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Feedback on sprinklers

Written by Laura King

Feb. 21, 2008

It’s great to get e-mails from readers! Bill Higgs, the fire chief in Sechelt, B.C., e-mailed this week to let me know he read the editorial on sprinklers in the January issue of Canadian Firefighter and to contribute some thoughts on the issue.

Here’s what he said:

In B.C we have also seen the province refuse to expand the sprinkler requirement in the Building Code, and also remove the legislative ability of municipalities to pass sprinkler bylaws. It appears that the Home Builders Association lobby group did a better job at disproving the benefit of automatic sprinklers than the fire service did at defending this simple, low cost, life saving technology.

We were fortunate to convince the two areas that we serve to pass sprinkler bylaws while they still could back in the 1990s. We did this by conducting a live fire test on a mirror image duplex that we had obtained to burn down as part of a live fire training exercise. Not wanting to miss this opportunity, we sprinklered one half of the duplex and not the other. We set identical fires and then timed a typical fire department response. The results were filmed and are on the attached link to our website. (Scroll down to SIXTH DECADE and then click on the icon of the buring house.

So impressed were the politicians that one district passed a law requiring sprinklers in all new construction and the other passed a similar bylaw requiring all residential construction over a duplex and all other construction to be fully sprinklered. So, needless to say, our fire district is very much a fire sprinklered community.

We offered this video to departments that might be trying to prove the same points and a lot of departments had great success. Back then, (1995) it was quite cumbersome to mail out dozens of videos but now with digital reproduction and the Internet perhaps others would be interested. Please feel free to mention or provide a link if you feel inclined.

Keep up the good work! We read your publication with great interest.

Thanks Bill!

COMMENTS

Dennis Fox
Written by Dennis Fox on 2008-03-05 09:49:16

I think the video from Chief Bill Higgs should be shown on all local news stations in the province of Ontario, and then take a public vote on weather sprinklers should be put into all new construction.
We are years behind people are dieing in fires that should not be. For the sake of sprinklered buildings its time the government acted on this matter – the sooner the better.
When sprinklers are made mandatory, there should also be legislation to prevent manufacturers and contractors from overpricing – there needs to be some kind of watchdog.
Denny Fox
Bala Ont.

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