After a career of fighting fires in a variety of ways, Jason Blinkhorn takes it personally when some people argue against improved safeguards.
You can’t blame Jason Blinkhorn for taking a bit of offense when he hears people arguing against retrofitting older Honolulu high-rises with fire sprinkler systems — as he did during recent City Council hearings on Bill 69, which as initially proposed would have mandated retrofits of all 358 buildings constructed before sprinkler systems were required in new high-rises beginning in 1975. After all, he’s spent his entire professional career trying to protect people and property from fires. People always come first.
“I take it a little personally when someone is arguing against something that is there solely to protect people in the building,” says Blinkhorn, president of Contractor Fire Protection. “They don’t have the facts and data behind it, so you get a lot of uninformed opinion. I believe in it, for sure, because of the science and data. The only reason to be against it is money, that’s it.”
He cites one particularly irksome myth.
“I’ve heard the argument that fire alarms are designed to save people and sprinklers are designed to save property,” says Blinkhorn. “I heard that at the Council meeting, a community forum, and it’s simply not true. Sprinklers are an early suppression method to allow people to get out of the building, to make sure it doesn’t spread to the point you either burn to death or die from smoke inhalation. It’s really to allow egress.”
Sprinklers also give firefighters a head start in putting out a fire. He mentions the Marco Polo inferno in particular: “There was a lack of water in the build- ing, no sprinklers, and for a firefighter that’s spooky. You want that early suppression. You hear about these big fires, but what you don’t hear about is all the fires that were avoided by having a fire protection system in place.”
Blinkhorn knows of what he speaks, and don’t be distracted for long by the opening phrase here:
“When I was playing junior hockey in Canada [yes, he played at the highest amateur level in hockey-centric Canada, as a goalie, and thus apparently was born to stop bad things], I started going to Seneca College in Toronto, a fire protection/engineering school. Part of the school was dedicated to training you to be a firefighter, but the other three years were dedicated to fire protection engineering. We trained in fire sprinkler design, fire alarm design, chemical suppression systems, as well as fire investigations, fire modeling, anything to do with fire science. Going into my fourth year, I was hired as a part-time firefight- er. We were on call every week, worked full time every weekend. I decided to use my fire engineering and applied for a job in the U.S.— there were a ton of jobs for fire protection engineers in the U.S., there’s not enough schools here to supply the demand.”
He took a job in Phoenix with a union fire sprinkler company and spent almost a decade there, then turned to project management of large-scale construction projects, then got into business management and ran the inspection services division for a fire protection contractor.
“We have a lot of work going on,” says Blinkhorn. “Most of our work is in the hotel industry. We’re very busy with retrofits — every single hotel here — probably half a dozen this year, every year. We’re going in and ripping out ceilings and redoing sprinkler systems, adding heads or changing pipe locations. We do it daily.”
Hotels, unlike condos and commercial buildings, are mandated by their insurance companies:
“The insurance company says we want you to do this because it’s fi- nancially beneficial to maintain these (sprinkler systems) rather than have something corrode and something explodes, and you have water damage in 10 units so you displace people who are staying at $200-, $300-, $500-a-night rooms, or more.
“The toughest aspect is design and coordination on a new construction job. It’s a pretty big animal, especially as a mechanical contractor where we’re providing your HVC, your plumbing, as well as your fire sprinklers. We do a lot of internal coordination so the engineered systems physically fit into the building. A lot more goes into it than people would assume. We have in- house sprinkler designers that we employ here, plus several contract workers. But we are a design-build company, so we do all the engineering in-house, and then submit to the city for approval, and then we do the installation, start to finish.
“The retrofit is a completely different animal.”
Before getting into a retrofit argument with Blinkhorn, ask him about how “there’s a lot of physics to it, hydraulic calculations, how much water gets to a sprinkler head. A lot is based on historical data on how fire spreads in certain combustible environments, based on occupancy and the classification of what is stored there. So when you do hydraulic calculation, there are different coefficients that support how much water, how much pressure, how many gallons you’re going to need to extinguish that fire or contain it pretty quickly. That working pressure at the end heads is where you start your design, that produces the size of pipe you need, everything that goes into supplying pressure from the street to that end sprinkler head.
“I sat through a couple of meetings of the City Council with the Residential Fire Safety Committee. There was a lot of misinformation on what it actually takes to do this work and some of the obstacles they feel cannot be overcome. I just wanted to make the point that when you’re getting into these buildings, the coring through some of the concrete walls, it’s a 2- to 4-inch core, once or twice on a floor, it does not compromise the integrity of a 32-floor building that’s made of concrete, or a wall that is hundreds of feet long. That is not accurate. I just want to give some facts.”
(The latest on Bill 69 as BMH wen to press was that the proposed bill was much, well, watered down from what was originally proposed, and won’t require all 358 non-sprinklered buildings to install systems immediately, and individual assessments will be made building by building. Meanwhile, the Council effectively called time out to seek more input.)
The facts to which Blinkhorn refers include studies that show how many lives sprinkler systems have saved, com- paring buildings that had zero, moderate or full sprinkler systems. This is truly a case where you get what you pay for.
The facts also include some good news for building owners, managers and associations considering a sprinkler retrofit.
“These high-rise buildings that need to be retrofitted have what they call a dry standpipe, which is basically for the fire department to connect to and pull up their water supply by pumping water into the standpipe,” Blinkhorn says. “There’s a hose valve for firefighters on every floor. In a retrofit situation, we’re going to take that standpipe and add a fire pump on the ground level and then connect to the city water supply, so that dry standpipe now becomes a pressurized wet standpipe. We can then cut in what we call a floor control assembly on each floor, and then add a sprinkler.