County Has a Leg Up on Sprinklers : Public safety: Most high-rises are protected from fires since they were built after state law made sprinklers mandatory.

Orange County wasn’t born yesterday. But most of its high-rise hotels were born after 1974--the year that California adopted an ordinance mandating automatic sprinkler systems in new buildings taller than 75 feet.

Therefore, the vast majority of high-rise hotels in the county are protected by sprinklers in every room.

“Orange County is lucky in a sense because much of our development has taken place in the past 15 years,” said David Hollister, fire protection analyst for the Costa Mesa Fire Department. Like many other cities in the county, Costa Mesa does not have any high-rise hotels unprotected by sprinklers.

The older hotels that sprung up around Disneyland before 1974 are being retrofitted with the life-saving devices, thanks to an ordinance passed last year by the Anaheim City Council.

Anaheim’s fire code goes a big step further than the state’s, requiring even those high-rise structures built before 1974 to have sprinkler systems. Although California toughened state fire codes after the Las Vegas MGM Grand tragedy 10 years ago, revisions fell short of making the 1974 sprinkler law retroactive.

“The city ordinance gives (building owners) until January of 1992 to comply,” said Janet Baylor, fire prevention analyst for the Anaheim Fire Department. “The Grand Hotel has finished installing a sprinkler system. The Disneyland Hotel, Inn at the Park and Quality Inn are in the process.”

Most cities in Orange County, Anaheim included, define “high-rise” as a building taller than 55 feet--or about five stories, the distance that a typical fire ladder can reach at an angle.

Marriott and ITT Sheraton corporations in recent years have taken the initiative to go beyond various state ordinances and retrofit all of their hotels with sprinkler systems.

Sprinklers extinguish the fire 96.2% of the time before firefighters arrive, according to California State Fire Marshal Jim McMullen. “All fires start out small,” he pointed out. “Sprinklers put out a fire before it becomes a tragedy.”