The tragic thing is that the wet-pipe fire sprinkler has existed for around 140 years -- this is 1880s-vintage technology! The fundamental design is very simple

The tragic thing is that the wet-pipe fire sprinkler has existed for around 140 years -- this is 1880s-vintage technology! The fundamental design is very simple -- a network of pipes, pressurised with water (from a tank or the municipal water supply and individual and replaceable sprinkler heads, each with its own heat-activated valve (initially with a melting fusible link, in 1922, the glass-bulb sprinkler was released) and deflector. The alarm valve, which activates a bell once water is flowing inside the system came later, in the 1890s. Nothing else can get extinguishing agent onto fire faster than a sprinkler system. A room can flash over in a little over two minutes, and not even the best fire brigade can get there that fast. A hundred litres of water per minute per tripped sprinkler head (and sprinklers will have activated well before the room they're in flashes over) puts an end to most fires with extreme prejudice. If the fire hasn't gone out by the time the fire brigade pulls up, the firefighters can hook up their pumps to external connections to the sprinkler network, which will increase the water pressure/flow inside the sprinkler pipes to get more water onto the offending blaze. This is not newfangled experimental nonsense, this is boring, well-established, and reliable technology. Sprinklers control fires so well, even in unsafe buildings, to the point that some designers neglect passive fire protection -- it's a bad idea to to depend on a single mechanism for critical applications like fire safety since there's always the possibility of the fire sprinkler system being manually turned off or otherwise malfunctioning. Fire deaths in buildings with operating fire sprinkler systems are rare (http://www.nfpa.org/~/media/files/news-and-research/fire-statistics/fire-protection-systems/ossprinklers.pdf?la=en http://www.nfpa.org/~/media/files/news-and-research/fire-sta...), there's about 80% less fatalities and almost all fatalities in sprinklered buildings are of victims who were present at the location the fire started -- sprinklers can't undo the damage from the event that started the fire. Most fire deaths are avoidable with century-old technology. It's tragic and depressing to see the never-ending trickle of fire fatalities (punctured by ghastly mass casualty incidents like the Grenfell fire) knowing that around 80% of them would have made it out alive had they been in a building with a functioning sprinkler system. This should be a well-solved problem, for fuck's sake, there's no technical reason why most occupied buildings connected to a municipal water system can't have some bloody sprinklers. Grenfell tower should have had sprinklers, the Triangle Shirtwaist building should have had sprinklers, and it's a failure of society that every building built less than a century ago and connected to municipal water supply doesn't have sprinklers.