By Joan Oliver – Northwest Herald

Fire safety is a lot like insurance: You don’t think about it until you need it. That is, until something bad happens.

Last week in Harvard, 27 people were displaced when two apartment buildings burned in the 1400 block of Northfield Court.

One man, 58-year-old John R. McKoski, later died. It’s still not known whether that was as a result of the fire.

On May 29, 2007, 36 people were displaced when a 24-unit apartment building at 720 St. Johns Road was destroyed in a blaze.

The cause of both fires: lighted cigarettes.

The result: thousands of dollars of damage and disrupted lives for those affected.

I have more than a passing interest in fire safety. That comes from being a firefighter’s wife.

It also means that I often hear of the difficulties of fighting fires in older buildings. And how a building’s construction can make it easier or harder to put out a fire once it has begun.

Ask any firefighter what he or she would do to minimize property damage and save lives.

“A fire starts out small and grows at an exponential rate,” Crystal Lake Fire Chief James Moore told reporter David Fitzgerald. “Sprinklers give occupants a chance to get out.”

My husband likes to quote one of his mentors, who said he’d put sprinklers in phone booths if he could.

It makes sense. Sprinklers stop fires from spreading. That means less property damage and potentially lives saved.

Simple, right? Wrong.

Sprinkler systems aren’t cheap. And retrofitting older buildings, as the apartment buildings mentioned above were, is even more expensive.

But it’s heartening to know that fire codes in many of our towns now require new multi-tenant buildings to have sprinkler systems.

We aren’t up to putting sprinklers in phone booths, but it’s a start.

And soon sprinklers could become as common as smoke detectors.

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