CBC News

An Ottawa city councillor is lobbying for a regulation that would make sprinklers mandatory in all new homes built in the city but Ontario law doesn’t allow such municipal rules to be enforced.

Diane Deans said she believes mandatory home sprinkler systems are needed more than ever and are the next logical step in fire safety after smoke alarms were made mandatory.

“The structural integrity of the buildings is not what it once was,” she said. “They are going to burn faster.”

Dave Cranridge, division chief of training for the Ottawa Fire Service, said many new homes are built from lightweight, composite wood frames that consume fewer trees, but are consumed by fire more quickly than solid wood beams.

“They burn a lot quicker and therefore they will fail a lot quicker. Therefore the roofs will fail, the floor joists will fail and we have more chance of a collapse.”

Duncan McNaughton, a fire protection engineer with the City of Ottawa, said sprinklers can prevent such a series of events from happening.

He cited the experience of communities with mandatory sprinkler laws, such as Scottsdale, Ariz., and Vancouver, B.C.

“They have yet to have a fire-related death in a sprinkled residential house in those communities since the implementation of sprinklers into residential houses,” he said.

However, such bylaws are not allowed in Ontario under the province’s Building Code Act.

Sean Tracey, Canadian regional manager for the National Fire Protection Association, said current fire safety regulations in the act are based on burn tests from the 1950s.

Since then, fire safety experts have tried unsuccessfully to change the code to reflect more recent tests, showing the faster burn rates of newer construction materials.

Tracey unsuccessfully lobbied for changes to the act to allow mandatory fire sprinkler regulations two years ago, when a committee was reviewing it.

He blames the building industry for the failure.

“There was only one fire service representative but there were seven home builders on the committee,” he said.

John Herbert, a spokesman for the Greater Ottawa Home Builder’s Association, said his group’s position is that sprinklers are expensive — he estimates they cost about $7,000 per home — and don’t make any sense as residential fire deaths have been declining.

According to the Ontario Fire Marshal’s office, there were 81 fire deaths in the province in 2006, down from 150 in 1997.

Herbert said mandatory smoke detectors are saving lives, but he thinks sprinklers will save only property.

Meanwhile, advocates for mandatory fire sprinklers said they are hopeful that a private member’s bill introduced by Liberal MPP Linda Jeffrey, who represents Brampton-Springdale, will be passed. It would change the Ontario Building Code to allow municipalities to pass sprinkler bylaws.

The bill will get its second reading on May 27, and Tracey said he is looking forward to that.

“That will give us the opportunity to debate this in a public forum, something that we’ve never … had the opportunity to do.”

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