A sprinkler ordinance that’s short and sassy
The city of Naples, Fla., has adopted a sprinkler ordinance of rare scope and brevity. The ordinance covers all new construction except single-family homes, carports, and sheds. Just one page long, it’s free of local amendments creating tradeoffs not allowed in the underlying documents, the 1985 version of the National Fire Protection Association’s National Fire Code.
The building contractors of Naples “didn’t want us to rewrite everything. We took that as an opportunity,” says Fire Marshal Wayne Martin. The contractors “were our biggest opposition going in. I think they felt it would create a lot of confusion in interpretation” if the standards were amended locally.
Although Naples’ ordinance is unusual in its strict adoption of national codes and its application to single-family homes, it’s milder than what contractors and other interested parties originally faced. The fire department’s first proposal covered even single-family housing and called for sprinkler retrofit by the year 2000.
The retrofit provision was a sore point for the Naples Area Board of Realtors, but after it was dropped, “we grudgingly supported” the ordinance, says past president Phillip Wood.
Fire Marshal Martin says a fire code seminar for architects and contractors “cleared the air” about adopting the new ordinance. But the realtors’ reservations are likely to revive sometime in the future. Martin’s office will be working on a standard for retrofit over the next two years. And the department’s first concern in that regard is a string of multistory condominiums, many of them for the elderly, along Naples’ beach.
