From a firefighter’s point of view, any prevention measures that can be added to a building to lessen the risk of fire, or mitigate its potential damage, are positive. Those strategies can be appealing to homeowners and insurers, as well, and making them available is to everyone’s mutual benefit.
That rationale informs efforts at more stringent regulations around fire prevention, and is surely at play in the push for La Plata County to require sprinklers be installed in all new-home construction. While doing so makes sense from a safety perspective, the county would be better served by refining the requirements to consider all the factors.
Firefighting officials have been lobbying the county to adopt the 2015 International Residential Code, which includes the sprinkler provision, citing – correctly – the sprinklers’ effectiveness at protecting human safety when fire occurs.
Tom Kaufman, a fire marshal for Upper Pine River Fire Protection District and private fire investigator said, “We don’t have fatalities in fully sprinklered homes. It just doesn’t happen.” That is a powerful incentive for installing the sprinkler systems and worth proposing to the county. However, there is significant cost associated with the systems, and requiring them would have implications that also must be considered.
Contractor Jerry Pope estimates that installing the system in his Missionary Ridge home would have added $15,000 to $20,000 to its cost. While comparing that figure to the value of a life saved provides an obvious answer, the actual equation is a bit more complex.
Increasing the cost of home construction by upward of $10,000 can price some buyers out of what is already a difficult market to enter. Balancing that against the potential safety benefits is overly simplistic. The risks must be considered, as well. Doing so provides the county an opportunity to fine-tune the firefighters’ proposal to maximize its effectiveness without making it unduly onerous.
Home construction in the wildland-urban interface – known as the WUI – has become increasingly problematic for insurers and firefighters, and any mitigation measures that can lessen the collective cost of fires in this high-risk area are worth considering. La Plata County has abundant WUI acreage, and it is worth considering a limited application of the sprinkler requirement in those areas, particularly those that are a lengthy distance from the nearest fire station.
A countywide regulation, though, is a bit extreme. For homes with adequate water supply in close proximity to a fire station, sprinkler systems would be helpful but perhaps not altogether necessary, particularly when considering the cost of installing the systems against the risk of devastating fire.
La Plata County should carefully weigh just how far to go in adopting more stringent building codes. A universal requirement of fire-suppression sprinkler systems is likely too far, but a more limited application of the system in high-risk areas could serve the county well in preserving lives and property should fire strike.
