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After reviews by the state fire marshal, contractors and engineers, the Nebo School District is confident Salem Hills High School is safe for students, officials said at the school board meeting Wednesday.
The safety of the school's fire sprinklers has been called into question in recent months by Salem resident Michael Ricks, a fire suppression consultant who works for a company in California. Ricks has said the school needs sprinklers above and below large architectural clouds, but Superintendant Chris Sorensen said the district will stand by the fire marshal's assessment that sprinklers are only needed below the clouds.
"We respect the integrity and professionalism of the Utah State Fire Marshal's Office," he said.
During public comment in the school board meeting, Ricks spoke to the school board about what he thinks are unsafe fire suppression systems in the schools. Ricks, who has two sons who will be attending the new school, said the school does not comply with fire codes because there are not sprinklers at the roof level above the clouds. When a fire is started, he said, the heat will rise straight up to the ceiling and then vertically, bypassing the sprinklers under the clouds below.
"There's a deficiency in the sprinkler system that I feel needs to be addressed," he said.
Chief Deputy Brent Halladay of the fire marshal's office acknowledged that fire code requires sprinklers to be a certain height from the ceiling, but he noted Utah law gives the fire marshal's office the authority to make modifications when there are practical difficulties in carrying out the code. As long as modifications do not lessen the safety and health of the building's occupants, Halladay said the office can approve necessary adjustments.
"We do not feel that we have lessened the safety," he said.
Halladay said the modifications were made to improve the safety of the building. The clouds are made of metal and hung up by several wires. On the top side of the clouds, metal framing creates a box three and a half inches deep. Halladay said the concern with putting sprinklers above the clouds is that the sprinklers would end up flooding them with water and breaking the 250-1,000 pound structures loose from the roof.
"When it comes down ... somebody's going to be critically injured or killed," he said.
Dennis Cecchini, vice president of MHTN Architects, said the water from the sprinklers pouring at 150 pounds per minute would collapse the clouds even if they were covered and could not hold water. With that much force, the water would not have time to run off the clouds before the wires would break.
Cecchini said the design of the sprinkler system took more than a year, and no mistakes have been made by the fire marshal's office. The fire marshal is a fire expert who has fought fires, he said.
"They know what [fires] do; they know how they react," he said. "They know what materials in the building will do when they light up."
The materials above the clouds consist of concrete, steel and glass and are non-combustible. Cecchini said even the casings for electrical wires have been designed to not catch fire. The safety of the children is the officials' concern, not the state of the building in a fire, he said, and he hopes hearing about the situation does not make parents concerned when they shouldn't be.
"Sometimes, inflammatory statements made without knowledge are more damaging than he realizes," Cecchini said.
Ricks said the decision of the school district angers him, but he was not surprised by the result. A third party who has no interest in the school should also have been consulted on the matter for a better perspective on the problem, he said.
"I think, in Utah, people have a hard time questioning authority," he said. |
