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Impacts from major fires can be devastating, whether in offices, industrial buildings, healthcare facilities or hotels, and many businesses never recover. But the costs of fires in industrial and commercial buildings go far beyond expense, affecting individual businesses and insured costs. Significant economic, environmental and community costs are also incurred, and many of them are ultimately borne by the taxpayer.


Sprinkler benefits


To reduce risk to life and the degree of damage in a fire, automatic sprinkler systems have proved time and time again to be both effective and efficient in a wide range of fire scenarios and building types. They afford greater levels of protection to people, property, businesses, jobs and the environment. There is clear evidence that sprinklers work. The National Fire Chiefs Council and National


Fire Sprinkler Network (NFSN) worked together to investigate the effectiveness and reliability of sprinklers. In their independent report, published by Optimal Economics2


, analysis of thousands of


incidents provided comprehensive and detailed analysis of sprinkler system activation and performance for controlling fire in buildings. Evidence from this report indicates that sprinkler systems have a very high operational reliability of 94% and demonstrate this when called upon. The report also found it evident that when sprinklers do operate, they extinguish or contain the fire on 99% of occasions across a wide range of building types. This is why they are chosen to


54 JUNE 2020 www.frmjournal.com


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