Tragic fire incident highlights the need for mobile residential sprinklers
At the turn of 2014-15 there was a fire at a retirement home in Denmark where a care taker died.
The Nursing home’s own description:
The nursing home is new and modern built in 2012 and it is water sprinkled including the residents’ apartments. The center has 114 accomodations spread over 6 floors with its own kitchen, bathroom and communal areas on all floors. Our main task is our residents. It’s important to us that everyone has a life that reflects the life they want to live. The nursing home support residents to cope with everyday life and use their own resources in the daily chores. As a resident, you can expect a life with care and existence in homely and secure premises, where there is room for everyone, with respect to the individual patient’s condition and mobility in all our operations.
The sequence of events:
The fire alarm goes from an apartment on the first floor in the afternoon. Two carers runs to the apartment and sees that the fire is so extensive that they can not get in so they close the door and call 112. The police and fire department got there at the same time. Over the threshold to the apartment flows water from the automatic sprinkler system. Inside the apartment it still burning, and police and fire departments finds a badly damaged 76-year-old woman sitting in her bed. She is rescued and cooled with water before she was taken to hospital. There, she dies the same night. The cause of the fire is unknown, but it is known that the woman was smoking, and has thus had a behavior with increased risk.
February 2015:
Q-Fog’s Danish partner GearTeam installs a Q1 in one of the accomodations at the care home which is estimated to have a risk of fire.
Conclusion:
Permanent water sprinklers protect buildings.
Mobile sprinklers with water mist protects people.