No one has ever died in a Utah school fire, according to state records and firefighters' institutional memory, Morris said.

This week, flames gutted Wasatch Junior High in Granite School District. School workers safely evacuated. Investigators fingered a computer server as the source. Damage has not yet been assessed. The Granite Board of Education is expected to discuss where to send Wasatch students — Superintendent Steve Ronnenkamp wants to keep them all together — when school starts this fall.

Wasatch did not have fire sprinklers. If it had, Morris believes, the blaze might have been restricted to the room where it started.

But the school wasn't out of line legally or in terms of other schools its age. Wasatch was not required to have sprinklers when it was built in 1959.

"Schools in Granite School District have always been built to meet or exceed existing building codes as required by state of Utah statute," according to a prepared statement the district issued Thursday.

In 1988, the state's uniform fire code strongly recommended sprinklers, Morris said. The devices were mandated in 2002.

About 90 percent of the Utah schools built in the past five or six years have sprinklers, Morris estimates. Some new schools in rural areas don't have enough water pressure for a sprinkler system, in which case they include other safety measures, such as fire walls.

But several older buildings — and there are many in the Salt Lake Valley where Jordan and Granite districts are celebrating their 100th birthdays — do not have sprinklers, Morris said.

But they, too, are safe.

Granite District monitors fire and smoke alarms. Fire extinguishers are available, floor plans are posted for emergency evacuation, fire drills are conducted monthly, and each school has emergency preparedness plans. The district has sprinklers in less than one-third of its schools, but they are in all buildings constructed after 1997.

Murray schools have new smoke detectors and alarm strobe lights in every room, and corridor and heat sensors in boiler rooms. Local and state fire officials routinely inspect those buildings, said Rod Pace, district buildings and grounds supervisor.

No question, sprinklers boost safety. But they're expensive: $100,000 to $300,000 to place in an old school, depending on the retrofit's complexity, according to Larry Turner, Salt Lake District's preconstruction compliance supervisor.

"It's cost-prohibitive right now to do that, nor are we required to do that," Jordan District spokeswoman Melinda Colton said of fire sprinkler upgrades. "So we try to do other things."

Jordan District has sprinklers in eight high schools, 14 of 17 middle schools and 16 of 55 elementaries. (Sandy Elementary, damaged by fire last November, is not among them.) It touts its emergency management system, evacuation procedures and alarm and other fire systems that are regularly maintained and reviewed.

"The most important thing I want parents to know is not to overreact to hear their school does not have a sprinkler system," Colton said. "School fires do happen, but they are rare. The most important things we worry about are the lives in the school — not the school."

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Contributing: Tiffany Erickson

E-mail: jtcook@desnews.com; lhancock@desnews.com