The smoke detector in your home will give you early warning--provided that you have both types of detectors installed in your home--but all you'll get is a small "window" of time to safety evacuate your home. Many people think that they'll have plenty of time to escape a hostile fire in their home, but nothing could be further from the truth. You'll only have 2-3 minutes at most to escape from your home before the smoke and heat and toxic gases overcome you.

Residential fire sprinklers will save lives. Period. Only residential sprinkler systems start to actively control the fire and prevent its rapid and deadly progression to "flashover", the instantaneous ignition of all the combustible materials in the area of the fire.  Together with properly installed and working smoke detectors, residential fire sprinklers provide the closest thing to "ironclad" protection to your family and your home from the ravages of fire.

Sounds like something no home should be without, right?  Yet, despite all the major building codes and fire prevention code organizations putting residential fire sprinkler requirements into their codes, builders and developers--and the politicians that they support--continue to fight the implementation of those code requirements.

Like antebellum Southern politicians whose protection of the institution of slavery was an issue of "states rights", those builders and developers and politicians want residential fire sprinkler installation to be a "local issue".  They want to keep it "local" so that they can keep it from happening. In places where their efforts are successful, people will continue to die needlessly.

Get involved in your community.  Arm yourself with the facts about residential sprinkler systems and join forces with your local fire department to ensure that the code requirements are implemented in you community.   Lives depend upon our actions.