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Protecting Your Home & Family

Edson Leader

Edson’s fire chief welcomes the changes recently undertaken by the provincial government to increase fire protection.

While the changes will not affect Edson and area that much, any measure taken to improve security and safety helps, Al Schram said.

“From a fire perspective, anything we can do to make structures safer we fully support.”

The changes announced on March 12 are two years ahead of proposed national code revisions and were lobbied for following Edmonton’s MacEwan Green subdivision fire in 2007 that destroyed 18 homes and damaged 76 others.

Cited as factors in the rapid spread of the fire were high winds, the use of vinyl siding and the close proximity of the structures.

Changes were made to the Alberta Fire Code and the Alberta Building Code.

Fire Code changes include:

• Requiring buildings adjacent to construction sites to be protected from potential fires.

• Requiring enhanced fire safety plans on construction sites to help control fire hazards in and around buildings.

• Clarifying where fire extinguishers should be located on construction sites.

• Improving safety measures for construction processes involving heat sources, such as roofing equipment, in order to prevent these activities from starting fires.

• Improving access to construction sites for fire departments by ensuring that:

- Fire trucks have adequate access to the site to be effective.

- Firefighters can access all parts of a building under construction; and,

- That the appropriate water supply systems are in place to accommodate firefighting.

In the Building Code the following changes will take place:

• Adding new fire resistance requirements for homes built close together:

- New homes with flammable siding, such as vinyl, built close to the property lines will be required to have fire resistant material, such as gypsum board, installed under the siding.

- New homes built close together will have new restrictions on the size and amount of windows allowed facing their neighbours.

• Improving sprinkler or exterior siding requirements for walk-up apartment buildings; and,

• Adding new fire resistant requirements for the interior of attached garages.

Schram said the spacing between buildings is often dictated by municipal land use bylaws. He said the recommendations coming from the codes would hopefully be incorporated into those.

Schram is hoping that residential sprinkler systems will become more of a standard in the future, but right now they’re rare.

“We’re not seeing a lot of that at all. It’s something we’d like to see. If you put a residential sprinkler system in your home, you could save your home real easily.”

Schram added, the costs of such systems are coming down and he’s hopeful that sprinkler systems will one day become part of the building code.

He said residential sprinkler systems are not prevalent, and that he was hard pressed to cite any existing local examples.

Schram said his department is not restricted when it comes to access to structures and good communication and planning with Town of Edson officials help to ensure this. He cited the Hillendale subdivision as one of those examples.

“With Hillendale we were involved in the planning from day one with our town engineers to make sure the streets were going to be adequate and the cul de sacs were going to be big enough. Locally we’re really fortunate we have a really good working relationship with our engineering and planning department — that we are accommodating that stuff.”

Changes to the Fire Code have already taken place. Building Code changes will take effect on May 3.

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QUINCY, Mass., March 19, 2009 – A statewide legislative threat that would have eliminated the ability of local communities to adopt or enforce requirements for home fire sprinklers has been defeated in Illinois. The Illinois bill died in recent days, but sprinkler opponents continue to push similar anti-sprinkler legislation in several other states.

Despite the fact that all major safety codes now call for the installation of fire sprinklers in new one- and two-family homes, sprinkler opponents want to prevent the adoption of these codes at the local level. The anti-sprinkler legislation threatens to put lives at stake.

“These anti-sprinkler bills have been designed to take a step backward in public safety,” says Jim Shannon, president of the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA). “The bills ignore the success of a proven technology and inappropriately take away a community’s ability to protect its citizens with this life-saving equipment. The fire service and other sprinkler advocates worked to defeat this safety threat in Illinois, but the threat of anti-sprinkler bills continues to be very real in other states.”

The legislation defeated in the Illinois Senate was brought down through teamwork and grassroots coordination. A dedicated group of supporters let their voices be heard with phone calls, letters to officials and testimony at a committee meeting. The Illinois bill was defeated by a 6-to-3 vote in committee.

“With the vast majority of the fire deaths in this country occurring in homes, it is unconscionable for anyone to stand in the way of efforts to save lives,” added Shannon. According to NFPA, the risk of dying in a home fire is cut by approximately 80 percent with home sprinklers.

In response to the continued legislative threat, NFPA is making available important information regarding the anti-sprinkler bills and the life-saving effect of sprinklers. Home fire sprinkler advocates can access that information through the Fire Sprinkler Initiative: Bringing Safety Home Web site. This new, free resource is a source of information and contains tools needed to fight for sprinklers in homes. The Fire Sprinkler Initiative, a project of NFPA, is designed to give supporters the resources they need to communicate the need for home fire sprinklers.

Hastings Star Gazette

Rules to mandate automatic fire sprinklers in new homes constructed after Jan. 1, 2011, will be delayed, the state Department of Labor and Industry says.

In a decision announced Monday in a letter to code officials, design professionals and contractors, the state agency cited four criteria in its decision not to move forward with the adoption of the 2009 building code recommendations that include the mandatory sprinkler provision.

“Given the drastic slowdown of the construction economy, we feel it is not the appropriate time to be updating regulations,” Steve Hernick, state building official, and Jerry Rosendahl, state fire marshal, said in the Department of Labor and Industry letter.

The International Code Council voted to add the provision to its International Residential Code during its meeting last fall in Minneapolis. The IRC, which is updated every three years, is basis of the Minnesota Building Code.

Labor and Industry Commissioner Steve Sviggum held a town meeting in December at Bemidji to gain input on the provision, and had planned to appoint an advisory council to formally begin a public hearing process on the new code when it was to be published in March.

“We appreciate that government understands the significant burden adopting a new building code would place on both homeowners and builders at this time,” Monte Mraz, Builders Association of Minnesota president said Tuesday in response to the memo.

Minnesota will forgo adopting the 2009 version of the International Code Council residential and fire code and instead wait to review the 2012 version, when available, he said.

“We are confident that the existing residential building code will continue to protect homeowners.,” Mraz said. “What we have now works; there will be no harm to citizens by the delay.”

In July 2007, Minnesota adopted the 2006 International Residential Code with a number of amendments. As an example, “BAM introduced requirements to the building code that address best building practices to reduce water intrusion,” said Mraz.

Minnesota also recently adopted a strict residential energy code to be implemented this summer. The new energy code includes provisions for reducing moisture-related problems in new residential construction and remodeling. Mraz added,

“Minnesota is known as a national leader in energy efficient construction for good reason. We build the most efficient homes in the country and have the data to prove it. The next version of the energy code will keep us on this path,” he said.

If Minnesota were to adopt the 2009 version of the IRC without amendments, every new construction permit pulled including single-family homes, would require fire sprinklers, Mraz said. By deciding to forgo adoption of the 2009 codes, the fire sprinkler mandate for all single-family homes will not go into effect for quite some time, if at all.

Reasons DLI cited for issuing the delay include;

* The availability of volunteers for technical advisory committees, given cutbacks in code jurisdictions, among design professionals and product suppliers.

* The staff time involved by state agencies for both the committee work and the rules process under the Administrative Procedures Act.

* The cost of code books and reference materials for townships, cities, counties, state agency offices, design professionals and other industry members.

* The cost of training for builders, designers, code officials and other industry members and the focus of the training on changes rather than other critical concepts.

“Based on the above criteria, we will not be moving forward with the adoption of the 2009 IRC, IBC or IFC and will strive to have our advisory committees and the state fire chief’s code committee ready to review the 2012 editions of these codes,” Hernick and Rosendahl wrote.

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