Residential Fire Sprinklers .com

Protecting Your Home & Family

Location:	Rush City, MN
Home Type:	Single Family Modular
Yr Built:	2006
Sq. Ft.:	4200
Date of Fire:	August 27, 2007
Damage:	Total Loss $407,000

Last year, on August 27, 2007, the Jungels family had their lives change forever. Around 10:30 am, Eric and Lil Jungels’ 14-year-old son was filling the lawn mower with gasoline in the garage and accidentally dripped gas on a frayed electrical cord. A large rug quickly ignited, and the fire rapidly spread through the house. Fortunately, both the Jungels’ young teenage children in the home were able to escape, as well as their three dogs. However, the fire destroyed the house and the Jungels lost everything they owned.

Ironically, Eric and Lil both work in the fire sprinkler industry helping others protect their buildings from fire. As parents of five children they enjoyed the constant protection of a residential fire sprinkler system in their first home together. But, when it came time to move into their next home, the fire protection they had grown accustomed to was no longer there…and unfortunately, in hindsight, this was the home that needed it the most.

The Jungels live in a rural area, about seven miles from the nearest town. Once they lost electricity due to the fire, they also lost any access to water on site from their well. With the high winds that day, the Rush City, MN Fire Department and three additional supporting fire departments could not save the house.

The Jungels’ house was a one story Rambler style modular home with a full finished basement. It was built in 2006 by Friendship Homes of Minnesota and had a finished square footage of 4,200 sq. ft. At the time of the fire, the home had working smoke detectors but no residential fire sprinklers or centrally monitored fire alarm system. The home was also lacking an automatic closing door and fireproof sheetrock between the attached garage and the home, allowing the flames to quickly spread from the garage to the interior of the home.

With the total loss of their home, the property damage was estimated at $249,270. The loss of their personal property came to $157,730. Fortunately, homeowner’s insurance covered the losses as expected, but that could never restore to the Jungels the many irreplaceable possessions that were destroyed. Eric reported that they lost family and vacation photo albums, five children’s memory boxes, Lions’ awards, class rings and family jewelry, several painstakingly gathered collections (katanas/knives/swords, beer steins, coins, and zebras), handmade arts, crafts, quilts and special Christmas items that had been gathered over the years. No amount of money could restore these unique and memory filled possessions.

The disruption of the Jungels’ lives continued after the fire. For four months they were displaced from their home. They rebuilt their home on the same site—this time making sure that residential fire sprinklers were installed. Eric is clear about how the fire changed his view of home fire safety. It opened his eyes to the potential areas fires can start. A few important construction differences, such as fireproof sheetrock between the house and garage and an automatic closing garage service door, can significantly slow a fire. He shares, “Fire can destroy everything you have worked your life to build and develop, in as little as three hours.” Fortunately, with a new home protected by fire sprinklers, they can rebuild their lives in confidence that their new memories and valuables will be protected.

View the details and photos of the Jungels’ new residential fire sprinkler system.

Have you experienced a fire in your home? If yes, we would like to know about it and feature you and your experience in a case study. Download the “Home Fire Loss Questionnaire”, answer the questions and return the completed questionnaire as indicated. We will use the information provided to publish a case study sharing your story so that other individuals and families can become more aware of home fire safety and take appropriate precautions.

By Robert DeWitt – Tuscaloosa News

Residential sprinkler systems save lives, firefighters say.

‘What will residential sprinklers mean to us?’ asked John Brook, a battalion chief assigned to training in the Tuscaloosa Fire Department. ‘Eight out of 10 people who die in fires die in residential fires.’

But safety like that comes with a price that not everyone is willing to pay.

‘This is a hot-button issue for the national home builders association,’ said Todd Vick, Home Builders Association of Tuscaloosa president. ‘It’s one of those deals where it does cost more.’

Adding an additional expense to a home is never popular with home builders or the buying public. But it’s particularly unpopular in a slumping real estate market.

‘Cost is definitely an issue since we’re already experiencing a tough housing market,’ Vick said. ‘The cost has been the number one reason for the opposition from home builders.’

Tuscaloosa Fire Chief Alan Martin has been pitching residential sprinkler systems to the City Council Public Safety Committee. While he doesn’t favor mandating sprinkler systems, he wants the council to consider offering incentives to encourage builders to install them.

