Governor Alarmed by House's Fire Sprinkler Bill

Harold Rittenberg had a surprise waiting for him when he opened his clothing store, Moe Levy's in Columbia, on Christmas Eve morning.

"It was just filled with smoke," he says. "You couldn't even see the room."

A short in an electrical outlet in a storage room had started a fire, which burned shelves loaded with ski wear.

Standing in the storage room, which is now mostly empty, Rittenberg explains, "What had happened, the sprinkler system had gone off, which is that one right there," he said, pointing to the sprinkler head in the ceiling of the storage room. "And it just flooded this place. And that's the only sprinkler head that went off."

A common myth about sprinkler systems is that every sprinkler head goes off when there's a fire, but that's not the case.

The House of Representatives passed a bill last Thursday that would provide a state subsidy of 80 percent of the cost of installing fire sprinklers in businesses and homes. Rittenberg thinks it's a good idea, since he learned for himself how much money sprinklers can save.

"They said this saved the rest of the store, because it would have caught on there and it would have immediately went outside," he said, pointing to the rest of his store.

But Gov. Mark Sanford is worried about the cost of the bill. The bill originally provided subsidies for putting sprinklers only in existing businesses, which would have cost taxpayers an estimated $36 million. But the House expanded the bill to include residential housing, which also expanded the cost to an estimated $108 million over five years.

"I appreciate the fact that the House was looking for ways to bring good from the horror of recent fires, but we do not believe open-ended financial commitments that essentially create new entitlements are the way to do so, particularly when you look at the realities of the budget we're about to head into, " Gov. Sanford said in a written statement.

The recent fires he referred to were the Sofa Superstore fire in Charleston that killed nine firefighters and the Ocean Isle Beach fire that killed seven college students last year. Neither the store nor the beach house had a sprinkler system.

But while adding homes to the bill added a lot more to its cost, Columbia Fire Marshal Carmen Floyd says it's an important step because that's where most fires, and fire deaths, occur. According to the U.S. Fire Administration, which is part of FEMA, 80 percent of fire deaths are in residential fires.

As for the cost to install sprinklers, the administration estimates it's $1 to $1.50 per square foot to add sprinklers during new home construction, and $2 to $4 per square foot to retrofit sprinklers in existing homes.

Assistant Chief Floyd says, "We can just reflect back on the Ocean Isle incident. What is the cost of a human life?"

The House bill is now headed to the Senate, which has been working on its own sprinkler bills. The Senate versions would offer tax incentives to install sprinklers instead of state subsidies.