The danger to life and damage to property resulting from fire is a high cost to pay for inadequate fire protection.

Increasing public awareness to the hazards of fire, together with the use of smoke detectors, will help reduce the risk to injury or death. Whilst smoke detectors give warning of fire, they do nothing to extinguish it. How the fire is dealt with in the first four minutes can sometimes mean the difference between life or death.

In an unprotected environment, just four minutes after a fire has erupted it is out of control and the building may be lost entirely. In a building protected by a fire sprinkler system, the fire is contained and controlled immediately, and the possibility of personal injury is dramatically reduced.

In fact, the greatest danger to life is the inhalation of toxic fumes generated by a fire long before it has had a chance to engulf the building structure. Early warning of a fire by using smoke detectors will reduce the risk to life by up to 50 percent. If a fire can also be extinguished early, the effect is even more dramatic. Using a combination of fire sprinklers and smoke detectors, the potential reduction in the loss of life is almost doubled to up to 98.5 percent.