Fire sprinklers are "green".
Why? Numerous reasons actually.
Let's start with water conservation. Most fires that grow big enough to activate a fire sprinkler system, are controlled or extinguished by just two fire sprinklers. For easy math, we will say that each sprinkler is discharging 50 gallons of water every minute (50 GPM) [side note: these numbers will vary depending on water supply and sprinkler selection...like I said....for easy math].
So two sprinklers would be dischargibg around 100 GPM. That sounds like a lot of water....but it's not.....especially relative to the next part of our comparison.
The fire is put out by the sprinklers.....it takes ten minutes from when the sprinkler first activated (and subsequently notified the fire department) until the fire department was on scene and shut the sprinkler system off. 1000 gallons to douse the fire. One maybe two fire trucks hit the road for a total of 2 hours of diesel fuel burning. Everyone goes home. Water damage is taken care of. The business that had the fire stays closes for a few hours....then it is business as usual....but they have an awesome story to tell about how the sprinkler system saved the day.
Here's the comparison. Same fire, yet no fire sprinklers. Fire burns past the incipient (beginning) phase, and starts to get really hot. It burned for about five minutes before anyone noticed and called the fire department. The chief gets there, sees the smoke, and calls for a second alarm. Now you're going to have anywhere from 6-10 fire trucks there, all burning plenty of diesel fuel. Oh, and they are going to be there for quite a while....it's turning out to be one big fire. Let's say, for easy math, they have 10 trucks there for 10 hours. That's 100 hours of engines running.
Let's look at water usage now. The fire department, on a big working fire, may dump 1000-2000 GPM for a few hours....maybe even more. This could put water usage over the 20,000 gallon mark.
Let's keep going.....when the place burns down, it will need to be demolished. Then rebuilt. That's a lot of vehicle exhaust, and raw material....
So yeah. Sprinklers are green.
More than you might think.
321FireProtection.com
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