Sprinkler damage ‘preferable'

Fire sprinkler damage to Auckland apartments is preferable to the amount of damage a fire could have caused, a fire safety chief says.

Gary Talbot, fire safety integration manager for the NZ Fire Service in Wellington, was responding to criticism from an insurance chief over sprinkler damage and said water damage was the lesser of two evils.

Peter Lyons, underwriting director of Takapuna-based Oceanic Insurance, said water damage from fire sprinklers had led to one $20,000 insurance claim.

He was also concerned about a rising number of claims from apartment dwellers.

But Talbot said: "Had the fire continued to develop without the intervention of the fire sprinkler, the insurance claim could well have been in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"It is hard for people to imagine the fire damage when it hasn't occurred as a result of an efficient operation of a fire sprinkler. It's easy to see the water though."

No matter how good the local fire brigade was - and Auckland's is one of the best in the world - firefighters could not put out fires until they knew there was one and had to be able to gain access to the building in question. It all took time.

"There is enough history written on tragic fires in high-rise buildings lacking sprinklers."

But Talbot questioned the reported damage in some Auckland blocks.

"Reports of water cascading down levels of the building only makes me curious as to the adequacy of the fire separation between floors," he said.

"If water can move between floors, so can hot fire gases and smoke."

He thought perhaps a problem had been discovered unwittingly.