Whitby Fire Chief Dave Speed’s passion for home fire sprinklers was sparked early on in his career.
He became interested in the subject while watching his father, former Toronto fire chief Al Speed, who was active in the promotion of sprinkler systems in homes to save lives. But it was only after he joined his first fire department in 1995, beginning in fire suppression and moving onto fire prevention after a few years, that the message truly resonated with him.
“I started to become more aware of the proactive element of the fire service and that as part of our calling to protect the public, one of the best ways we can do that is to prevent emergencies or fires before they happen, or to minimize the consequences of fires as much as possible,” said Speed, who took over as chief of Whitby Fire and Emergency Services in 2014.
“We have our codes, we have our standards, we have smoke alarms and maintaining them and so on, but there’s really nothing in place that requires sprinklers in people’s homes. And that really seems to me to be one of the best solutions to protect people’s lives and property in our communities.”
Speed is one of many fire chiefs across Ontario who are calling on the province to make sprinklers mandatory in new homes. Earlier this year, he asked Whitby council to endorse a letter of support to accompany Whitby-Oshawa MPP Lorne Coe’s private member’s bill amending the Ontario Building Code to provide authority to municipalities to require the installation of fire sprinklers in new residential construction.
“With multiple residential fire deaths recently occurring in Durham Region and elsewhere throughout the province, now is the time to take action to help make our communities safer,” Mayor Don Mitchell wrote in the letter, which was sent to Coe on Jan. 31.
“It is our understanding that with a fully functioning residential sprinkler system in place, future tragedies of this nature may be avoided.”
A fire at 116 Centre St. N. Oshawa on Jan. 8 resulted in the deaths of Lindsey Bonchek and her two children, nine-year-old Maddie and four-year-old Jackson, as well as Steven Macdonald. All four died from smoke inhalation. Fire officials said there were no working smoke alarms in the home.
“This came forward following the fatal fire in Oshawa and it’s something that the fire chiefs in the province have been working on for decades,” said Speed, adding that the vast majority of fires and fire deaths in Ontario occur in residential properties.
“It just got to the point where it was felt that now is a good time to move this forward and to get the building code changed.”
The mayor’s letter also pointed out that mandatory sprinklers in new builds was one of the recommendations presented by the jury following a coroner’s inquest into a fire in Whitby in 2012 that took the lives of three teens. Benjamin Twiddy, 19, Holly Harrison, 18, and Marilee (Hollylynn) Towie, 17, died in the blaze at 917 Dundas St. W. Jurors heard they were trapped in an upstairs apartment with only one exit when a burning towel triggered a fire in a stairwell.
Speed said he reached out to Coe who requested that letters of support from local mayors and councils be submitted to accompany the proposed bill.
“We were able to get letters from different jurisdictions all over North America in support of this,” he said, counting among them the National Fire Prevention Association and Ontario Association of Fire Chiefs.
Coe’s executive assistant, Paul Newcombe confirmed that they’ve been working with stakeholders on this matter but declined to comment until after the bill is tabled. He said a date to bring it forward has not yet been set and is likely to take place after the June election.
The model that will be used in the bill is the same one that’s been successfully implemented in British Columbia since the 1990s. There are currently more than 30 municipalities in B.C. that have bylaws requiring sprinklers in new residential construction. Since these bylaws have been in place, there has only been one death in a home with sprinklers.
According to the Ontario Fire Marshal’s Office, between 2011 and 2015, 75 per cent of all structure fires were in residential occupancies. From 2006 to 2015, there were 735 fire fatalities in the province and of those, 625 or 85 per cent were in residential occupancies — most of them occurring during sleeping hours.
“Sprinklers activate early on in a fire while it’s still small, they keep it in check, and they prevent the generation of what kills people, which is a large amount of heat and smoke and it gives people time to safely escape,” said Speed, who describes it like “having a firefighter in your house 24 hours a day.”
He added that sprinklers douse flames with a fraction of water used by fire department hoses and keep the fire to the room or area of origin until firefighters arrive, greatly reducing property damage and allowing occupants more time to flee. This is particularly crucial in modern fast-spreading house fires, he noted.
“Fires grow much faster than they did 20 years ago because all of our furnishings now are all synthetic and oil-based ... these things all burn much more quickly and they get up to a higher temperature much faster. In the past, a person could have had 10 minutes or more to safely escape a house fire. That number has shrunk significantly to where it’s usually under two minutes.”
The main benefit of sprinkler systems in homes, said Speed, is that they provide an “engineered solution.” While smoke alarms are important, they require human intervention in order to be effective.
“There’s that element where people have to do something to maintain them for them to work, and the second thing is if a smoke alarm activates early on in a fire, people have to physically get up and evacuate,” he said.
“Sprinklers don’t require people to change their behaviour. They assume there’s going to be a fire and they’re engineered to solve the problem.
Link to original article in Whitby This Week: Whitby fire chief makes push for fire sprinklers in new homes