February
25, 2003, 9:45 a.m. Sprinkler
Results
The best way
to prevent fire casualties.
By Eli Lehrer
n
the wake of a fire that killed nearly 100 at The Station nightclub in
Rhode Island, lawmakers will spend the next few months debating tighter
fire-safety regulations.
In these debates
Miami, Florida, which has nearly 200 nightclubs clustered around Coconut
Grove, may emerge as a model. Miami has a great deal of pride in a strict
regulatory regime that appears to work reasonably well. Miami regularly
inspects all nightclubs following strict rules and calls for plenty of input
from business owners on insuring safety. While dozens of people died every
year in Miami's clubs before the regulations went into effect, only a handful
have died in the last decade, nearly all of them from drug overdoses. When
it comes to preventing stampedes like the one that killed 21 in Chicago
early last week, indeed, more and smarter regulation on the Miami model
might make sense.
But better regulation
would not have helped the 100 people who died in Rhode Island. The Station's
exits weren't blocked and the club had recently passed an safety inspection
that presumably included an analysis of its fire extinguishers, exit signs,
and evacuation plans. None of this helped. While only a fool would follow
the path of heavy-metal band Great White and set off fireworks indoors,
Rhode Island law already prohibited nearly all indoor pyrotechnics anyway.
The state of Rhode Island has already announced re-inspections of every
nightclub in the state and other jurisdictions will likely follow suit.
Regulations and enforcement will grow tighter and club owners, concertgoers,
and taxpayers will pay millions for dubious safety improvements.
Installing more sprinkler
systems, however, could save both lives and money. By snuffing out The
Station fire before it started, a sprinkler would have saved nearly all
of the 100 lives. According to the United States Fire Administration,
no more than two people have ever died in an ordinary fire in building
with a working sprinkler system. In the last five years, it appears that
no one — except for fire fighters — has died in an ordinary
fire in a fully sprinklered building. While less than two percent of all
buildings have sprinkler systems, significantly more public buildings
have them. In Fresno, California — which mandates sprinkler systems
in nearly all public buildings in its downtown — the American Fire
Sprinkler Association reports only $42,000 in downtown fire-related property
damage in the ten years since the law went into effect.
A sprinkler system
in a medium-sized building like The Station nightclub would cost tens
of thousands of dollars: A lot of money but significantly less than the
multimillion-dollar value that insurance companies and government agencies
place on a single human life. (Sprinklers cost about $1.50 to $2.00 per
square foot; about the same as carpet.) States and municipalities enact
fire codes to safeguard lives. Since sprinkler systems appear to do so
spectacularly in safeguarding people, there's a good case for exempting
buildings with sprinkler systems from fire inspections altogether, except,
perhaps, to a periodic check to insure that the sprinkler system works.
Private insurance companies, for their part, will continue to mandate
cost-effective means to safeguard property and commonsense design decisions
(such as building theater doors that swing outward). With potential reward
of eliminating code-compliance problems in return for this regulatory
relief, owners of older buildings will jump at the chance to install sprinkler
systems. And many fewer people will die as a result.
—
Eli Lehrer is a senior editor of The American Enterprise.
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n
the wake of a fire that killed nearly 100 at The Station nightclub in
Rhode Island, lawmakers will spend the next few months debating tighter
fire-safety regulations.
