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UK Business Fires Waste 9 Billion Litres of Water a Year
A conclusion drawn from research carried out by Bureau Veritas, which looked into the environmental impact of the 360-plus commercial fires that break out in the UK each year, suggests that installing sprinklers in commercial and industrial buildings would save England and Wales over 9 billion litres of water every year. This is five times the UK’s annual consumption of bottled-water.
The report, entitled “Assessing The Role For Fire Sprinklers”, discovered that installing sprinklers would save lives and would cut the 350,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by commercial fires.
The report also concludes that buildings fitted with sprinklers often use only 0.2 percent of the water used to extinguish a fire in a building that has no sprinklers, that there is a clear net carbon benefit to installing sprinkler systems in all buildings over 5,000 square metres, and that sprinklers have a massively important role to play in active fire prevention.