Exposed sprinklers
By Kevin Reed
In December 2021, on a sunny day in beautiful Wrightsville Beach, NC, a boat owner was walking around naked on a busy boat dock in a large marina brimming with millions of dollars of high-end watercraft, in full view of several restaurants and other businesses that surround the marina. He was just out there, in broad daylight, waving his arms casually, walking in circles around the dock “exposing his genitals and whole nude body,” as one marina employee said, perhaps still dazed from the encounter.
People shot video and posted it on social media, and after 30 minutes or so of this, the police showed up and arrested the guy for indecent exposure. Apparently he’d been (allegedly) pestering people in various ways around the area for no less than a week or so.
No sooner is this guy in county lockup, he breaks off a fire sprinkler from the ceiling in his jail cell. This leads to the additional charge of “instigating a false fire alarm and molesting a fire system.” “Molesting” a fire system seems a lot worse than simply “vandalizing” or “damaging” a fire system. The solution was just to move him to a cell that didn’t have a sprinkler system. The police mention to the reporter of the story that sprinkler damage in that jail (New Hanover County Jail) happens about three times a month.
Which is interesting. So, three times a month, or about 36 times a year, detainees damage a sprinkler head, just in that one jail alone. New Hanover County Jail has a 672 bed capacity. How often do they do repairs? How much do those cost? Them’s taxpayer dollars that the police would surely rather use elsewhere.
Do other jails have the same issues? Well, they seem to. Kosciusko County jail, in Indiana, is replacing 160 sprinkler heads, with bids ranging from $24,000-$32,000. They had 4 broken heads in just one weekend. In their case, broken sprinkler heads led to water running down into the basement, which floods, damages electronics, and gets dangerously close to the electrical panels for the facility.
There are are around 3,134 local jails around the U.S. If jails coordinated information nationally, we might have an accurate count of damaged sprinkler heads each year nationally. Short of that, one can only guess, which I will do now, probably with a large margin of error: If you go with a lower estimate and say each jail averages 3 broken heads a month (which would vary up/down by size of jail), then that’s around 112,824 broken sprinkler heads a year. Judging from the Kosciusko County example, the cost of replacing one sprinkler is around $175 each ($28,000 / 160 sprinklers). So just for 112,824 sprinklers taxpayers are burping up something like $19,744,200 a year just to fix busted sprinklers! Jail size, design, and actual numbers would obviously impact those estimates.
If the jails coordinated nationally in some capacity, they might be able to get a bulk rate on parts at least, if not installation. Even just an administrative pool around supplies might help. But the way things are set up, that coordination is unlikely to happen. Which is too bad, because seems like that’s money that they could re-allocate to more important things they need.
Then - you have 1,833 state prisons, 110 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile detention centers, 218 immigrant detention centers, 80 Indian country jails (as they’re called), in addition to military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories. One can only wonder at what the number of sprinklers being damaged is across all those facilities. Or, maybe some official somewhere knows and has developed a long PowerPoint about the topic.
They have those sprinkler cages, but seems like you could just tear the cage off and bust the sprinkler head when you’ve got nothing but time on your heads and are looking to piss some people off. They have institutional fire sprinkler heads that seem tamper resistant, at least, that retail around $70 a pop, plus installation. Still, there’s a lip on them against the ceiling and a determined individual might be able to rough that thing up a bit.
On the plus side, seems like this is a market opportunity to design, manufacture, and distribute retractable tamper-proof sprinkler systems (RTPSSs).
