By G.K. Sharman – Orlando Sentinel

Most people wouldn’t notice, but in Baldwin Park, fire hydrants are farther apart than they are in other communities — 500 feet instead of the typical 300 feet.

It’s one of the trade-offs the city of Orlando agreed to in exchange for developers installing residential fire-sprinkler systems in all of the homes, in addition to already-mandated sprinkler protection in commercial buildings.

Only 2 percent to 3 percent of new homes nationwide contain sprinklers, but fire-protection officials would like to see them become standard equipment, much like seat belts in automobiles.

These systems are consumer-friendly versions of their commercial cousins. Smaller and less obtrusive, they’re designed to extinguish fires common to homes — kitchen flare-ups, for instance, or a smoldering cigarette — before they become infernos that consume your house, your possessions and perhaps even your family.

Unlike a commercial system, which is designed to protect property and control the blaze until people can get out of a building, home sprinklers concentrate on small, interior fires. As such, they’re no help in the case of exterior fire threats such as the recent wildfires in Central Florida.

Residential sprinklers save property and lives, and fire-protection officials, locally and nationally, enthusiastically recommend them.

Homes are “really the last major source of big fire deaths,” said Roy L. Marshall, director of the Residential Fire Safety Institute, which lobbies for residential fire sprinklers.

Marshall said that commercial sprinkler regulations during the past century have drastically reduced fire deaths in high-rises, hotels and nursing homes. Now, 75 percent to 80 percent of people who die in fires are at home. That’s an average of about 3,000 people a year, he said, “and that’s a lot of people to die needlessly.”

In addition to the RFSI, the International Code Council, a membership association dedicated to building safety and fire prevention, is pushing nationally to require sprinklers in one- and two-family homes.

Proposed ordinances from the National Fire Protection Association also are expected this October and include requirements for sprinklers in new homes, said Jack Richardson, Orlando’s fire-protection engineer.

However, states are not obliged to accept the regulations, he said, and Florida is opting out of making that particular provision state law.

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