This past academic year saw the highest number of campus-related fire deaths in seven years. Of the 20 fire fatalities, 18 were in off-campus housing and two were in Greek housing. While the number of fire deaths compared to the number of students on campuses across the country may not be large, what is high is the significant risk that students face while at college. Since January 2000, more than 80% of the fire fatalities identified by Campus Firewatch have happened in off-campus housing.

A number of communities are taking steps to address these risks. Education, detection and suppression are effective strategies, but these become more challenging with the student demographic. In some cases, the community has had to react to a tragedy. In other situations, the community has looked forward, identified a problem and taken proactive steps.

“We don't want to become a statistic based on what has happened in the past year in Lincoln [Neb.] and St. Louis,” says University Park (Texas) Fire Marshal John Gillette. Fatal fires in fraternities in each of those cities killed a student. One of the solutions that University Park used was a mandatory sprinkler-retrofit ordinance to address the off-campus fraternities and sororities at Southern Methodist University in Texas. “Most of them did not have protection that was close to current codes.”

SMU had a program of voluntarily putting sprinklers into the nine Greek houses under the university's control, and Gillette reports that all but two have been sprinklered. The new ordinance was passed on April 3 and gives off-campus houses five years to get the systems into place. Surprisingly, Gillette says that they really did not run into much opposition. “Some people said they had expected it a long time ago,” he says.

That's not always the case, however. On May 8, 1999, a fire killed Dominic Passantino at a fraternity at the University of Missouri-Columbia. The Columbia Fire Department already had been looking into a sprinkler ordinance and they thought it this tragedy would help those efforts.

“It didn't have quite the impact that we were hoping for because it occurred on the last day of school,” says Columbia Fire Marshal Steven Sapp. “Even though we tried to keep it fresh in people's minds that we had a problem and needed to correct it, we lost our momentum.”

He also had been looking outside of Columbia for help. “We were under the wrong impression that there would be more of a push from the national headquarters to mandate fire sprinklers in the fraternities and sororities,” Sapp says. This turned out to not be the case.

Recently the situation changed when Columbia hired a new director of public works and a new building regulations supervisor. It also was time for a new code-adoption cycle, so there was an opportunity to revisit the sprinkler issue in Greek housing. A subcommittee was formed to look at a number of issues, and a number of public meetings were held. At a hearing in January, the opposition from the Greek community surfaced.

“We were surprised we did not receive public comment at an earlier subcommittee meeting,” says Sapp. “Debbie Sorrell (from the fire marshal's office) had been to meetings with chapter presidents and with the house corporation boards and had told them in early November that the amendment was out there and moving through the subcommittee and that public meetings were being held. No comments were offered.”

There were three points of contention, according to Sapp. First, the Greek system claimed that they had not received notice of the hearings, despite the fact that the school, local and national media had been running stories. “In addition, we had given them copies of the proposed amendments,” says Sapp.

Those amendments included a time frame for compliance. “We had chosen six years because of what we were seeing across the country,” says Sapp. “This would allow for a couple of years of planning, two years for fund-raising and then installation.” The subcommittee also looked at the amount of sprinkler work being done at the local colleges to make sure that there would be enough contractors to support this time frame.

But the Greek system claimed that six years was not enough time to raise the funds to sprinkler the houses and requested 10 years instead. Finally the Greek system asked to have the amendment changed to require installation of only an NFPA 13R system, which is less restrictive and doesn't cover as much of the building as a conventional 13 system.

“The subcommittee and the fire department don't feel that they should have that … in the amendment because it should be determined by a fire protection engineer based on the individual building rather than in the code,” says Sapp. “We certainly understand that a 13R system is better than nothing, but we don't buy into the argument that attics don't need to be sprinklered.”

The amendment passed, thanks in part to testimony from Donna Henson, Passantino's mother. “It weighed very heavily on the council's decision and the public hearing afterward to not extend it to 10 years,” says Sapp. “The council was comfortable with keeping it at six years because they did not want this to happen again.”

The cost of installing sprinklers is always an argument that is raised against these ordinances. “Financial, first and foremost, is what most of the houses will bring up,” says Div. Chief Rich Barr from Lawrence-Douglas County Fire Medical, home of the University of Kansas and Haskell Indian Nations University. “They said they could not afford it and that it would put them out of business.”