‘It’s one of those things that’s going to take a little time,’ Martin said. ‘What we need to do is get past all the myths and misinformation and convince people this is the thing we need to do.’

The statistics, he said, are compelling. He points to Scottsdale, Ariz., which in 1987 began requiring all new residences to have sprinkler systems.

‘It saves a lot of lives,’ said Kerry Swick, a battalion chief with the Scottsdale Fire Department. ‘We haven’t had a life lost in a sprinkled residential since then.’

Since the law’s passage, Scottsdale had 13 fire fatalities in homes without sprinkler systems. Swick says those numbers indicate the value of residential sprinkler systems.

Fire codes have long required sprinkler systems for commercial buildings and multi-family housing. But single-family houses have been exempt, except in a few places.

Brook says it will take a while before people recognize the value of residential sprinkler systems, just as it took some time before smoke detectors became standard.

‘In 1969, smoke alarms came onto the market,’ Brook said. ‘It cost about $1,000 for a three-bedroom home to have working smoke alarms. Today, you can put smoke alarms in a three-bedroom house for about $50. They reduced in half the number of people dying in residential fires. But people are still dying in residential fires.’

Martin and Brook saw a presentation by a group called Fire Team USA, which got a federal grant to study the effects of sprinkler systems on house fires. The organization’s conclusion was that sprinkler systems help the people inside survive.

‘It’s not designed to completely extinguish the fire,’ Brooks said. ‘Many times, it does control the fire. A residential sprinkler system is like a protection system. The fire department still has to come.’

It also helps protect the people least able to protect themselves, such as the elderly, children and people with disabilities. The sprinkler system can help them stay alive until help arrives.

‘Smoke alarms are a passive protection device,’ Brook said. ‘It gives you an opportunity to escape. A sprinkler system is an active protection device. It is going to work the same way regardless of your state of mind. You can be impaired by alcohol. You can be 5 years old and go hide under the bed.’

People can’t breathe in temperatures above 120 degrees, Brook said. Residential fires in houses without sprinkler systems can climb to 2,000 degrees in a matter of minutes.

In studies of houses with sprinkler systems, temperatures never got above 165 degrees at the ceiling level and 80 to 90 degrees on the floor, Brook said.

And sprinkler systems actually cause less water damage than the fire department, Brook said. Firefighters use 100-150 gallons of water per minute to fight fires. A sprinkler head produces about 12 gallons a minute.

Advocates claim sprinkler systems can easily be freeze protected and are not as expensive as a commercial system. They can be installed with PVC piping using the domestic water supply and don’t have to be tested regularly like commercial systems, Martin said.

‘The cost on those is $1 to $1.50 per square foot. That’s about like a countertop,’ he said.

Vick disputes that assessment, saying home builders have not found that to be true. A Lee County builder priced systems for two 3,000-square-foot houses, with one estimate for $11,000 and another for $14,000. That’s closer to the $3 to $4 per square foot that builders expect.

‘Proponents make it appear that it’s as easy as your plumber installing a few sprinkler heads,’ Vick said. ‘It’s not. There are issues with who can install it. There are issues in design. Where do the heads have to be and where do they need to be?’

There are other considerations too, Vick said. For instance, a retrofitted ceiling fan could block a sprinkler head. What happens if water is cut off to a residence? What about water pressure issues? And if the system fails, can homeowners hold builders liable for the damage?

The savings on homeowners insurance is also minimal, since insurance companies are responsible for water damage in addition to fire damage, Vick said. On a $200,000 house in Trussville with a sprinkler system, the savings was only $10 a year, he said.

‘All these concerns need to be addressed and need to be defined before mandating anything,’ Vick said, adding that sprinkler systems are being advocated by fire equipment companies trying to make sales and by firefighters who are as concerned about the safety of their own ranks as about homeowners.

But Martin reiterates he doesn’t want to force residential sprinkler systems on builders. He wants to convince people to install them because they save lives.

To read the full article click here.

BY HEATH DRUZIN AND ROCKY BARKER – Idaho Statesman

A wall of fire barreled through the forest with a jet-engine roar near Secesh Meadows last August, and local fire chief Cris Bent knew his work was about to be tested.

Flames danced atop lodgepole pines, smoke darkened the sky, and residents of the tiny mountain hamlet north of McCall prepared for the worst. Just a month earlier, a forest fire had burned 254 homes near Lake Tahoe and the 2007 fire season appeared ready to claim its next community.

