NFPA Journal - November/December 2017 - 72

HOME FIRE SPRINKLERS
HOME SAFE HOME

Most occupants will probably barely
notice the presence of the sprinklers,
but fire officials don't mind-they're
just thankful to have one less thing to
worry about. "Most fire deaths occur
in single-family homes, and the data
clearly shows that fire suppression
systems like sprinklers save lives," said
Chris Connealy, the Texas fire marshal
and a member of the Texas Fire Sprinkler Coalition. "We always appreciate
when fire prevention and safety equipment are taken into consideration."

Complex problem,
tight timeframe

resulting in 14 deaths and 18 injuries,"
the letter states. "FEMA statistics show
that the injury and death rates [in those
units] have been more than double
that of the United States' manufactured
housing in general, and up to double
that of other residential experiences."
Due to these and other problems, FEMA
suspended use of the travel campers
after Katrina and worked to revamp its
emergency housing stock. After years
of pro-sprinkler lobbying by one of its
divisions, the U.S. Fire Administration
(USFA), especially by its then-administrator, Ernest Mitchell-(see "Setting an
Example," page 74)-FEMA decided in
2015 to go a step further by equipping
its stock of new emergency housing
with fire sprinklers.
Once the decision was made, USFA
officials got to work-and they had a
monumental engineering challenge in
front of them. "For me, an old grizzled
engineer who has had an opportunity
to do some really cool things in my
career, it was the most challenging
project I have ever worked on," said
Lawrence McKenna, Jr., a fire protection engineer at the USFA who was

GUTTER CREDIT

How these government-funded temporary emergency dwellings came to have
home fire sprinklers was no small feat
of engineering-or of political maneuvering. Like many aspects of today's
emergency management planning, the
FEMA sprinklers can be traced to Hurricane Katrina.
By some estimates Katrina displaced
more than a million residents in the
gulf region, and while some returned in
days, as many as 600,000 people were
still homeless a month later. At least

114,000 households turned to FEMA
for emergency housing, which hustled
to deliver more than 100,000 small
campers to the region in what officials
believed at the time was a short-term
fix to an acute problem.
It didn't turn out that way. Though
well-intentioned, the effort was fraught
with missteps, lawsuits, and enduring
embarrassments.
Soon after the campers arrived, many
occupants began to report headaches
and illnesses, maladies later linked to
unacceptably high levels of formaldehyde inside certain campers. (In 2012,
the companies that manufactured and
installed the Katrina campers agreed
to pay victims $42.6 million to settle a
class-action lawsuit.) Another persistent
problem was fire. Several people were
killed and many more injured in numerous explosions linked to the camper's
propane tanks, which contractors did
not always inspect or install to code.
According to a 2015 letter from
FEMA to HUD, FEMA deployed more
than 142,000 temporary housing units
from 2005 to 2009. "Unfortunately, 186
fires occurred in these deployed units,

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NFPA Journal - November/December 2017
