Wasatch lacked sprinklers

Because of the high cost to retrofit them, many Utah schools built in the late 1950s don't have a sprinkling system — including Wasatch Junior High School.

While details are still hazy, fire authorities question whether the 46-year-old school could have been saved had a sprinkling system been in place.

Ron Morris, Utah state fire marshal, said sprinkling systems "make a huge difference" with fires. "On a fire like this, we may have kept it to the room of origin if it had been sprinkled," he said.

Granite School District superintendent Stephen Ronnenkamp said the cost to retrofit a school is often too great. Wasatch Junior High didn't even have an air-conditioning system.

Ronnenkamp wouldn't say, however, whether a sprinkling system would have made a difference in the fire at Wasatch Junior High. "It's hard to speculate," he said. "We don't know the cause. We don't know the conditions and what happened."

He continued: "There are a lot of old buildings that don't have sprinkling and we can't afford to put it in. It's primarily an issue of cost."

The price to install a sprinkling system in an old building can range from $100,000 to $300,000, said Larry Turner, preconstruction compliance supervisor with the Salt Lake City School District. Costs increase depending on size and complexity of the retrofit.

Most of Salt Lake City's schools have been retrofitted to comply with codes for fire and earthquake, according to Turner. Schools like Highland and West are some of the oldest in the Salt Lake Valley.

"It just makes sense," Turner said.

Still, said Morris, it's difficult to ask school districts to spend money to retrofit schools when budgets are already tight. "We're between a rock and a hard spot in determining how much do they do and still making it worthwhile for them to be in the building," he said.

"If we try to go back and mandate changes every time the code changes, we literally bankrupt the school district."

Yearly checks are still done to ensure schools are compliant with the code they were built under, according to Morris. The state checks for safety hazards: blocked hallways, a lack of fire extinguishers, locked doors that should be unlocked.

Some school districts have their alarm system directly linked to local fire departments. Also, students actively participate in fire drills. "The good news here," said Morris, "is that if it had been occupied, all would have been out safely and there wouldn't have been a loss of life."

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E-mail: nwarburton@desnews.com