By Anjali Athavaley
The Wall Street Journal
FALLBROOK, Calif. —Alberta Davidson woke up at 5 a.m. one morning last March to a blaring alarm. Her garage was on fire.
But it wasn’t her smoke detector that had gone off. Rather, the alarm was notifying her that the fire sprinklers in her garage had activated.
The sprinklers helped keep the fire from spreading to the interior of her house in Fallbrook, Calif., where sprinklers are mandatory in new homes.
“Fire sprinklers really saved my home and saved my life,” says Davidson, 48. “Prior to the incident, we took them for granted.”
As concern over residential fire deaths grows, home sprinklers are becoming more widespread and could soon be mandatory in new homes across the country. Meanwhile, a growing number of communities in states ranging from California to Maryland are already requiring sprinklers in new homes and, in some cases, in homes that undergo significant enlargements.
The Residential Fire Safety Institute, a Maple Grove, Minn.-based non-profit that promotes fire safety, says it has a record of 400 counties and cities that have passed ordinances requiring sprinklers.
Eight years ago, that number was only 200, says Roy Marshall, the organization’s director.
Supporters of mandatory sprinklers say they help extend the amount of time residents have to get out of the house during a fire by preventing flashover, which occurs when the temperature in a room reaches a point where all combustible materials burst into flames. In many cases, they put out smaller house fires altogether, says Gary Keith, vice president of field operations at the Quincy, Mass.-based National Fire Protection Association, a non-profit that sets recommended fire-safety standards.
That has spurred cities like University Park, Texas, where homes are generally two stories and built in close proximity to each other, to take action.
The City Council there passed an ordinance last January requiring sprinklers in new homes and homes that are 3,000 square feet that undergo an addition of 1,000 square feet or more. Mayor James H. Holmes III says that in University Park, sprinkler installation costs $10,000 to $15,000 for most homes.
But the idea of requiring sprinklers in single-family homes nationwide has drawn opposition from builders, who say that sprinklers increase costs and require some maintenance by the homeowner.
“While NAHB is not against residential sprinklers as an option for home owners, there is not enough evidence in making these mandatory,” says Steve Orlowski, program manager at the National Association of Home Builders in Washington.
Supporters of sprinkler ordinances point to a study by Scottsdale, Ariz., which made sprinklers mandatory in 1985.
Fifteen years later, the average fire loss per single-family home with sprinklers was only $2,166, compared with an average loss of $45,019 in single-family homes without them.
In single-family homes, one or two sprinkler heads controlled or extinguished fires 88 percent of the time.
Fire-safety officials and local officials in jurisdictions where sprinklers are mandatory are quick to dispel myths about sprinklers. One popular misconception is that when one sprinkler goes off, they all do. “What folks don’t understand is that these sprinkler systems that are installed in today’s homes only go off where the heat activates them,” says Mayor Holmes of University Park.
Sprinklers rarely go off by accident, Keith says.
They are not activated by smoke, so if you burn something in the kitchen but see smoke and no flames, the sprinklers won’t go off. To turn off the sprinklers, you have to either turn off the control valve or the main water supply in your home.
However, residents who have been through house fires say they were shocked by the amount of water that filled their homes when their sprinkler systems activated. (A typical sprinkler emits 15 to 20 gallons of water per minute.)
“It was like a hurricane,” says James Bond, 36, who had a house fire last New Year’s Eve.
A candle that was lit for an earlier party melted and caught the back of his couch on fire.
The sprinkler helped to contain the fire so that Bond’s guests could lift the couch and throw it outside. The house had $25,000 worth of water damage, but “I’d rather have that type of damage than have the house catch on fire,” says Bond, of Clarksburg, Md.