01 November 2005
Lawrence Bamber

The number of serious fires in dwellings - where serious is defined as involving fatalities or causing losses of £100 000 plus - averaged 60 a year in the period 1999-20031.

Of the 55 fires reported in 2003, 27 occurred at night, 14 started in living/dining rooms and 10 started in bedrooms/bed-sitting rooms. Twelve resulted in 3 or more fatalities. The total estimated loss was £8.98 million.

Looking at causation, 16 involved smoking materials, 7  resulted from deliberate ignition, and 6 were caused by electrical faults. Reports do not say whether smoke/heat detection devices were fitted in these dwellings. If sprinkler protection had been fitted, it is highly likely that lives, as well as property, could have been preserved.

Housing Act 2004

The Housing Act 2004 has a major impact on fire safety management in all residential property in England and Wales. An important aspect for landlords and others to consider is the fact that from October 2005, certain houses in multiple occupation (HMOs) have to be licensed. Also, the new Housing Health And Safety Rating System (HHSRS) applies to all rented property, including HMOs.

Residential properties with 3 or more storeys and having 5 or more tenants now have to be licensed by the Local Authority. This type of property presents the greatest fire risk.

There will also be duties on local authorities to carry out HHSRS inspections on licensed HMOs within 5 years of the licence being granted. Other non-licensed residential properties will also require HHSRS inspections by the local authority.

The purpose of the HHSRS inspection is to check the property for various listed hazards, of which fire safety is one. Property owners and landlords will be required to carry out remedial work to deal with any (fire) hazards spotted. This may, in certain circumstances, require landlords or owners to retro-fit sprinkler systems for life preservation.

In essence, the local authority is required to carry out the HHSRS, ie a risk assessment, of the premises and produce a list of remedial measures. However, the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order (RRFSO) places the duty to undertake a fire risk assessment on the owner/landlord of the property.

Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order

RRFSO, which is likely to come into force in April 2006, is primarily aimed at workplaces and other non-domestic premises, it does have implications for owners/landlords of residential properties, especially those having public/common areas.

The order retains the right of the fire authority to prohibit or restrict the use of any part of a residential property when there is a serious risk to persons in the event of a fire. In HMOs with public/common areas, such as blocks of flats or houses converted into self-contained flats, the owner/landlord will have a duty under the legislation to ensure there are fire safety measures such as sprinkler systems in the common areas. This is  because the common areas can become the workplaces for employees and contractors.

Landlords will also have a duty to carry out fire risk assessments of each property with the objective of implementing appropriate control measures. Assessments should be carried out by competent persons and should include consideration of the following areas:

• compliance with fire safety legislation
• adequacy of control measures
• fire safety management systems
• means of escape in case of fire
• signage and warning notices, eg fire exit routes
• fire detection systems
• fire alarm systems
• fixed (sprinklers) and portable (extinguishers) fire-fighting equipment
• structural features - such as bottlenecks, protected stairways/escape routes, final exit doors
• control of sources of ignition
• fire safety training
• maintenance systems
• record-keeping/documentation.

In addition to fire risk assessments, owners/landlords will also have to ensure the fire safety of exits and entrances to their properties and deal with any risks from any hazardous/flammable substances which on the premises.

Sprinklers in residential properties

Within the last decade sprinkler usage has more than doubled in the UK. This growth has been greatest in the residential sector, where it is estimated (in the Fire Protection and Fire Engineering Journal, March 2005) that over 30 000 properties have been given sprinkler systems in the last 5 years and lives have been saved.

The agreed UK specification for residential sprinklers is BS 9251:2005: Sprinkler Systems For Residential And Domestic Occupancies Code Of Practice (British Standards Institution). The Fire Sprinkler Association (FSA) has also developed a comprehensive training programme covering residential sprinkler installation. More than 50 organisations have been certified under the training programme.

The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM), which is responsible for regulatory fire safety in the UK, has undertaken a 3-year research project on the cost-effectiveness of residential sprinklers. The findings of the project showed that residential sprinklers performed effectively against a range of very challenging residential fires. In almost every case, people present in the room where the fires started would have been saved and in all cases there would have been no loss of life elsewhere in the building.

This means it is highly likely that there will be a substantial upsurge in the number of properties being protected, and hence in the number of lives saved, by residential sprinkler systems in the UK, especially when the legislative changes discussed above come fully into effect.

Some history

The drive for sprinklers in residential properties came from a report commissioned in the US in 1973, entitled America Burning. This report showed that around 75% of US fire casualties occurred in the victims' own homes. Similar figures would be expected in the UK.

This led to the development of a specification for a home-based life safety sprinkler system which saw the light of day in 1989 as NFPA13R: Installation Of Sprinkler Systems In Residential Occupancies Up To And Including Four Storeys In Height.

In the UK, the first guide appeared in 1990 as Technical Bulletin TB14: Sprinkler Systems For Dwelling Houses, Flats And Transportable Homes. This was replaced in 2000 by a Code of Practice: DD251: 2000: Sprinkler Systems For Residential And Domestic Occupancies. As stated above, DD251 has been superseded by BS 9251: 2005.

US research examined fires in domestic premises to develop a viable method of extinguishment and allowing occupants adequate time to either escape or be rescued from the premises. The research also assessed the impact of sprinklers on reducing the incidence of death and injury in home fires. Other studies looked at design, installation, use, maintenance and reliability of sprinkler systems, including discharge rates, spray patterns and response sensitivity. Parallel to this was research into what actually kills people in fires, including carbon monoxide threshold values, temperature/heat, and oxygen depletion/deficiency.

