Sprinklers to be mandatory in Quebec seniors’ homes
Five days after the release of the coroner’s report on the deadly fire in L’Isle- Verte last year, Quebec announced that it will enact one of its central recommendations: Automatic sprinklers will become mandatory in nearly all certified old- age homes, Labour Minister Sam Hamad said Tuesday.
Owners will be given a five- year grace period to bring their buildings up to code, as the coroner had proposed. They will also be offered some financial assistance, the details of which will be spelled out in the spring budget.
Hamad estimated the cost of retrofitting seniors’ homes with sprinklers at $ 220 million to $ 260 million — triple the amount the health ministry had predicted last year.
“There is no price on the security of the elderly, and the government of Quebec is ready to pay, to subsidize a part of the renovations to assure their security,” Hamad said in a news conference at the National Assembly.
“After the events in L’Isle- Verte, we have the duty to do everything possible to prevent a tragedy like that from happening again,” he said.
For now, Quebec’s building code only requires seniors’ residences housing non- autonomous residents — those lacking mobility — to have sprinklers.
In April, however, the rules will change to cover almost all seniors’ homes. The only exceptions will be single- family residences of fewer than 10 people with an exit on each floor, and one- storey buildings with a maximum of eight apartments housing at most 16 people.
Yves Desjardins, president of the Quebec association for eldercare facilities, warned that small seniors’ homes will need “substantial aid” from Quebec to afford sprinkler systems. He said their installation can cost between $ 4 and $ 8 per square foot, but it can be even more expensive depending on the capacity of the local water supply.
“Now, with the hours of manpower necessary to drill into the walls, drill into the roof, for the pipework — that’s where it becomes more costly,” he explained.
About 600 to 700 seniors’ residences out of the 1,900 in Quebec aren’t equipped with sprinklers, he said.
Finance Minister Carlos Leitão said Quebec would “try to minimize” the costs for residences, especially smaller ones.
Coroner Cyrille Delâge, in his 130- page report on the fire that gutted the Résidence du Havre and killed 32 seniors on Jan. 23, 2014, urged Quebec to make sprinklers mandatory in certified residences.
Of those who died in the Résidence du Havre, all but one lived in the older wing of the home, built in 1997, before sprinklers became obligatory in any new residence. The expansion, erected in 2003, was equipped with sprinklers and a firewall.
For more than two decades, Delâge has called for sprinklers in seniors’ homes. In 1993, he led a public inquest into a fire at a St- Isidore residence for seniors and the mentally ill that killed five people two years earlier. He concluded that regulations should be tightened to require sprinklers in each room of a seniors’ home. “The best fire- prevention service is the one which works without the trucks leaving the fire station,” he was quoted as saying in The Montreal Gazette.
But in his report on the fire in L’Isle- Verte, Delâge said sprinklers alone aren’t enough to prevent fires like the one that tore through the Résidence du Havre. He included the caveat ( in capital l etters f or emphasis): “An automatic sprinkler system in a building doesn’t solve all problems, particularly in the case of a structural fire that can emit lethal smoke inside the building without an intervention system.”
In addition to sprinklers, he said seniors’ homes should also be equipped with smoke and heat detectors hooked up to a central alarm system that would alert 911 in case of fire. He also suggested merging rural fire departments and placing each of them under the command of a single fire chief.
In a statement, the Quebec Association of Fire Chiefs, which welcomed the coroner’s recommendations, also saluted t he new requirement for sprinklers in most seniors’ homes. “The announced measures will facilitate the work of firefighters and, by that very fact, lives will be saved,” said André Saint- Hilaire, the association member in charge of fire prevention.