His community passed an ordinance in 1993 with a seven-year window to comply. When the deadline occurred in 2000, Barr says the fire department had to issue notices to vacate to six houses. “Of those six, however, only two had waited until the deadline and they installed sprinklers over the summer to come into compliance,” he says. “Four chose not to comply and they were razed. One of the reasons they gave was the sprinkler requirement, but in reality their membership had dropped off significantly and they would not have lasted.”

In Chapel Hill, N.C., after the fire that killed five students at the University of North Carolina, an ordinance was passed that mandated sprinklers. According to Fire Chief Dan Jones, the legislature and the governor established a rotating fund that they could borrow against, but no one took advantage of its availability.

Finances were an issue at Arizona State University in Tempe as well. The Greek houses were owned by the university, and as such were required to be sprinklered as state buildings. The university looked at selling the houses to private owners, which would not require them to be sprinklered. “Tempe didn't have an ordinance that would cover privately owned houses, which is why we enacted it at that point,” says Tempe Fire Chief Cliff Jones. “The idea of selling them off to the private sector diminished considerably at that point.”

Building ownership is an important point to consider. In some cases, the building is owned by a private landlord and leased to the local chapter. In other cases, a corporation board made up of alumni own the house. At some institutions, the school owns the buildings, but this is not as common. Ownership determines which organization or institution has control over the house and its condition; it can be the local fire department or, in the case of a building owned by a state school, the state fire marshal.

The relationship between the local chapter of a fraternity or sorority and the national headquarters comes into play with both ownership and responsibility for fire safety. National organizations have in some cases claimed that they have only an advisory role in fire safety. This is more often the case with fraternities than with sororities, which have taken a far more active role from the national level in providing for the fire safety requirements of their buildings.

Sometimes timing is crucial in getting an ordinance passed. Senior Fire Inspector Tim Knisely of the Centre Region Code Administration in State College, Pa., used a tragedy in another community to make the point about the importance of sprinklers in saving lives.

“The weekend before the ordinance was proposed [in September 2003], a fire in Ohio killed five students living off-campus,” says Knisely. “It was not in Greek housing, but they were Greeks living off-campus. We played some of the press conference from Ohio at the council meeting, using that teachable moment.”

Unfortunately, Dan Jones had to use a tragedy in his own community. “We first tried to get an ordinance in 1992 and 1993,” he says, “but the builders showed up in public hearings with a lobbyist from Washington and painted a picture of doom and gloom. The claimed it would drive housing prices way up and create claims for water damage. They were all myths, but they threw them out there and the council backed away.”

Then on May 12, 1996, both Mother's Day and graduation day at the University of North Carolina, a fire started in the basement of a 3-story fraternity and killed five students asleep on the top floor. The city manager and mayor both told the fire chief to start again on the ordinance. “That very day, when we were holding press conferences about the fire, we started pushing the idea of sprinklers with no opposition,” he says.

The benefits of these systems quickly became apparent. In one fraternity, the system had been installed and was operational, but had not yet been accepted. However, when a fire broke out during the night, the system activated and extinguished the fire.

While much attention has been on Greek housing, residence halls also have been addressed by a few states. In 2000, three freshmen died in a fire at Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J. Within five months, legislation was introduced and signed into law that mandated the installation of sprinklers in all residence halls and Greek housing within four years statewide. In addition, the legislature provided the funding to underwrite this cost.

Delaware had been considering legislation, and when the Seton Hall tragedy occurred, the state fire marshal's office wanted to do something to make sure that this didn't happen in Delaware. “What the legislators did is pass an act requiring that all residence halls have to be sprinklered by 2009,” says R.T. Leicht, chief of special services for the Delaware State Fire Marshal's office. “To help encourage this, they established a fund that would provide no-interest loans if a school didn't have the money.”

There is no question that more schools and communities are calling for the installation of sprinklers in residence halls and Greek housing. In some cases, they are doing it voluntarily, recognizing the value of these systems in saving lives. In other cases it is being mandated through ordinances at the local and state level.

All of this activity is coming at a critical time. The next logical step is to look at off-campus housing and how to save lives where most students live and, unfortunately, die.

Ed Comeau is the publisher of Campus Firewatch, a monthly electronic newsletter. He was the founding director of the non-profit Center for Campus Fire Safety and the former chief fire investigator for the National Fire Protection Association.