By Alma Gaul agaul@qctimes.com
The Illinois Fire Marshal shelved on Friday a plan that would have required fire sprinklers to be added to new single-family homes, but his is not the last word on the issue.
Rock Island building official Tom Ayers explained that while the fire marshal speaks to the fire code, Quad-City area updates to building codes still are pending.
The requirement that fire sprinklers be installed in new single-family homes was included in the 2009 International Residential Code, a model building code used by most communities throughout the country. But for various reasons, the requirement has not been in force around the Quad-Cities. Either exemptions were passed by state and local governments or governments did not adopt the updated code.
Exemptions are expiring, though, so the Illowa Building Officials Association — a coalition of Quad-City building and code enforcement officials — has been working to come up with options that it hopes will be acceptable to homebuilders who staunchly oppose the mandate on the basis of housing affordability, consumer choice and inherent property rights.
In fact, the first of 10,000 letters were sent Friday by a Quad-City builders coalition as part of an educational campaign opposing mandatory sprinklers, said Gene Holst, the CEO of the Quad-City Area Realtor Association, one of the coalition members.
Other members are the Quad-City Builders & Remodelers Association (formerly the Homebuilders), the Quad-City Area Realtor Association, the Quad-Cities Chamber of Commerce, Habitat for Humanity-Quad-Cities and the Student-Built Home Project.
The letters are going to homeowners and decision-makers on both sides of the Mississippi River, Holst said.
"We hope to make enough people aware that they can talk to elected officials locally so that when they adopt these resolutions to the code, it will be with exemptions to the mandate," he added.
While stakeholders in both Iowa and Illinois have been waiting for their respective states to act on the issue, "I think it's going to be (decided) pretty much municipality by municipality," he said.
In addition to the mailing, other campaign efforts will include telephone polling and the creation of a website, he said.
The effort is being funded with $45,000 from the National Association of Realtors that was received about a month ago, $20,000 from the Iowa Association of Realtors and $9,000 from the Illinois association.
The local builders and remodelers association previously spent about $17,000 on a television advertising campaign to educate the public on its views, the group's executive officer has said.
The Illinois Association of Realtors had developed a six-page document of talking points for its members to use to persuade the fire marshal to shelve his plan.
Among the points are that hard-wired, interconnected, battery-backup smoke detectors required in today's homes are effective and that insurance credits do not offset the cost of a sprinkler system.
In the Quad-City area, Bob Buck, the president of the Illowa group of building officials, has said that the main reason for sprinklers in the code is safety. It is not to extinguish fires, but rather to extend the amount of time residents have to get out — and the time that firefighters have to get in and out — of a burning home.
Building materials are constantly changing, and testing agencies have found that the engineered lumber used in the floor I-joists of most new homes burns faster than the solid, sawed "legacy lumber" used in the past, Buck has said.
Results of an Underwriters Laboratory test showed the I-joists of floors collapsing in less than six minutes, he added.
So, earlier this year, Illowa came up with four alternatives to sprinklers that it believes still promote safe homes, including the use of fire-resistant I-joists, the use of "legacy" lumber and the installation of sheetrock to the ceiling of the basement to cover the floor assembly.
There may even be more alternatives such as a post-applied protection, Ayers said. "Who knows what lies out there? People are creative.
"We can continue our dialogue with the goal of coming to a reasonable agreement."
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