Fire alarm systems have been proven for decades to provide life safety and property protection.
On the other end of the technical spectrum, what happens when insurance companies decide to require fire alarm systems in homes that are under construction? How can fire alarm systems perform reliably under these conditions and should an alarm contractor care? The answer is: Absolutely!
For large homes under construction, insurance companies have commonly required that their insureds have an alarm contractor install and monitor a “temporary fire alarm system” for the home. Resultantly, the insurance underwriter tells their insured “what’s required” by way of the design of the “temporary fire alarm system” as an authority having jurisdiction (AHJ).
Despite that, all the insurance carrier wants as part of their design paradigm is for the alarm contractor to install one smoke detector per floor. Remarkably, it seems to matter little whether the home is 5,000 square feet or 20,000 square feet.
In other words, this poorly designed method is a one-size-fits-all approach that will foreseeably fail under most circumstances because the system does not even meet the mandatory minimum requirements of NFPA 72.
Given that, many insurance company representatives who are “designing” these fire alarm systems do not seem to have the foggiest idea of what standards apply to fire alarm systems, what the actual coverage area of a smoke detector is and as to how many smoke detectors should be installed in the home as set forth in NFPA 72 when the protected premises are not under construction.
What Are the Dangers of a Temporary Fire Alarm System?
Predictably, if a fire occurs in a home that is “under construction,” it is not likely that “the system” will perform as “expected,” and it certainly cannot be expected to provide property protection.
At the same time, if there is a loss and the fire alarm system is alleged to have failed, even though it was based in material part on what the insurance carrier designed and required the alarm contractor to provide, it is still likely to become a target of a subrogation claim.
Simplified, it’s one thing to design and install a fire alarm system after the home is constructed, but it is completely different when designing and installing a fire alarm system in an “open” construction site, where but for the insurer’s requirements many alarm contractors would not even attempt to perform this task due to harsh site conditions, the likelihood of false alarms and that in an open construction site there is just nothing to stop the fire from rapidly spreading throughout the home and destroying it.
Along those same lines, to minimize problems associated with false alarms, many in the insurance industry have shifted from recommending a grossly inadequate quantity of smoke detectors in a home under construction to simply requiring that the home have only rate-of-rise or heat detectors on the premises.
Either way, the idea that a “temporary fire alarm system” can provide any desirable form of property protection that an insurer wants to achieve during the construction of a home is simply illusory. It is also important to note that the insurance carriers ‘request for their insured to install a “temporary fire alarm system” is not optional. Instead, and in most cases, it is a condition precedent for insurance coverage to be in effect for the home.
Stated differently, if the customer (insured) does not want to install a “temporary fire alarm system” in their home while it is under construction and/or just fails to contract to have “the required system” installed, and there is a fire, the insurance carrier can deny coverage under their policy of insurance because protective safeguard endorsements are mandatory.
What does this mean? Suppose a protective safeguard endorsement is part of an insurance policy, and it is found to have been violated by the insured, whereby the required “temporary” fire alarm system was never installed.
In that case, that can be a basis for the carrier to deny coverage, and the entirety of the loss would not be a covered event.
In the meantime, the chances of the “temporary fire alarm system” performing reliably in an effort to help minimize loss in an open construction environment by electronically protecting the property is predictably low because all of the elements that are required to obtain optimum performance do not exist on an open construction site and with an insurance company approved system that does not meet NFPA 72 this becomes a recipe for disaster.
Coming full circle, it is hard to believe that the insurer is not aware of the materiality of this fact.
Critically, the professional and technical community of the alarm industry needs to do more to help ensure that they are not creating increased risk by installing “temporary fire alarm systems” that are designed by insurers, of which; the insurer knew, should have known and/or had a duty to know that this type of system could never be deemed reliable nor does it even come close to meeting the mandatory minimum requirements of NFPA 72.
Notwithstanding, besides property protection, there is a risk that someone working in the home during construction could be seriously injured and/or killed in a fire at an open construction site. Therefore, changes must be made now, or a fire on a project that contains a “temporary fire alarm system” could be the biggest risk your company faces.
