POLICY REPORT
BUILDING AND DEVELOPMENT
Date: June 16, 1995
Dept. File No.Rep001.Doc
TO: Vancouver City Council
FROM: City Building Inspector, in consultation with
the Fire Chief
SUBJECT: Amendment to the Building By-law to Allow
Simplification by Requiring Mandatory Sprinkler
Systems for New Buildings
RECOMMENDATION
A. THAT Council approve an amendment to the Vancouver Building
By-law, to allow simplification of the building construction
requirements by requiring the few smaller retail, office,
assembly and industrial buildings that do not contain
residential suites, to be designed and fitted with fire
protection sprinkler systems.
B. THAT Council request the Director of Legal Services to revise
the Building By-law accordingly.
GENERAL MANAGER'S COMMENTS
The General Manager of the Community Services Group RECOMMENDS
approval of A and B.
COUNCIL POLICY
Council has passed a number of resolutions and by-laws since 1973, which
directly relate to the City's fire upgrading initiatives and mandatory
sprinkler protection for most high-rise buildings, all residential and
institutional buildings, one- and two-family dwellings and secondary
suites, as well as retroactive requirements to sprinkler the downtown
SROs.
Council has also passed a resolution requesting that changes be made to
further simplify the City's by-laws related to development and building
construction.
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SUMMARY
The City Building Inspector, in consultation with the Fire Chief, is
recommending that the City of Vancouver continue its proactive approach
to fire protection by requiring all new buildings to be equipped with
automatic fire suppression sprinkler systems at this time.
This action would immediately permit significant simplification of the
Building By-law by removing requirements used only for unsprinklered
buildings and reformatting the remainder of the By-law into simpler
requirements for construction.
DISCUSSION
As our City grows in population, so does its accompanying residential,
institutional and commercial property development. With this growth
there is a need for ever larger and greater fire suppression
capabilities to simply maintain the present levels of fire protection.
The only way this may be avoided is through a more proactive approach to
fire safety by providing an automatic suppression capability for all
buildings.
Following major downtown hotel fires which recorded very high numbers of
fire deaths in 1971 and 1972, Council adopted mandatory retroactive
requirements for those buildings, which included sprinklering as the
main requirement. It has proven very effective in cutting down fire
deaths in the subsequent 20 plus years.
Council in 1974, after several high-rise office fires which involved
some fire fighting tragedies, passed a by-law to require all new high-
rise office buildings to be sprinklered.
In 1988, Council approved a by-law to require partial sprinklering for
upgrading new secondary suites, especially after reviewing the fire
casualties from many basement suite fires during the 1980s.
Then, in March 1990, Council approved mandatory sprinklers for all new
residential and institutional buildings, and all other buildings which
contained residential or institutional uses.
In April 1990, City Council, after much public debate, approved the
mandatory sprinklering of one- and two-family dwellings.
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Over the last 20 years, the Building By-law has also created many
relaxations to go along with the above mandatory requirements to
increase the benefits for sprinklering. This is still going on whenever
possible.
In the five years since 1990, Vancouver has been recognized across North
America for taking this major fire-safety initiative, which certainly
has not deterred any quality development, as many people were
predicting. In fact, we have estimated that 18% of all our existing
residential suites are now sprinklered, including over 6% of all one-
and two-family dwellings (See Appendix).
Of the 1,534 building permits for new buildings issued last year, 1,460
of them required the buildings to be sprinklered, or almost 95%. Thus,
only 5% of new buildings in 1994 did not require sprinkler protection.
These are the few smaller retail, office, assembly and factory buildings
that do not contain residential occupancies. It would now seem a
natural extension of Council's previous philosophy to extend
sprinklering to the few remaining new building types.
There are two major opportunities created for Vancouver by removing from
the Building By-law this anomaly of permitting a very few new
unsprinklered buildings.
Firstly, to improve fire-safety: We sometimes find newly sprinklered
buildings with residential occupancy being faced with a brand-new
neighbouring building which has no residential occupancy and therefore
currently requires no sprinklers. Residential buildings are sprinklered
for life-safety purposes only and, therefore, many parts of such
buildings are exempt from full sprinkler coverage, rendering them
vulnerable to external fires originating from an unsprinklered building
immediately adjacent.
As Councils in 1991 and 1992 noted from some spectacular Vancouver fire
incidents that made headlines at that time, fires from such
unsprinklered buildings endanger the occupants of neighbouring
buildings.
Currently, all existing unsprinklered buildings would only require
sprinklering if there is a major change in occupancy, where there are
major alterations, and when there are multiple residential units above,
or if the spatial separation to prevent fire spread between properties
is deficient. Although this seems to be a very small number each year,
the numbers are growing with some voluntary sprinklering being carried
out by some owners for insurance premium reduction purposes.
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Secondly, to allow a major simplification to building construction
requirements: If Council agrees to require the remaining 5% of new
buildings to be sprinklered, the Building By-law could be substantially
simplified by reducing over 30 pages of requirements presently used only
for unsprinklered buildings. Instead of having unique fire-safety
requirements for each different type of unsprinklered building, we have
been able to redesign the remaining requirements into a very simple
form. This proposed new methodology has received much favourable
response from designers already.
Partly because of the successful implementation of sprinklering in
Vancouver, the 1995 National Building Code (NBC) has recently introduced
mandatory sprinklering of almost all new buildings over 3 storeys in
height in the new Code and has also adopted many of the relaxations of
the previous Vancouver Building By-law as well as a few others.
Therefore, by requiring sprinklers for all new buildings in Vancouver,
all the current relaxations and some of the recently added 1995 NBC
relaxations would then become the only requirements for all buildings.
This would reduce the rest of the by-law requirements by almost 30
additional pages for more simplification. These are mostly requirements
that must always be read first and then considered, before deciding that
they are not applicable. In the future, as more sprinkler-based
relaxations are being considered either in Canada or the U.S.A., we will
review them for further adoption.
Since Council in the past has been looking for ways to simplify City by-
laws, this would be a natural place to start and would lead to savings
in design, review and inspection time. Simplification of the Building
By-law will not decrease life safety through a more limited reliance
upon passive fire protection, since sprinkler technology is proving to
reduce fire tragedies drastically worldwide.
We, in Vancouver, could quickly have one of the simplest building codes
for commercial, industrial and multi-family residential construction in
North America.
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