New sprinkler requirement a rare step change in safety

摘要

Improvements in fire protection are typically a matter of incremental progression. Large step-changes are rare. In the last 50 years, the only such step-change commonly referred to in Australia is the 1995 introduction of legislation requiring smoke alarms in residential buildings around the country. In November 2018, we saw another of those step-changes with confirmation that the upcoming National Construction Code (NCC) 2019 would require fire sprinklers in all new residential buildings over three storeys and under 25m in height, going beyond the previous requirement for sprinklers only in residential buildings above 25m.