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Home fire sprinklers and the HBA

steveray said:
99.66% survival rate with hardwired smokes and CO.....
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It all goes back to people not understanding what the objective is in that situation. For smaller buildings, the objective of the construction is to ensure everyone gets out safe. The main reason why people are able to do that in their own home is because of functional smoke alarms. We know fire is not what the real issue is because deaths do not correlate with the time that most fire occur. Most fires occur at supper time. Most deaths occur in the middle of the night. It's not that your house is on fire that is the safety hazard. It is that you are unconscious and unaware that your house is on fire.

There is a joke that there is not a foundation that the fire service can't save when it comes to houses. But, that's the way it should be. When the fire service pulls up to a house that is fully involved, they should find the family standing on the front lawn watching everything they own burn to the ground. The fire service should be preventing fire from spreading to adjacent structures. Home are not designed to have fires fought from within. They lack the necessary fire separations and rated construction to do so safely. That is regardless of if they contain sprinklers.

Some comments on the article lament the disproportionate loss of elderly and children in fires. The reason that elderly and children are more impacted in home fires is because smoke alarms sounding patterns were typically geared towards adults. This has started to change with new temporal patterns and voice commands. This statistic is likely to fall in the future, however, it will remain higher than adults since both groups have an impaired ability for self-preservation.
 
steveray said:
99.66% survival rate with hardwired smokes and CO.....
Click to expand...

Covid has a 99%+ survival rate too, and look what the world has done with that..



"The science" (and isn't everyone tired of hearing that?) says you're perfectly safe in your house without sprinklers as long as you have working detectors, but there's a bunch of government employees and an industry lobby that don't care, and think you should have sprinklers anyway. Who wins? The side that controls the message and spends the most money. So far the homebuilders are doing a decent job of that.
 
JCraver said:
Apologies. 98.3%.

I don't think that negates the point I was trying to make.
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I'm not sure how comfortable I am conflating the two statistics. This would appear to be a logical fallacy called false equivalency.

One is 99+/-% of people who have fires, which is a relatively small subset of the overall population (a small percentage of a small percentage).

The other is 99+/-% of the entire population (or approaching the entire population as it is an infectious disease).

Let's make up some numbers se we can see the difference.

For instance, let's assume both are 99%, but the percentage of people who have fires is only 1% (99% of people do not have home fires).

So for our virus, I have 1 fatality for each hundred that get sick (again, assuming the entire population gets sick).

For our fires, we have 1 fatality for each ten thousand people. Obviously a large difference.

So, what did we learn? Fires are less infectious than a virus.
 
Holy cow. Try to throw a little levity at a couple of statistics and everybody gets all twisted. I'll use a different example when I make percentage comparisons in the future. o_O


The point - Very, very few people who have house fires die. There's a couple groups who would like that number to be even lower, but so far, more rational people have prevailed over those groups. The end.
 
JC...Guessing the levity didn't come through....Neither did the point....We all know that statistics can be pushed in any direction....Like when the sprinkler lobby said that you are 2X safer with sprinklers in your home because it goes from 99.62% or whatever to 99.88%=0.26% which is half of the difference between 99.62 and 100%....Not bashing, just trying to discuss...
 
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