The collective research findings resulted in the design of a new type of sprinkler - the residential sprinkler. These devices are fundamentally different from conventional sprinklers in that they respond much faster and their spray patterns provide water flows designed to wet the walls as well as attacking the source of the fire. Residential sprinkler installations are designed to tackle a fire when it is still small, in order to keep temperatures and products of combustion levels as low as possible in the room where the fire starts. This in turn should prevent flash-over and hence should maintain a more survivable environment.

These residential sprinkler systems are designed using quick-response sprinkler heads. Such systems have been used in the US over the last 20 years to great positive effect. A study published in the US under the title Automatic Sprinklers: A 10-year Study showed that quick-response sprinklers in all residences and buildings reduced the loss of property damage by 80% and minimised loss of life by 97.5%.

As a result of this and other research, the ODPM in the UK commissioned research by the Building Research Establishment (BRE) who published their report entitled Effectiveness Of Sprinklers In Residential Premises (BRE Report 204505:2004). The findings were based on the results of a number of simulated fires in the living room of an experimental house. Some of the tests involved sprinkler installations and others did not. Some of the general conclusions were:

• the sprinklers controlled all the fires
• the vast majority of the sprinklered fires were extinguished
• with sprinklers, the combustion products (fire gases) were cooled sufficiently so that the occupants of the room in which the fire started would not have experienced extreme pain caused by convected heat
• in all of the sprinklered fires death would not have resulted
• without the sprinkler installation it was estimated that the living room's occupants would have lost consciousness within 13 to 16 minutes by being overcome by asphyxiant gases and would have been dead within 14 to 17 minutes
• for all the unsprinklered fires the conditions rapidly became lethal
• with bed and television fires, the sprinkler greatly reduced the build-up of toxic products of combustion and convected heat in the room where the fire started but there was little or no difference to visibility
• for table fires, the conditions became unsurvivable for both sprinklered and unsprinklered fires.

Residential sprinkler systems can be cost-effective, particularly when installed during construction or when buildings are being altered  or their use changed.

Sleepless firefighters

One of the recommendations following the report of the investigation into the Woolworths fire in Manchester in 1979, in which 10 people died, was that if sprinklers had been installed, the loss of life would have been reduced or eliminated. That recommendation has been thoroughly backed up by research and evidence discussed above. The push towards the use of sprinkler systems for life safety is on fast forward.

Although residential sprinklers currently make up only a very small part of the UK sprinkler market, this is likely to grow in the next few years, especially with the combination of fire safety officers and local authority building control officers recommending sprinklers as the first choice of fire protection and extinguishment because they do not rely on human factors, and because of their cost effectiveness.

According to Sir George Pigot, chief executive of the Fire Sprinkler Association sprinklers are slowly gaining proper recognition and are becoming part of mainstream fire protection and life safety in the UK. Indeed, as Jim Dalton, director of Public Fire Protection of the National Fire Sprinkler Association in the US, said (Fire Protection And Fire Engineering Journal Supplement, March 2004): "It is like having a firefighter in every room of every building, at all times of the day and night, throughout the year. They do not sleep; they do not got to other incidents; and they are always there ready to attack any outbreak of fire in its earliest stages."

Sprinkler protection is a life preservation essential.

1  Fire Prevention And Fire Engineering Journal, March 2005

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Facts about sprinklers

Fire sprinklers are simple devices, individually operated directly by the heat from a fire.

Only the sprinkler(s) over the fire will activate. Sprinklers in each room of the property react to the individual room temperatures and will usually be set off between 155oF and 165oF.

When a fire starts, a plume of hot gases rise upwards to the ceiling of the room. The glass bulb or solder link in the sprinkler head heats up and breaks when it reaches the trigger temperature. This releases a cap which allows the water to flow onto a specially designed diffuser.

The diffuser breaks up the water into carefully controlled droplets which penetrate the fire plume and cool the burning material below and also wetting the walls of the room, both putting the fire out and cooling/wetting potential fuel.

Sprinklers do not go off accidentally and are only triggered by real fires - not burning toast!

Sprinklers are very reliable and only one in sixteen million exhibit any form of manufacturing defect.

The flow of water from the sprinkler system is small in comparison with the water that would have been used by the fire brigade.  More often than not the system uses 1,000 times less water!  This therefore minimises the risk of water damage to the property.

Sprinklers vs smoke detectors

Smoke detectors (if checked, maintained and with batteries tested) can save lives by providing a warning of the presence of smoke but they can do nothing to extinguish a growing fire.  Too often, battery-operated smoke detectors fail to function, either because the batteries are dead or have been removed.

The combination of smoke detectors and sprinkler systems can reduce the loss of life by 98.5% which is an increase of 48.5% over smoke detectors alone. (Source: Life Safety Fire Protection, Dublin.)

Sprinklers place much less reliance on human factors, such as the use of portable fire extinguishers or knowledge of the means of escape. They start extinguishing the fire almost immediately.

As smoke, a fire by-product, is very often the cause of death of occupants, the use of sprinklers minimises the build-up of large quantities of smoke thereby prolonging escape time and hence life.

Apart from explosion fatalities, there has never been a multiple loss of life from fire in a UK building fully equipped with sprinklers.

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