But as the raging East Zone Complex fire reached the cluster of loosely-spaced homes, the flames dropped to the ground, crackling and smoldering. The fire crept right up to doorsteps. But without the intense flames that spurred the fire just moments before, no homes burned – a feat fire managers attributed largely to Bent’s push to clear flammable brush from around houses in the community.

“It just blew through the area,” Bent said. “We were well prepared.”

The town’s ability to withstand a frontal assault by a major wildfire demonstrates what fire behavior experts have been saying for more than a decade. Clearing brush and other flammables and requiring fireproof roofs will protect houses even in an intense wildfire – without risking firefighters’ lives.

More provocatively, the research suggests that fighting fires on public lands to protect homes is ineffective and, in the long run, counter-productive.

It is also far more expensive.

Federal agencies still put out nearly every fire that starts – of the around 80,000 blazes each year, just 327 are generally allowed to burn. Out of the 9.8 million acres that burned across the country last year, only about 430,000 acres burned without suppression, in what managers call “wildland fire use” blazes.

Fire suppression costs have risen 6.5 times in a decade to $1.86 billion last year. At the same time, funding to make private homes and communities safer has dropped by more than 30 percent since 2001 – to less than $80 million in 2008 – and more cuts are proposed for 2009.

This is the paradox of wildland fire management in America: Most scientists and fire managers agree that fire is a healthy and necessary part of the forest, and that fighting these blazes serves only to build up fuels and boost the size and frequency of catastrophic fires.

But federal agencies keep attacking almost every wildfire, many deep in the woods, and the rising cost of suppression diverts money from protecting homes and communities – which can be saved with the right, and often inexpensive, measures.

The result: Billions of taxpayer dollars are spent on what most experts agree is the wrong approach. The lives of firefighters are put in danger on fires that don’t need to be fought. And homes are left vulnerable, their fate often decided by wind direction and the availability of federal firefighters to protect private property.

A TALE OF TWO TOWNS

Down the road from Secesh Meadows in Warren, thick black smoke had blotted out the intense midsummer sun, leaving the historic mining town in a premature dusk.

The choking clouds seemed to burst, but instead of rain, blackened pine needles and glowing embers fell from the sky, hurled by the raging wildfire’s 300-foot flames. Unlike Secesh, Warren had no program to clear brush from around the log cabins that dot the town.

And last August, embers ignited three homes and sparked fires that destroyed them.

Like many Warren residents, Butch Cooper, who owns the Winter Inn, blames the Forest Service and what he sees as the agency’s unwillingness to put out fires. Cooper, who has lived in Warren on and off for more than 20 years, would like to see more logging in the forest and faster fire suppression.

“There is no management of the forest – it’s just: destroy it,” he said.

He reflects the long-held conventional wisdom in much of the West: The federal government turned its back on good forest management when it started to phase out public lands logging, and that’s what is creating more large fires.

Michael Dubrasich, a Lebanon, Ore., consulting forester, is critical of forest policy, too. The federal government is wasting timber and backing away from its historic role of protecting private property.

“The fires that start on unkempt federal land and spread to private property are irresponsible spillovers perpetrated upon American citizens by their own government,” Dubrasich said.

But Bent didn’t leave the responsibility to protect his community to others.

In 2006, he used a $60,000 federal grant to remove brush and trees from around Secesh Meadows houses – a tactic known in the wildfire management community as firewise.

He was able to convince only 37 percent of the residents to participate in the program, though some who declined already had cleared their property. His effort, along with federal firefighters and volunteers, was enough to save the town.

But firefighters had to devote extra effort – meaning increased danger and taxpayer cost – to protecting homes that had not been prepared, Bent said.

“That really personally annoyed me a great deal,” Bent said. “We’re risking the lives of young men and women to protect a home the homeowner could have treated at their leisure.”

THE SCIENCE OF FIRE BEHAVIOR

The fires in Secesh Meadows and Warren didn’t surprise Jack Cohen, the U.S. Forest Service’s top expert on how fires burn homes.

Most of the public and even many firefighters and fire managers think of the fire racing through the canopy of the forest -the intense “crown fire” – as the main threat to homes.

But the reality is that most crown fires lose their intensity when they reach the edge of a community. Trees are spread more thinly in residential areas, intersected by roads and driveways and lawns, so the fires tend to drop to the ground, where they burn with less intensity and are easier to manage than the blazing crown fires.

