NFPA Issues Fire Department Standards that Encourage Sprinkler Protection

The NFPA Standards Council has agreed to issue NFPA 1710 and NFPA 1720, two new standards that address the deployment of fire department resources. NFPA 1710 is intended to apply to mostly career fire departments, while NFPA 1720 is intended to apply to mostly volunteer departments. Both standards address acceptable response times for fire fighters to arrive on the scene and the numbers of fire fighters that should be available to perform certain tasks.

The original version of NFPA 1710 would have required at least four fire fighters on an engine company dispatched to a structure fire. Those fire fighters would have to arrive on the scene within 4 minutes of leaving the station at least 90% of the time. Critics of this original version stated that a 4 minute response time to a structure fire was not necessary in a community where all of the buildings were fully sprinklered. The critics also wanted the option of providing sprinklers for all of the buildings outside of the 4 minute response area from a fire station.

The NFPA Standards Council agreed that the critics’ arguments had merit. Rather than place language in the standard directly addressing sprinklers, the Standards Council added a statement of equivalency as follows:

1.3 Equivalency. Nothing in this standard is intended to prohibit the use of systems, methods, or approaches of equivalent or superior performance to those prescribed in this standard. Technical documentation shall be submitted to the Authority Having Jurisdiction to demonstrate equivalency.

With this equivalency statement and technical documentation on the status of sprinklered buildings in a community, a municipal planner can meet the NFPA standard without having to have most of their buildings within 4 minutes of a fire station. This additional flexibility in the standard can save a community millions of dollars in building and maintenance costs of additional fire stations.

During the testimony on this issue municipal managers from around the country testified that they would rather provide low interest loans to building owners from city funds to retrofit existing buildings with sprinklers than pay for additional fire stations to cut response times down from 5 to 4 minutes. As an industry, we would certainly applaud this forward-looking view of municipal master planning.