- Author
-
Federal Emergency Management Agency
- Title
- Home Fire Protection: Residential Fire Sprinkler Systems Save Lives.
- Coporate
- Federal Emergency Management Agency, Washington, DC
- Report
-
FA 43
February 2008
4 p.
- Keywords
-
residential buildings
|
sprinkler systems
|
fire protection
|
sprinklers
|
costs
|
housing
|
statistics
|
NFPA 13D
|
fire safety
- Identifiers
- advantages of newly designed home sprinkler systems; low water requirement; piping requirements; good investment for homebuilders
- Abstract
- Schools, office buildings, factories, and other commercial buildings have benefited from fire protection sprinkler systems for over a century. To protect investments in buildings and machinery, the textile mills in New England began using sprinkler systems over 100 years ago following a series of devastating fires that claimed many lives and destroyed entire businesses. But what about our homes? Although we protect our businesses, what actions do we take to protect our families, our homes, and our possessions from fire? Millions of Americans have installed smoke alarms in their homes in the past few decades, but a smoke alarm can only alert the occupants to a fire in the house…it cannot contain or extinguish a fire. Residential sprinkler systems can! Studies by the Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) U.S. Fire Administration (USFA) indicate that the installation of residential fire sprinkler systems could have saved thousands of lives, prevented a large percentage of those injuries, and eliminated hundreds of millions of dollars in property losses.