I have posted twice before arguments for sprinklering buildings. The first, which I posted last August dealt primarily with protection of lives. The second posting from last week addresses the loss of livelihood. With this post, I will address the relationship of fire protection to green construction and environmental stewardship.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation has long advocated that preservation of old buildings is the ultimate in green because of the embodied energy in the existing structure. Folded in with the energy required to demolish the building and dispose of the debris and other related environmental (and human/cultural) costs and the energy required to redevelop the site, there is something approaching a threefold disadvantage to replacing buildings rather than reusing.
Fast forward to the topic at hand. When buildings are destroyed by fire the embedded energy of the building is lost. Again, the cost of cleaning up the rubble (no hope of recycling/reusing most of it) and the resources required to rebuild in essence triple the embedded energy of the facility. Couple that with the environmental damage caused by the fire itself (metals melting, materials decomposing and/or off gassing during combustion, etc., and you could have a bona-fide disaster which could have been averted.
Given that we see about half a million structure fires annually, doesn’t it make environmental sense to sprinkler the buildings?
Charlottesville Architect 
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