The Importance of Sprinkler Systems in Schools

More than 8,000 fires occur in educational occupancies in the United States each year, accounting for an annual loss of $65,000,000 in property damage. Although fire deaths in schools average less than one per year, hundreds have been injured.

Many parents send their children off to school each day never realizing that although the school meets state fire codes, it does not contain a sprinkler system- widely recognized as the number one tool of fire protection. Why? To put it simply, state regulations do not require sprinkler systems in schools. This is an unfortunate fact, since sprinklers save lives as well as reduce damage to taxpayer's property in case of a fire.

In over one hundred years of use, there has never been a multiple fatality of building occupants from fire in a building protected by a properly designed, installed, and maintained sprinkler system. Almost every new shopping mall, nursing home, high-rise building and hotel is protected with sprinklers, but not schools. Sprinkler systems can add hundreds of thousands of dollars to a school's invoice, even though the service they provide is priceless.

Why are sprinkler systems so important? For one thing, they are able to respond to a fire while it is still small, preventing the fire from developing into a major threat. If a building is built to be fire resistant, it is entirely possible that it will react like an oven in the event of fire. Even though the building may not burn, the contents will- allowing toxic products of combustion to spread beyond the fire area and throughout the facility. Sprinklers would prevent this from happening by distributing water directly where it is needed to confine and control the fire.

While fire drills are extremely successful in educating children in the proper way to evacuate the building, they do not extinguish the fire or protect the building during non-school hours. Alarms can alert fire departments to the scene, but they also are unable to put out the fire.

Sprinkler systems have an un-comparable record of reliability as no other fire protection system even comes close. Records of fires in buildings with supervised automatic fire sprinkler systems have indicated successful extinguishments or control in more than 99 percent of fire incidents.

Sprinkler systems also reduce the amount of water needed to extinguish a fire. Because they attack a fire while it is still small, they often use less than 50 gallons per minute. Once a fire has grown, it typically takes the fire department hundreds of gallons of water per minute to fight it. Sprinklers use approximately one-tenth of the amount of water used by the fire department to extinguish fires in non-sprinklered buildings.

Given the damage, injuries, and possible deaths that could result from a fire, it would be foolish to not make sprinklers a top priority in the construction or remodeling of a school building. It would be a wise investment for the community.