Cohen has studied dozens of fires across the nation since the 1990s, and he sees the same behavior every time.

Most homes are ignited by flying embers, thrown as far as a mile and a half ahead of the crown fire. Or they catch fire when the ground fire reaches brush and trees within 100 feet of the buildings.

The homes themselves burn especially hot – and can send off their own embers to start new fires – but often the trees around the burned homes are left with their green canopies intact.

That tells Cohen that there is no “wall of fire” blazing through a community and consuming everything in its path.

Instead, he says, it shows the fires can be fought within the communities – and that raging fires on public lands don’t need to be stopped in the wilderness to protect private property.

Cohen’s research demonstrates that requiring forest homeowners to have a fireproof roof, to clear their gutters of pine needles and to remove bushes and trees within 100 feet of a home is far less expensive and more effective for protecting homes than fighting fires on public lands.

Cutting trees to thin the forest around communities – the preferred method of treating federal lands to protect homes – reduces airborne embers that ignite many house fires. But that tactic is still more expensive and less effective than clearing directly around homes.

“We have the ability to be compatible with fire,” Cohen said. “But we mostly choose not to be. … Our expectations, desires, and perceptions are inconsistent with the natural reality.”

To read the full article click here.

By Amber Smith – The Ledger

HAINES CITY | Dennis Coder was angry after his home and a mobile home burned last month at his Drift In Resort in rural East Polk County.

His anger was focused at Polk County Fire Services, whose firefighters were unable to put out the flames in time to save his property – including, by his estimate, $500,000 in antique collectibles.

But county fire officials say they did all they could to save the structures, given the lack of water and other problems they faced combatting the blaze that struck June 19.

The nearest fire hydrant is a mile away from the resort, which features eight theme-style cottages and is in a remote area. The resort is still open.

There are many reasons why Coder and others choose to live in the county’s rural areas.

But living farther away from cities and services can sometimes put the resident in peril when it comes to needing emergency help.

“Fire doubles itself every minute,” said Steve Buttermore, Polk County Fire Services battalion chief. “A rural area’s biggest threat is wildfires. It takes a longer response time due to the distance.”

Most rural areas also don’t have fire hydrants. That means fire departments, whether city or county, have to bring the water with them in tanker trucks.

Fire departments are prepared for this, Buttermore said. They can shuttle in tanker trucks, basically water tanks on wheels, and they can use any nearby water source, such as a lake, pond or a swimming pool to get water to the truck.

All city and county fire departments are set up to draft water if needed.

Lake Alfred Fire Chief Roger Pridgen said he can remember having to draft only twice in 20 years.

“It just isn’t something we have to do very often,” Pridgen said.

Departments can also call in mutual aid help from nearby stations and start a convoy of water.

“We can shuttle tankers from the closest water source to the site of the fire,” Buttermore said. “We also have it in our 10-year plan to start using super tankers, which would allow us to carry more water in one truck.”

A tanker truck holds 1,500 gallons of water. A supertanker can hold 3,000 gallons of water.

FIREFIGHTING FORMULA

The rule of thumb in firefighting is one gallon of water is needed to extinguish the heat generated by one pound of burning wood.

There is also a universal formula, called the Iowa Formula, that fire officials use to figure how much water, manpower and equipment is needed to fight a house fire that is fully involved.

By using that formula, for example, fire officials can estimate they will need 192 gallons of water per minute to fight a fire in a 2,400-square-foot house.

Rick Parnell, Polk County Fire Services assistant chief, said when an emergency call, such as a house fire, comes into the county’s communications center, it shows on the computer screen where the call is coming from.

“The system shows us if it is in a rural area, and we can respond accordingly with additional tankers if needed,” Parnell said.

To read the full article click here.

By Greg Sabatino – BCLocalNews

Firefighters say arson has not been ruled out as the cause of a house fire that erupted Monday morning on the North Shore.

“It’s possible,” said Daniel Funk, a fire inspector with Kamloops Fire and Rescue.

“We’re not ruling it out.”

Shortly after 11 a.m. Monday morning, firefighters were called to the scene at 861 Ollek Street where a blaze had completely engulfed the west side of the North Shore home.

“The home’s completely damaged,” Funk said.

“The upstairs is all smoke and fire damage, the downstairs is all water damage.”

