# Tradeoffs for sprinklers not scientificly based



## TheCommish (Jul 17, 2017)

Worceser Massachussettess 
*Telegram and Gazette - 07/15/2017                                                                                                                                                            Page : A006*

WPI REVIEW ON BUILDING CODES:

*‘Tradeoffs’ granted for sprinklers not always scientiﬁcally based*

*By Scott O’Connell*

Telegram & Gazette Staff


WORCESTER  —  A  new  report from the National Association of State Fire Marshals and a research team at Worcester Polytechnic Insti- tute has found the common practice of relaxing building regulations for structures with sprinkler systems is not based on sound science and data.

Based on a review of literature and some computer modeling work performed by WPI faculty and graduate stu- dents, the study discovered that many of the common so- called “trade-offs” granted to builders in those scenarios result in buildings of suspect fire safety, despite the presence of sprinklers.

“It’s been an issue for NASFM for nearly two decades now,” said Jon Narva, the organization’s external rela- tions director. “We’ve been concerned we don’t have a good understanding of how it’s affecting buildings. We don’t think our buildings  are unsafe,  but  we  don’t know — we needed some science behind it.”

The association picked WPI, which has a large fire sciences program, to put together a neutral analysis of how loos- ened building codes may be affecting fire safety, he added. NASFM hopes to use the results — WPI is slated to continue working on modeling until September — to inform future building code updates, as well as design a fire risk evaluation tool to test the safety of different types of building construction.

Nicholas A. Dembsey, a fire protection engineering pro- fessor at WPI who worked on the project, said there is still some knowledgeable thinking behind the code relaxations; “It’s not like they were just random things that occurred,” he said. There are also some tradeoffs that are “perfectly safe,”  he  said.

But there are others, his team found, that warrant some skepticism. Some build- ings, for example, are allowed to have flammable exterior finishes if they have inte. rior sprinkler systems. But that material can catch fire before the sprinkler system is even activated, according to NASFM.

Other questionable areas the WPI researchers looked at were the spacing and size allowances for exits granted to sprinkler-outfitted build- ings, as well as the different standard of “thermomechanical” integrity — essentially the ability of the building itself to withstand fire — those structures are held to. The latter tradeoff in particular is important to fire services, Mr. Dembsey said; “You don’t want the building to collapse while they’re inside.”

The report further validated those concerns by finding many tradeoffs are based on empirical, rather than scientific or data-backed rationales. The other intent of the review, Mr. Dembsey added, was to see how tradeoffs are counterbalanced by the presence of sprinklers in building


construction. While fire suppression systems can be effective, the permissions they trigger for various code ease- ments may result in structures that, from a fire safety perspective, “are not really put together in a holistic fashion,” he said. The report found, for example, that buildings are being constructed on the “assumption that sprinklers will always overcome the shortcomings in materials and design,” Mr. Dembsey  said.

The presence of sprinklers, in fact, “may have ultimately led to some weaker construction practices, resulting in less-resilient buildings,” said NASFM’s president, Butch Browning.

Also working on the project for WPI are fire protection engineering professor Brian Meacham, post-doctoral student Praveen Kamath, and PhD student Honggang Wang.


_—Scott O’Connell can be reached at Scott.O’Connell@ telegram.com. Follow him on Twitter @ScottOConnellTG_

copyright © 2017 Worcester Telegram &amp Gazette Corp. 07/15/2017

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