Click the video above to watch the Orange County Fire Authority in Irvine, California demonstrate the life- and

property-saving effectiveness of residential fire sprinklers.

Visit http://www.ocfa.org/ for further information.

Video uploaded with permission from Orange County Fire Authority.

Fires in the home pose one of the biggest threats to the people of our community. Over 350,000 home fires occur every year in this country and more than 2,500 people a year die in these home fires.

Home fire sprinklers are a proven way to

protect lives and property against fires at home.

These life-saving systems respond quickly and effectively to the presence of a nearby fire. When sprinklers are present, they save lives.

In fact, if you have a reported fire in your home, the risk of dying decreases by about 80 percent when sprinklers are present. And, people in homes with sprinklers are protected against significant property loss—sprinklers reduce the average property loss by 71 percent per fire.

Model safety codes now require the use of home fire sprinklers in new one- and two-family homes. These requirements offer the highest level of safety to protect the people of your community.

• Home sprinkler systems respond quickly to reduce the heat, flames, and smoke from a fire, giving families valuable time to get to safety.
• Roughly 90 percent of the time, just one sprinkler operates.
• Each individual sprinkler is designed and calibrated to go off when it senses a significant heat change.
• Only the sprinkler closest to the fire will activate, spraying water directly on the fire.

Portland Fire & Rescue cares about your health and safety and wants you to understand that an effective fire loss prevention and reduction measure for both life and property is the installation and maintenance of home fire sprinklers. Home fire sprinkler systems offer the optimum level of fire safety because they control the fire immediately in the room of origin, help limit the spread of fire, and often extinguish it before the firefighters arrive.

Learn more by visiting the Fire Sprinkler Initiative website (a project of the National Fire Protection Association) at http://www.firesprinklerinitiative.org.

   Portland Fire & Rescue 

   We Respond: Always Ready, Always There

   October 11, 2011 

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