Ken Bayntun, a tenant renting the basement of the home, was the first to witness the fire and said he was inside the home at the time the fire started.

“The people that live there, they asked me to turn the water off at 11 a.m. when they left,” he explained.

“I came out at about quarter to 11.”

Bayntun had been watching TV in the basement suite he rents and went outside to turn off the sprinklers.

“The first thing was I saw the smoke, and heard all these popping sounds,” he said. “I saw the fire all over the west side of the building.

“All the exterior was on fire and all the siding.”

The flames quickly incinerated the steps leading up to the porch and a charred “V” pattern was created up the side of the home.

The damage extended throughout the garage, deck and upstairs portion of the residence.

To read the full article click here.

By Kyle Magin – North Lake Tahoe Bonanza

A fire that started Friday on a 500-block Lakeshore Boulevard home was contained quickly by an in-home sprinkler system that North Lake Tahoe Fire Protection District officials say saved the home.

The fire started in a walk-in closet in the master bedroom of the home a little before 12:30 p.m. Friday, said NLTFPD Asst. Fire Marshal Pete Mulvihill.

Once a fire detector was activated by smoke in the room, two sprinkler heads douses the flames before firefighters from the NLTFPD arrived to contain what was left of the blaze. The home’s caretaker was on the property but no one was inside the home while the fire was burning and no one was hurt.

Mulvihill said an official cause of the fire has not been determined but expects one early next week.

“This is a great advertisement for fire sprinkler systems,” said Gary Walsh, who bought the home in 2000.

Walsh said the home was equipped with a sprinkler system when he bought it and then updated it after the purchase.

“The sprinkler system operated very successfully,” Mulvihill, who was among more than one dozen NLTFPD firefighters on the scene, said. “One sprinkler head in the closet and a second one outside the closet door worked to contain the fire with far less water than we would have used with a fire hose.”

Both Walsh and the home’s caretaker, Alex Estevez, suspected the blaze started from an electrical failure in the walk-in closet.

Estevez said he first noticed the fire at 12:28 p.m. Friday and alerted Walsh via cell phone.

Walsh, who says he and his wife split their time between the home and a ranch in Gardnerville, Nev., is selling the home through Lakeshore Realty.

The home and two others which sit on the property is listed for $47 million altogether, making it one of the three most expensive properties on Lake Tahoe and top-25 nationwide.

Chris Plastiras, who along with wife Patti are the listing agents for the home, said Friday’s damage was minimal and credited the NLTFPD with a good job to save the home.

“The fire district did a phenomenal job of responding to this,” Plastiras said. “There was some water damage, I think a little less than 1,000 gallons of water were used in total, but we should be able to restore it in a relatively short period of time.”

To read the full article click here.

By Gordon Gregory – Salt Lake Tribune

I live close to tall trees in Northern California, and on the afternoon of June 12, I held our mare, Millie, and watched wildfire advance toward the draw not 1,000 yards away where my wife and I had almost finished building our home. We’d been working on the house for almost four years.

The wind pushed a towering cloud of black smoke west of our place. I found hope in the lateral drift. I believed that the inferno then burning for a second day would slide by us.

But when I heard explosions, caused by God knows what as fire consumed the homes farther up the road – explosions that grew louder as the homes of nearer neighbors were hit – hope began to fade.

And it vanished altogether when I saw whole trees torch off and heard the roar of destruction that nothing would quiet. Not the DC-10 dropping its 12,000 gallons of fire retardant, not the engines staged along the gravel roadway and certainly not my silent prayers, offered far too late. When a fireman yelled “Get the hell out!” I felt the kind of sickness that comes from powerlessness in the path of fury.

Jogging away from the inferno, Millie tossing her head against the roped halter, I couldn’t imagine how I would tell my wife and our 14-year-old daughter that every board and nail, every ill-hung door and crooked tile, every left-behind artifact of our lives was gone.

All of it: Georgia’s ribbons, her childhood drawings of cats, drawings of cats, her notes of love; the books and writings; the framed family pictures; the glass art and paintings from my sister and mother; my brother’s ink drawings; and my father’s watch, the one he wore the day he died and which I wear – wore – when I need his support. All of it violently rendered into nothing more than a smoldering statistical blip.

