BY DAVE GATHMAN – The Courier News

HAMPSHIRE — As about 20 business people looked on, a man with a lighter set fire to two living rooms.

It was a demonstration of what a difference home sprinkling systems can make, and members of the Hampshire Area Chamber of Commerce were watching Wednesday as the fires started burning in two little simulated living rooms behind the village’s fire station.

Each “living room” occupied a wooden hut measuring 10 square feet. Each was lined with drywall and contained a well-weathered couch plus a used TV set. They even had cheap paintings on the walls.

There was one major difference, though. Room No. 1 had no sprinkler system. As a small fire began flickering on the surface of its couch — the kind of fire that might have been started by a dropped cigarette, Fire Capt. Trevor Herrmann noted — thin, wispy gray smoke floated up the wall and collected near the ceiling.

The fire spread along the couch with what seemed like a slow pace. But only about three minutes into the demonstration, it burned through the couch’s fabric covering and began attacking the foam cushion inside. Within seconds the thin, gray smoke turned into thick, suffocating, pitch-black clouds that filled the room and blocked all sight.

Another 90 seconds — exactly 4 minutes and 35 seconds after the fire began, or about how long it likely would take the first firetrucks to arrive, Herrmann noted — Room No. 1 reached a magic temperature point where all that smoke and hot gas suddenly became combustible themselves. With an almost explosion-like poof, the room’s whole atmosphere turned instantly from a black cloud to a sheet of yellow flame.

“That’s the flashover,” Herrmann explained. But anyone on that couch would have been dead by now anyway.

Then the same process began in Room No. 2. Its couch fire began the same way, with flickering flames and wispy gray smoke. But 1 minute and 35 seconds into the experiment, a sprinkler head on that room’s ceiling started spraying water onto the fire. The blaze was totally extinguished before another half minute had passed.

Few residences have sprinklers, Herrmann and Fire Chief Curt Kramer noted. Herrmann said sprinklers in a new house or apartment building cost about $9,000 for a 3,000-square-foot structure. Trying to retrofit sprinklers into an existing home is even more expensive.

But knowing what he does about house fires, “My next home will definitely have sprinklers,” Herrmann said.

Short of installing sprinklers, Herrmann said the most important steps anyone can take to prevent fire deaths are to have smoke detectors and change their batteries twice annually, and to have an escape plan and practice it with the whole family. “I keep an escape ladder under my bed, and every once in awhile I’ll set off the smoke detector at 2:30 a.m. so we can practice getting out,” Herrmann said.

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