By Lew Sichelman – Los Angeles Times

Six people were in the St. Michaels, Md., house when the smoke alarm went off two summers ago. The sound woke one, who was a light sleeper, according to news reports. And she managed to rouse two of her friends. But three others died in the blaze.

The house was just outside the town limits of the Eastern Shore getaway, which had recently adopted an ordinance requiring all new homes to have a sprinkler system. Consequently, it didn’t have one.

Advocates of sprinkler systems say that sprinklers not only would have saved the lives of those three people but damage to the property would have been minimal.

It is the same argument sprinkler proponents have been using for years. And they’ve finally been heard.

In an overwhelming 1,283-470 vote late last month, the International Code Council (ICC) meeting in Minneapolis mandated that sprinklers be required in all one- and two-family homes and town houses built to the International Residential Code (IRC) as of Jan. 1, 2011.

Builders who have been adamantly opposed to sprinklers cried foul. After years of beating back sprinkler advocates, the deck was stacked against them this time when 900 fire officials showed up unexpectedly to vote for the proposal.

The National Assn. of Home Builders won’t talk about the decision. “We are not doing any interviews,” said public affairs representative Donna Reichle. But in the association’s weekly online member newsletter published shortly after the vote, Pinopolis, S.C., builder James Anderson, chairman of the NAHB’s Construction, Codes and Standards Committee, had this to say:

“We welcome the insight and experience that fire officials bring to the code-development process because our codes are focused on life-safety issues. However, it seems clear that these particular officials were focused on one issue only without the benefit of perspective regarding how such mandates jibe with hundreds of other code proposals considered at this hearing. That’s unfortunate, because such reasoned discussion is what the model-code process was designed to accomplish.”

In a statement to the media, NAHB President Sandy Dunn, a builder from West Virginia, said her members were not opposed to sprinklers per se. Rather, they are rankled by mandates “because the evidence is clear that [sprinklers] are not the right solution for every home.”

Even with the code council’s approval, the long-running battle over residential fire sprinklers is far from over because IRC codes aren’t enforceable until they are adopted by local jurisdictions.

“Our members will continue to advocate for cost-effective construction and life-safety measures through the model-code process,” Dunn said in her statement.

The sprinkler mandate will first appear in the 2009 IRC, which will be published by the end of the year. That gives states two full years to adopt the requirement. Forty-six states use the IRC as the basis for regulating residential construction.

The NAHB says its opposition isn’t about money. But isn’t it always about money?

Based on an average cost of $1.50 per square foot and an average house of 2,340 square feet, the typical sprinkler system would add $3,510 to the price of a typical house. And that’s not counting the usual 10% markup.

It’s a small price to pay, fire-safety advocates counter, to save just one life. “The cost to put sprinklers into the home where my daughter died would have been less than what I had to pay for the flowers at her funeral,” Kaaren Mann, a Simpsonville, S.C., mother of a fire victim, reportedly testified at the ICC meeting.

The housing lobby favors hard-wired, interconnected smoke detectors, which are already in the building code, over sprinklers. The rules call for the alarms to be installed in every bedroom and on every floor.

Today, it’s estimated that more than 95% of all homes have smoke detectors. And fire-safety experts say they’ve been a godsend.

Fire deaths have declined dramatically over the last three decades as the detectors have become more common, they say. But they also offer up these sobering statistics: More than 3,000 people die each year from fire, and a home burns every 80 seconds.

Residential sprinklers are the only fire-protection technology that works to rapidly contain fire, effectively giving families more time to escape the deadly heat and poisonous gases of an unchecked blaze, according to the IRC Fire Sprinkler Coalition, an association of more than 100 fire services, building-code officials and safety organizations in 45 states.

The potential impact of this code change is discussed at “Residential Fire Sprinklers Market Growth and Labor Demand Analysis“

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