By 2:30 p.m. that day our house had become rubble. It was one of more than 70 homes lost to the Humboldt Fire and one of 102 residences destroyed by wildfire that week alone in Butte County, Calif. As I write this weeks later, the fires still rage, people are still fleeing – my family and I had to move out of a rental house on July 9, as a new fire closed in on us – and another 40 homes were lost in a nearby community.

Our experience, like everyone’s, is simple. It is also entirely commonplace.

We thought we were safe. We thought disasters were only stories. We thought that human action could forestall calamity. Surely, a retardant-laden jet and all those fire trucks, coupled with the stucco siding and tile roof, not to mention the home-sprinkler system backed by a 5,000-gallon water tank – surely, all of this would be enough to defeat something as simple, as archaic, as fire.

Such silliness.

So what does fire teach? Perspective, I suppose, though that depends on your vantage point. The one I’m sitting on now teeters between gratitude and grief. The support and aid we’ve received from neighbors and strangers has been remarkable, and our appreciation for this community has grown immeasurably. But the loss of our house and belongings will haunt the three of us for a good time. I doubt we’ll connect with another dwelling as fully as we did the ruined one. I fear we will never again put down our roots as deeply.

Sometimes I look for meaning, or at least symmetry. The land we lived on was untouched until we borrowed it from nature. We took away many of the trees and the brush and we changed the habitat, putting our needs first. Then the brush and the trees conspired with a spark to take it back.

But that’s too simple. Wildfire is not something to which one can attach a meaning. It is simply the chaos of nature taking over, and maybe that’s the lesson.

We think that because we can turn jetliners into air tankers, we are in control. We think we can fix anything if we just put enough technology, money and bureaucracy into the effort. But we delude ourselves, just as I deluded myself for a time June 12.

The reality is that, here in the West, we live in fire’s realm. It is less a neighbor than an inattentive overlord, an absentee landlord who might ignore you for generations and then, on a whim, suddenly decide to burn down your house. When it’s your house that’s taken, you may become a refugee, fleeing with only what you can carry or lead away.

To read the full article click here.

By KEVIN DUCHSCHERE – Minneapolis Star Tribune

Bystanders and firefighters worked furiously late Friday night to rescue residents of a St. Paul apartment building that was deliberately set on fire, officials said.

As a result of the quick action, no one was seriously injured in the blaze, which was reported just before 10 p.m. Friday. But St. Paul Fire Marshal Steve Zaccard said that police have launched an arson investigation.

No arrests have been made.

“When you set fire to an occupied building at 10 at night, you’re trying to kill somebody. To me, that is attempted murder,” Zaccard said. “People were asleep. People were relaxing.”

Because the fire is under investigation, Zaccard declined to comment on reports that the fire was set just outside the building or that a domestic dispute involving one of the residents may have been a factor.

The building didn’t sustain serious structural damage — Zaccard estimated a loss of about $50,000 — but smoke damage forced residents to leave. Some were taken by the Red Cross to a Roseville motel, while others stayed with relatives or friends.

Evidence of the fire was clear Saturday on the two-story, 11-unit building on Hamline Avenue just south of Larpenteur Avenue.

The brick front was smudged with smoke, the front door and windows were boarded up, and a sign with the large word “ARSON” was attached to the entry.

Two workers at the SuperAmerica station across Hamline may have been the first to notice the fire. Witnesses said they ran fire extinguishers across the street and directed them against flames surrounding the front door.

To read the full article click here.

By Nick Kuhl – Leduc Representative

Major fires that can spread from home to home in crowded neighbourhoods and cause mass chaos are hopefully a thing of the past.

The Alberta government announced new measures last month that will tighten building and fire codes on new housing developments in the province, in an effort to reduce and eliminate high-intensity residential fires.

“Any change to the code that can reduce the risk of fire and improve life safety is welcomed,” said Bob Scott, deputy fire chief for Leduc fire services.

Multi-family buildings will now be required to add more sprinklers in balconies, attics and crawl spaces –– sections that tend to swell fire.

“Those are areas where the construction tends to be more open and exposed to fire spreading rapidly,” Scott said. “By having a sprinkler in those locations, it can actually suppress the fire quite quickly.”

Additionally, fire-resistant gypsum wallboard will now be required under vinyl siding in new construction projects, replacing faster-burning oriented strandboard that had been previously used.

“What that does is start to absorb the heat and tends to slow the progress of the fire,” Scott explains.

These changes were part of the 22 recommendations, 18 of which were accepted, that were proposed by a group of emergency workers, fire departments and the Safety Codes Council.

