 4-1 in favor in January. Fifty-four municipalities in Northern Illinois have similar ordinances. Rising demand for installations led the fire department in Salem, Ore., to offer sprinkler seminars for plumbers, which drew 41 contractors in February. “Three years ago, we had no calls for them,” Joe Parrott, deputy chief of fire and life safety, told Salem’s Statesman Journal.
Credit: Tyco Fire & Building Products
In May 2007, a residential fire sprinkler code revision received a 56 percent favorable vote—476 for to 375 against—at ICC’s annual meeting in Rochester, N.Y. “This was an unprecedented level of support,” says Jeffrey Shapiro, president of Austin, Texas–based International Code Consultants. But code changes require a two-thirds majority to override committee opposition, and that opposition is expected to continue on the residential committee that last January rejected three sprinkler code changes at a hearing in Palm Springs, Calif. So fire services are urging their brethren to turn out in force in Minneapolis. “Our opposition … isn’t really home builders and developers. It’s our own apathy,” writes Ronny Coleman, a master instructor in California’s Fire Service Training and Education System, in a recent issue of Fire Chief magazine. With 30,000 fire departments and 1.1 million firefighters in the U.S., the fire sprinkler debate, he says, “is ours to win or lose.”
Cost estimate confusion
In February, NFPA’s Fire Protection Research Institute in Quincy, Mass., initiated an analysis of 10 communities where residential fire sprinklers are mandated to determine the real cost of installations, which is this issue’s third rail. The NAHB and fire services are among the constituencies represented on a technical panel set up to evaluate this study’s results, which should be completed by October. “NAHB’s involvement shows that it is open to good, factual information,” says Kathleen Almand, the Institute’s executive director. Some veteran fire fighters, battle scarred by this ongoing fight, are skeptical. “When Montgomery County, [Md.,] passed the most comprehensive smoke detector ordinance in the country in the 1970s, the same people who opposed that oppose sprinkler mandates today,” recalls Jim Dalton, the National Fire Sprinkler Association’s director of public fire protection and one of the leaders in the residential fire sprinkler movement.
The NAHB nevertheless asserts there are legitimate grounds to oppose fire sprinkler mandates for new homes. The trade group agrees with a recent NFPA report, which estimates that home deaths would lessen by one-third if every home had at least one working smoke alarm, and supports equipping all new homes with interconnected devices. Steven Orlowski, program manager for the NAHB’s Advocacy Group, adds that retrofitting an existing home with smoke alarms—for around 45 cents per square foot in a 2,400-square-foot colonial-style home—“would be far less expensive” than installing fire sprinklers. RFSI counters these arguments by noting that from 2000 through 2004, more than one-third of residential fire deaths were in homes with smoke detectors. Michael Hamilton, battalion chief of Montgomery County, Md.’s fire code enforcement section, adds that sprinklers help put out fires before they “flash over” into another room, thereby lengthening the time occupants might escape unharmed from a burning home.
Home builders object to what they see as the prohibitive expense of installing fire sprinklers. In 2007, the NAHB Research Center surveyed 102 builders that in the previous year had included fire sprinklers in 5,527 homes whose median size was 2,271 square feet, and found that the final cost of installation averaged $6,677. In Montgomery County, that can rise to $15,000 (depending on the house size) when permits, inspections, and user fees are factored in, says Raquel Montenegro, associate director of legislative affairs for the Maryland National Capital BIA. She points out that once that ordinance became law, the county eliminated tax incentives for retrofitting older homes with sprinklers.
Proponents contend that the cost is actually closer to $1 to $1.50 per square foot and cite a 2005 study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which found that integrating a multipurpose sprinkler system into the plumbing of a house under construction adds $2,075 to a 3,338-square-foot colonial, $1,895 to a 2,257-square-foot townhouse, and $829 to a 1,172-square-foot ranch. In Scottsdale, Ariz., where a residential sprinkler ordinance has been on the books since 1985, builders install systems for about 80 cents per square foot, says deputy chief Jim Ford. But he cautions that without mandates, community design “freedoms,” such as changes in hydrant spacing and street width, would “go away.”
Consumers blasé, so far
The intensity of this debate hasn’t ignited a fire under homeowners or buyers, as very few are choosing sprinklers over, say, granite countertops as options, if they’re offered at all. Fire service officials partly blame this on the way TV shows and movies erroneously show sprinklers going off simultaneously at the slightest change in room temperature. Dalton notes, too, that sprinklers have lacked the marketing and education boost that could spur consumer demand. “Homeowners’ expectations about the minimum fire protection in their homes is very vague,” he observes.
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Fire officials suspect that homeowner awareness might be higher than opponents claim. They see the glass half full in a 2006 NAHB poll of 800 people, which found 29 percent who thought sprinklers should be required in homes. Forty-five percent of 1,019 people polled by Harris Interactive for the Home Fire Sprinkler Coalition thought a sprinkler-equipped home more desirable than one without sprinklers, and 69 percent thought sprinklers increase the value of a house. Shapiro observes that many home buyers were once renters and are used to seeing sprinklers in apartments and condos. Other sources point out that seat belts, air bags, and motorcycle helmets all required mandates before they gained public acceptance.
Montenegro, though, says this debate doesn’t get to the heart of the matter because it only addresses installing sprinklers in new homes, when existing homes are more vulnerable to conflagration, she and other builders contend. Hamilton and other fire service people say that home fires have less to do with the age of a house than with human behavior. A 2005 NFPA study found that heating systems cause about 14 percent of dwelling fires, and electrical systems cause 8 percent. But more than one-third of home fires start in a kitchen, and another 12 percent in a bedroom, which implies that cooking mishaps and smoking in bed are two main causes of home fires.
Given that few homeowners are willing to spend the money to retrofit their homes with sprinklers, Shapiro and Ford, among others, ask why the long-term safety of a house should hinge on whether its original buyer chooses sprinklers as an option.
Firefighters fume
ICC’s Final Hearing Action won’t resolve this issue, regardless of how its membership votes. If a sprinkler code revision passes, it won’t go into effect until Jan. 1, 2011, although municipalities could, theoretically, choose to comply with it sooner. Builders will continue to press their case in statehouses and building code offices. But firefighters are getting desperate, if an article posted in March on Firehouse magazine’s Web site reflects their collective frustration. Contributing editor Azarang Mirkhah, who is the fire protection engineer for the city of Las Vegas, called on firefighters to “seriously consider” the option of “staying out” of a burning home with no active fire protection system. “Home builders need to recognize that besides the direct property fire loss, there are also indirect costs associated with the loss of civilian and firefighter lives. And these are the costs that they have ignored in their cost/benefit calculations for far too long.”