Agoura Hills Considers Mandatory Fire Sprinkler Proposal

Agoura Hills is on the verge of becoming the first city in Los Angeles County to require automatic sprinkler systems in all new homes, officials said.

“We’re trying to make our fire dollar go farther and make the community safer at the same time,” said Mayor Jack W. Koenig, who introduced the proposal at a City Council meeting last week.

Koenig said no opposition has filtered back to the town’s City Hall yet, but a public hearing is scheduled for July 13.

The Agoura Hills proposal was conceived months before the disastrous May 4 fire at the downtown First Interstate Bank Building, Koenig said. A sprinkler system was being installed in that building, but was not yet operational when the fire struck.

“Everyone realizes, especially with what happened with the high-rise downtown, the advantages” of a residential sprinkler law, he said. The city already requires sprinklers in industrial and commercial buildings.

The residential sprinklers are estimated to add about $3,750 to the price of a new 2,500-square-foot home, the mayor said.

“On builders, it will not have any effect,” said Saiyd Jaffari, a building design engineer with the Meckler Engineers Group of Encino. “They will pass it on to the buyers and some buyers might be out of the market.”

Home buyers, however, could gain that money back in the long run by paying less in fire insurance, Koenig said.

Some Not Affected

Existing homes or homes that have already been approved for construction would not be affected by the proposed sprinkler ordinance if it passes.

The Orange County city of San Clemente is believed to be the first city in the nation to require residential sprinklers, said William Goss, a retired Los Angeles deputy fire chief who is regional manager for the National Fire Sprinkler Assn., a Patterson, N.Y.-based trade group of sprinkler manufacturers and installers.

Since the San Clemente law passed in 1976, residential sprinkler requirements have become more popular nationwide, Goss said. Fire officials believe sprinklers reduce firefighting costs by putting out fires quickly, he said.

Smoke detectors, which are widely required in homes, alert residents that a fire has started, but do nothing to extinguish it, he said. A 1974 Illinois Institute of Technology study showed that 36% of the population may be unable to respond to a smoke alarm because of their ages, physical condition or chemical addiction, Goss said.

Some governments, including the city and county of Los Angeles, have required residential sprinklers in selected areas that may be low on water or far from a fire station. Such areas include parts of the Antelope Valley and the more remote areas of the Santa Monica Mountains, said county Assistant Fire Chief James Daleo.

In turn, some home builders have resisted sprinklers because of the cost, Daleo said.

Daleo mentions the case of one adamant home builder in arguing the benefits of a sprinkler system. The Antelope Valley man, who was building his own home, installed the sprinklers in spite of his complaints to county officials about the cost, Daleo said.

In the early hours of Feb. 28, shortly after the house was completed, a fire broke out in a bedroom as the man and his family were sleeping elsewhere in the house. The sprinkler system extinguished the fire and awoke the residents. A smoke detector in the hallway outside the closed bedroom door had not gone off, the fire chief said.

“Usually by the time you wake up in a fire,” Daleo said, “you have a smoke situation where you have limited egress and maybe an overwhelming amount of smoke.”

Modern residential sprinklers almost never go off accidentally and do not go off in an entire home if a fire starts in one room, Koenig said. Accompanying alarm bells inside and outside the home notify residents and neighbors of a fire, he said.

Agoura Hills is especially sensitive to fire danger because of the dry grassland and brush that surround the city, Koenig said.

“We’re subjected to grass fires on almost a yearly basis,” Koenig said. At present, fire investigators are trying to identify an arsonist suspected of setting 14 fires in the past two months in the brush along the Ventura Freeway in Agoura Hills and Westlake Village, he said.

Installing a system in a finished home can cost twice as much as putting one in as a house is being built, the mayor said.

No major housing developments are planned for Agoura Hills, which has little open space left for large housing tracts, said Dana Riccard, associate city planner.

The city will continue to grow, though, and the sprinkler ordinance fits into the city’s plan for future fire safety, Koenig said.

“We’re residentially mostly built out, but we have more to go,” Koenig said. “The boundaries of Agoura Hills will change over the years, too. There definitely will be more building.”