They were also partially prompted by the devastating 18-home fire in Edmonton’s MacEwan neighbourhood in July 2007, one of the city’s largest fires on record, which although deemed to be arson, spread rapidly due to lax building codes and sub-standard materials.

“The older construction –– where we used solid pieces of lumber –– don’t fail. They’re able to withstand fire longer and don’t fail as quickly as the new construction does,” Scott said. “That was a huge contributing factor in the major fire that Edmonton had last year. Homes are so close together that if a fire was to start in one home and was to be coming out of a window, there is still potential for the fire to move up and into the attic of a neighbouring home.”

New homes with attached garages will now also be required to have fire detectors installed along with the aforementioned gypsum wallboard.

“We have vehicles and other things in garages that can start on fire that could basically burn undetected for some period of time,” Scott said. “It’s important because right now the code does not require a smoke alarm in attached garages.”

Retrofitting older homes is a challenge, Scott added, but it is possible to take some precautions as well.

“We recommend installing more than just the basic smoke alarms in homes,” he said. “Where people sleep with doors closed in bedrooms, there should be a smoke alarm installed in the bedroom as well as outside in the hallways.”

Currently, homes are only required to have one smoke alarm per floor and there is no need to change the legislation, Scott explains.

“Education is more important right now,” he said. “If we continue to work on helping people understand the importance of having smoke alarms throughout their home, it can make a big difference. It (the new codes) still doesn’t take away from the need for people to be fire aware and minimize any risk at home.”

To read the full article click here.

By Lynne Klaft – Worcester Telegram

LUNENBURG— Can sprinkler alarm systems save lives?

Ask any firefighter and the unequivocal answer is yes.

State Rep. James B. Eldridge, D-Acton, plans to file a bill that will require automatic sprinkler systems in all housing for senior citizens.

“This bill is a direct response to the tragic fire at the Pearl Brook housing complex on May 10 in which Jeffrey Phillips, a resident, died,” Mr. Eldridge said at a news conference yesterday.

There are 35,000 units of housing for the elderly in the state and not all of them are required to have sprinkler systems, he said.

“I want to make sure that every unit has sprinklers. This is a common-sense approach that will ensure the safety of all our citizens,” said Mr. Eldridge.

On hand yesterday to support the bill were officials from the Fire Chiefs’ Association of Massachusetts, Lunenburg Selectman Thomas A. Alonzo, Lunenburg Deputy Fire Chief Patrick A. Sullivan and the executive director of Leominster Housing Authority, Eugene Capoccia.

“Any sprinkler alarm system is helpful because it saves lives and any sprinkler bill has our support,” said Worcester Fire Chief Gerard A. Dio, who is president of the chiefs’ association.

“After 30 years fighting fires in Worcester, I have seen the need to protect the elderly and the young, the most vulnerable people in a fire situation.

“The elderly are not as quick and things happen, like leaving things on the stove. The need is there especially in multiple family developments,” said Chief Dio.

The chief described a fire in which an elderly woman burned to death while cooking in her kitchen.

“If a sprinkler system had gone off, she might have been saved. The housing she lived in had no sprinklers. Sprinklers are the quickest way to get water on a fire, to help contain a fire until we arrive,” he said.

Deputy Fire Chief Sullivan was at the Pearl Brook complex fire and said that the damage to the building would not have been as extensive, and people displaced, if the building had had sprinklers. The complex on White Street is administered by the Leominster Housing Authority.

The complex is slated to have repairs done on sidewalks, back stairs, porches and accesses to exterior doors.

According to Mr. Eldridge, the $600,000 in repairs will be started in early spring and will include installation of a sprinkler system for the 48 units.

“We have gotten a commitment from the state to do so, although we do not know exactly how much it will cost, yet,” said Mr. Eldridge.

Mr. Capoccia estimates the cost of installing sprinklers at $3,400 per unit, but added that discounts for multiple units could reduce that.

“After installation the cost for insurance could drop dramatically and help to pay for it over the long term. This just makes good sense,” said Mr. Capoccia.

Mr. Eldridge said funding for the installation of sprinklers in housing for the elderly will come from a $500 million affordable housing bond that the state has committed to.

“This bond would allow $20 million for the sprinkler systems and we are working with DHCD and folks like Gene (Capoccia) to figure out the costs,” he said.

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