Fire Demo Shows How Sprinklers Save Lives, Property

In less than a minute, the fire had engulfed most of the small bedroom, from the curtains to the chair and even the computer.

“If you got out alive, you wouldn’t be back in the home for six to nine months,” Tom Lia told the crowd of fire personnel and spectators gathered to watch the staged inferno.

Lia is executive director of the Northern Illinois Fire Sprinkler Advisory Board. He was at Dynamic Fire Protection on Eastern Avenue in Plainfield to drive home the importance of sprinklers in saving lives and preventing fires from spreading.

The demo, which was open to the public, showed the difference between two near-identical rooms — one with a sprinkler and one without — as they ignited from a candle-related mishap.

The demonstration was funded by a stipend from the Home Fire Sprinkler Coalition, an organization created in 2003 to raise awareness of the benefits of home sprinklers in the homebuilding industry.

Erik Hoffer, a spokesman for the HFSC, said just 75 Illinois communities have ordinances that require builders to outfit new homes with sprinklers.

Plainfield’s newest Deputy Fire Chief, Dave Riddle, said that’s something that could eventually come to pass in Plainfield.

“We are absolutely considering it,” he said. But first, “There’s a lot of education to do,” Riddle said, “Letting the public see the dramatic difference in a sprinkllered and unsprinklered room fire — that usually just speaks for itself.”

On Wednesday, the Plainfield fire department did just that, igniting the side-by-side rooms and timing each fire’s progress. Both rooms were equipped with smoke detectors, but only one had a sprinkler.

In just more than two minutes, the unsprinklered room fire was at complete flashover, consuming everything inside and spreading quickly.

In the other room, a sprinkler was set to go off when the temperature reached 155 degrees. Two seconds after the smoke alarm went off, so did the sprinklers, disbursing 15 gallons of water per minute, Lia said. The sprinkers went off just 17 seconds after the fire began.

The fire in the sprinklered room was quickly under control.

“Those people are back in the house the same day,” Lia said.

Hoffer said was one of 50 fire departments nationwide to receive a stipend from the HFSC. The stipend program is funded through a Federal Emergency Management Agency grant program.