How would you like to have firefighters protecting you and your family and your home 24/7, 365 days a year—and even that extra day on a Leap Year?  I’m not talking about firefighters on duty down at the local fire station.  I’m talking about firefighters in your home! 

How?  Install a residential sprinkler system in your new or existing home.   Why?  Unlike a smoke detector--which only alerts you to the existence of a fire in your home so that you can safely evacuate—a residential sprinkler system actually starts controlling the fire well before the arrival of firefighters from your local fire department. 

Though a residential sprinkler system may not completely extinguish the fire, it will keep it small so that you and your family can safely get out AND it will keep the fire from quickly growing to a more advanced—and dangerous—stage known to firefighters as flashover.  Fires in one-and two-family homes can reach the flashover in minutes presenting danger to occupants trying to exit the home and firefighters attempting to control the blaze.

Residential sprinkler systems have been around for over thirty years, yet have not gained widespread acceptance in the United States.  Over that same 30+ year period, over 100,000 Americans have lost their lives in residential fires.  That number is equal to the population of a medium sized American city such as Portsmouth, Virginia or Peoria, Illinois.

Besides looking at getting those “firefighters” in your home, we all need to get more active in our communities and support the efforts of fire departments at the local level to get residential sprinkler system ordinances passed .  According to Jeffrey Shapiro, a fire protection engineer and noted author on the subject,

“An approved automatic fire sprinkler system shall be installed in new one- and two-family dwellings and townhouses in accordance with NFPA 13D.  This is one sentence that will change the course of fire safety in America when it is added to the International Residential Code (IRC), a model code published by the International Code Council (ICC) that governs residential construction in 45 states plus the District of Columbia.  No single change to a model code could have a more direct and consequential impact on reducing the nation’s long-term fire losses than revising the IRC to require residential sprinklers in new homes.”

There communities in the United States whose example we can all follow.  Scottsdale, Arizona became one of the first communities in the USA to require residential sprinklers over twenty years ago.  Today, over 40,000 one-and two-family homes in Scottsdale are protected 24/7/365 by a residential sprinkler system.

Install sprinklers.  Save lives.  ‘Nuff said?