Use fire detectors and sprinkler systems that work.
The two most familiar, and most effective, ways to prevent fires at apartment and condo buildings are smoke detectors and sprinkler systems. According to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), the chance of a death by fire is halved in apartments with smoke detectors.
But there’s a catch: Those numbers assume that the smoke detectors are hard-wired into the electrical system. “Multifamily has been a problem class over the years,” says Steve Bushnell, product manager for commercial real estate at Fireman’s Fund Insurance Co. “We’ve seen problems over and over again with battery-operated smoke detectors and have paid several losses because of battery-operated smoke detectors with no batteries. We want to see hard-wired units, and we may require a connection to a central station alarm.”
The statistical case for including sprinkler systems in a property is just as impressive. The NFPA credits them with a 50 percent to 75 percent reduction in fire death rates and perhaps as high as a 60 percent reduction in property loss rates. “For high-rise buildings, sprinklers are associated with a reduction of at least 88 percent in the rate of deaths per 1,000 fires and at least 44 percent in the average dollar-loss per fire,” says Gary Keith, NFPA vice president of building and life safety in Quincy, Mass. The nonprofit works to advocate fire prevention and has more than 79,000 members.
As a result, sprinkler systems are required in all new high-rise buildings and in new low-rise buildings in a growing number of cities and states. (Some states adopt statewide regulations; others leave more flexibility to cities and towns.) For many multifamily owners, a more pressing and controversial question is whether they must retrofit existing buildings with sprinklers. Nationwide, most efforts to mandate retrofits have focused on high-rise buildings, but sprinkler advocates typically face an uphill battle, especially when it comes to residential properties. Chicago, for example, passed a high-rise retrofit law at the end of 2004, after a 2003 high-rise fire resulted in six deaths. But owners have 15 years to fully comply with the law, and it requires only that residential high-rises be evaluated by a professional engineer rather than the fire department.
Even where residential sprinkler retrofit laws have passed, there have usually been some exceptions. For instance, Louisville, Ky., exempted owner-occupied residential co-ops. Connecticut required sprinkler retrofits only in housing for the elderly, but, according to Ken Isman, vice president of engineering at the National Fire Sprinkler Association in Patterson, N.Y., “owners would claim legally that they were not housing for elderly, even if most of the people in their building were over 65.”
The reason for the opposition is, of course, the high cost of a sprinkler retrofit. (See “Critical Questions,” p. 65.) If apartment buildings are going to be voluntarily retrofitted with sprinklers, some sort of incentive for owners will probably be required to get the job done. So the National Fire Sprinkler Association is supporting a bill in Congress called the Fire Sprinkler Incentive Act. If passed, the bill would change the tax code so that owners of any commercial or apartment building–high-rise or low-rise–could depreciate the cost of a sprinkler system over five years, instead of the 30-plus years now required. As of June 2006, both the House and Senate versions of the bill had been buried in committee for more than a year. Isman says that while it’s difficult to amend the tax code, he is cautiously optimistic.