If the fire official can cite recent fires as examples, all the better. Fire modeling programs can be used to augment fire incident reports. They allow fire officials to recreate actual fires on a computer, creating scenarios with and without sprinklers. In the unsprinklered scenario, the printout will describe the deteriorating room conditions as the fire grows to flashover. This reinforces the reality of the threat and documents the short time to flashover. By adding a sprinklered scenario, Fire officials can show how sprinklers would have changed the outcome.
When people see that the air temperature in the room of origin reaches over 600F at the ceiling and exceeds 150F at the breathing level (the point where you cannot breath) in just over two minutes, they begin to understand the reality of fire. When they learn that the sprinkler would have operated within 60 seconds when the ceiling temperature was only 200F and the air still cool enough to breath, they begin to understand the life-saving power of sprinklers. The RFSI slide set for policy makers uses modeling to compare a local fire where no sprinklers were present with a model of what the outcome would have been had sprinklers been installed. The RFSI can assist you with doing a computer simulation of a fire that occurred in your community.
After illustrating the threat of flashover, the next step is to explain why the fire department cannot equal the capability of sprinklers. The fire official can do this by documenting the manual suppression needs in different occupancies, and then describing the fire department's manual suppression capability. Once the fire official identifies the kinds of structures where the risk exceeds capability, he or she has the rationale for requiring sprinklers in them.
Describing suppression capability and structural fire risk requires quantitative measures. For the most part, however, the fire service has not progressed beyond annual fire loss data. The days when a fire official could tell policy makers that "I'm the authority on fire safety and it is my opinion that this is needed" are over. Quantifying fire risk and suppression capability will be new to most fire officials, making them uncomfortable with the prospect. However, the task is not as hard as it appears.