A fire in a seniors鈥� residence has devastated the town of L鈥橧sle-Verte, Que., and suddenly made automatic sprinklers a topic of conversation across sa国际传媒.
Seventeen seniors have been confirmed dead in the ruins of the residence, and another 15 are missing and presumed dead. The older part of the building, which did not have sprinklers, was destroyed in the blaze.
On Vancouver Island, with its large population of seniors, the disaster strikes a chord. Governments and health authorities must pay attention to the lessons from Quebec.
鈥淗ow many deaths will it take before they take steps?鈥� said Martha Jane Lewis, executive director of the sa国际传媒 Centre for Elder Advocacy and Support.
sa国际传媒, like every other Canadian jurisdiction, requires sprinklers in new seniors鈥� homes. However, any sa国际传媒 nursing home built before 1996 does not have to be retrofitted to install sprinklers.
In Victoria, three of 29 residential-care facilities do not have sprinklers. The fire department says they are small and they require that their residents be ambulatory. Overall, Island Health says eight of its 84 licensed facilities don鈥檛 have sprinkler systems.
While it鈥檚 true that emotional reactions to tragedies can lead to bad policy, sometimes tragedies remind us of work that has been sitting on the to-do list for too long.
Imagining the terrifying last minutes of the victims in L鈥橧sle-Verte makes us think of our own aging relatives, but it also forces us to confront the realities of evacuating nursing homes.
In Quebec, two staff members were on duty that night to rescue dozens of residents, many of them in wheelchairs or walkers. Getting even one wheelchair-bound person down three storeys when the elevator was off-limits would have been almost impossible.
In a fire that moved as fast as this one, there was no hope of saving more than a handful of the residents.
Sprinklers would have made the difference.
A report analyzing 1,942 fires in sa国际传媒 between 2006 and 2011 found that the odds of dying in a fire were 11.9 times higher in buildings without sprinklers than in buildings with sprinklers.
Researchers in the U.S. found that sprinklers reduced the severity of fires by one-half to two-thirds; 鈥渟everity鈥� meant both the number of deaths per 100 fires and the property damage per fire.
A study of residential fires by the U.S. National Bureau of Standards found that when a home was equipped with both smoke detectors and sprinklers, the risk of dying in a fire was reduced by 82 per cent.
The value of sprinklers is not in question, especially when residents have limited mobility. As of last summer, nursing homes in the United States won鈥檛 get Medicaid or Medicare reimbursement unless they have sprinklers.
sa国际传媒鈥檚 fire chiefs have been calling for sprinklers in nursing homes for decades. Nova Scotia was the first province to require them 鈥� in 1976. The other provinces didn鈥檛 follow suit until the 1990s; the last was Quebec.
Only a handful, however, require retrofitting.
The Quebec fire has already moved the Ontario government to accelerate its plans on sprinklers. Last year, Ontario said all older nursing homes would be required to retrofit their facilities with sprinklers, but gave them five to 10 years to comply. After the fire, the health minister said the province would speed up the work.
sa国际传媒 must look seriously at requiring retrofitting of older nursing homes. It will cost money, but this is one area where provincial dollars could be well-spent on a grant program to assist owners.
Nursing-home residents are vulnerable, and sprinklers are a proven way to save lives.
