Snuffed Out

The Co-operators Group Ltd. of Guelph, Ontario has stepped up efforts to encourage the installation of fire suppression sprinklers in new private homes and is lending its support to Ontario’s proposed fire safety requirements that would apply to retirement homes, long-term care facilities, group homes, supportive housing and hospitals.

In January, Ontario’s Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services published proposed regulations meant to improve fire safety. The draft requirements are based on recommendations from a technical advisory committee, initially announced last April, chaired by then-provincial deputy fire marshal Bernie Silvestri.

Submitted to the ministry in late 2012, the committee’s report includes a plan to require that fire sprinklers be installed in facilities housing vulnerable persons, including retirement homes. Committee members also made recommendations with respect to annual inspections and staff training.

“The Ontario government is to be commended for taking action to better protect some of those who are most vulnerable in residential fires, including seniors and people with disabilities,” Leonard Sharman, senior advisor of media relations for The Co-operators, says in an e-mail. “We support the proposed changes.”

A ministry spokesperson confirmed in December that the ruling Liberals had no plans at the time to re-introduce legislation that would require retrofitting retirement homes with fire sprinklers since the advisory committee recommendations could be implemented through regulation. If implemented, the proposed provincial requirements would include mandatory sprinklers for existing “care occupancies,” retirement homes regulated under Ontario’s Retirement Homes Act and long-term care homes.

Mandatory sprinklers, however, would only be required for facilities housing more than four occupants.

“I wasn’t happy with that,” New Democrat MPP Paul Miller says of that proposal. Representing the riding of Hamilton East-Stoney Creek, Miller adds, however, that he is “pleasantly surprised” the regulations would include sprinklers not just for retirement homes, but also for group homes and other facilities.

Last year, Miller tabled Bill 54, the Fire Protection and Prevention Amendment Act (Retrofitting of Retirement Homes with Automatic Sprinklers), 2012, which passed second reading in September, but could not proceed to third reading after then Premier Dalton McGuinty prorogued the provincial legislature in October. Had the bill passed into law, it would have required that sprinklers be installed by 2018.

BETTER LOSS RATIO

One of Miller’s NDP caucus colleagues, Teresa Armstrong, is a former insurance broker. “Commercial buildings with sprinkler systems are going to have a different rate of insurance, compared to a commercial building that doesn’t have a sprinkler system,” the NDP MPP for London Fanshawe said in the Ontario legislature. “That certainly won’t offset the cost of implementing a sprinkler system, but it certainly will be a better loss ratio for an insurance company, which will then also perhaps roll back to those commercial institutions where they can have a little bit of a break.”

Bill 54 was not Miller’s first attempt to mandate the retrofitting of retirement homes with sprinklers. In June 2010, he introduced Bill 92, Mandating Sprinklers

in All Ontario Retirement Homes Act, 2010, which died on the order table because it was not passed into law before the provincial election in October 2011.

“There have been six deaths since I first introduced the first bill,” Miller said in a recent interview. “Had (Bill 92) gone forward then, we would have had two years of the five-year implementation under our belts by now.”

Miller says he is hoping the regulations proposed by the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services in January – the public consultation for which ended February 28 – take effect by May. At press time, the new leader of the Ontario Liberals, Kathleen Wynne, had been named and the provincial legislature was back in session.

“As a society, I think we owe it to our seniors and others living in care facilities to make their residences as safe as possible,” says The Co-operators’ Leonard Sharman, characterizing the draft changes as a “step in the right direction.” Sprinklers are a “very worthwhile investment, and the proposals around safety plans, fire inspections and enhanced staff training are very positive as well.”

Although the Insurance Bureau of Canada (IBC) does not take a position on sprinklers specifically, “anything that mitigates risk is a good thing,” an IBC spokesperson notes in an e-mail.

As for State Farm Canada, “fire sprinklers have been proven to be an effective tool in reducing the impact and damage fires cause,” adds a company spokesperson.

“Next to natural disasters, fires at unsprinklered facilities represent the greatest losses for our clients,” reports FM Global. “We believe it is worthwhile to install sprinklers even where local code doesn’t require it because sprinklers provide fire protection, save lives and make businesses more resilient,” notes a spokesperson for FM Global.

Commenting in general on sprinklers, as opposed to the specific changes that were recently proposed in Ontario, Joe Kovoor, risk services manager for Northbridge Insurance, cites documents from the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) in Quincy, Massachusetts. Kovoor suggests that NFPA 13D, a sprinkler design standard for one- and two-family dwellings, and NFPA 13R, a standard for low-rise residential buildings, are designed more to save lives than property.

“It is not designed in the long run to actually put down a fire, but is to actually delay the fire (by) about 10 or 20 minutes, where it gives the occupants a chance to either get out or allow the firefighters to come in and take them out,” he says of the NFPA standards.

In Ontario, the provincial building code currently requires all new residential buildings of four storeys or higher to have automated sprinklers, notes a spokesperson for the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing. “Currently, the building code does not require sprinklers to be installed in new houses three storeys or less,” she writes in an e-mail, adding this is “consistent with the model National Building Code, which currently does not have sprinkler requirements for new houses.”

SPRINKLERS IN ALL NEW HOMES

However, The Co-operators is encouraging governments to require that sprinklers be installed in all new homes, Sharman says. “What we’re calling for is not to have them installed in existing homes, because there is a lot of cost and inconvenience, but when you’re building a home to incorporate them in the design,” he says. “It can be done for about 1.5% of the cost of the whole home, comparable to, say, the cost of getting granite countertops or something along those lines.”

The Co-operators is also sponsoring a three-year study by Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, which is exploring the consequences and health care costs of house fires. Launched last summer, the study includes a demonstration in which two rooms are set on fire, although only one is equipped with an automatic sprinkler. The structure housing the rooms can be transported to different locations where the local fire department can do a demonstration.

The sprinkler system “essentially puts the fire out before it really gets going, and then the other room beside it essentially burns to the ground,” Sharman reports. “It’s a really strong visual, so we wanted to grab people’s attention.”

At its heart, the study will involve reviewing existing research and literature to “essentially try to put a price tag” on the economic and societal costs of residential fires, Sharman says. “It’s kind of like the discussion around seat belts 40 or 50 years ago,” he suggests. “A lot of people couldn’t see a reason to make them mandatory and now they’re accepted. We’re hoping that it will be the same way with fire sprinklers.”