"Many instances?" Care to list a few for us?
the term "many instances" was extracted from somewhere,
but i am not sure where.
and the theme of the response was not an indictment of sprinklers
as the above question might lead one to believe....
rather the theme of the response was a strong questioning of
the prescription for
smoke venting in large, open-plan buildings
with sprinklers.
secondly, my wording was poor, and should have
read
"...but there are plenty of occassions where they
should not be sending firefighters into high-piled
storage [in the few cases {sic}] where the sprinklers
systems simply..."
this was not my intention, to nail and damn
the sprinklered state of the nation, but since
you asked
you wanted a few examples.
a few being one more than a couple.
1. McFrugals, New Orleans where the fire department
valiantly saved the warehouse on first response. sprinklers
worked, but because of mismatched design, they
also forced the fire department to work.
2. Atherstone on Avon. no sprinklers, we lost firefighters there
so can't blame the design, just the code / review
process
3. Ford Motor Company, Germany, bin-boxes overwhelmed
the sprinkler system there.
4. British Columbia, a toilet roll warehouse beat the pants off
a sprinkler system, no firefighter fatalities, thankfully
5. Sherwin-Williams, Ohio. i think we all know how this
story goes
6. Minot, Nakota (used to spend summers back on the
Missouri breaks, down state) 1987. chemicals burned
the sprinklered warehouse down.
again, my intention is NOT to damn sprinklers. most people
who work with me are TIRED of hearing me complain about
ways to get more sprinkler water into a building. It was in
fact Leyton that complained about my putting sprinklers
over stair landings in a high rise hotel years ago, but he
acquised and used it as a horse-trading item on a later issue.
My point is not that sprinklers fail (and we MUST count
closed valves as sprinkler failures, that is what chains and
locks are for if we must), but the point that in high-piled
storage applications with
sprinkler protection,
even with smoke venting
when the fire department is called in to put the kabosh...they
should be careful. I don't know if it is still in NFPA 13, but the
old 231C sprinker code recommended firefighters to hang outside
the warehouse for 20 minutes and let the sprinkler system do
its job... but of course, that doesn't happen.
scot deal
excelsior fire engineering
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