Meet a homebuilder who is a sprinkler advocate at the Home Builders' show in Orlando

Murray Pound of Gold Seal Homes, Carstairs, Alberta

For years, Canadian homebuilder Murray Pound rejected home fire sprinklers based on notions of exorbitant cost and installation hassles. Now he’s an outspoken sprinkler advocate on a mission to dispel the myths. What changed?

Find out -- and meet Murray in person at the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) International Builders' Show® in Orlando next week. Murray will be a special guest in the exhibit booth of the Home Fire Sprinkler Coalition, a nonprofit organization and the leading resource for independent, noncommercial information about residential fire sprinklers.

Murray will be in the HFSC booth (#W909)at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando on:

• Wednesday, February 8, from 9:30 am - 5:00 pm
• Thursday, February 9 from 9:30 am - 5:00 pm

Murray was recently interviewed by NFPA Journal® about his perspective on home fire sprinklers:

NFPA JOURNAL: You’re a former volunteer firefighter with the Carstairs Fire Department. How did that experience influence your opinion on residential sprinklers?

MURRAY: I responded to a house fire in 1999 that was directly across the street from the home I was living in. It was the middle of winter. The fire had gotten into the garage by the time we got there. The volunteer crew did what they could, but the floor system failed, which meant the crews couldn’t make an entry into the home. I’m the builder, and my fellow firefighters are looking at me like, "What did you do wrong when you built this house?" It was never said, but you could see it in their eyes. The house was a total loss. When the fire investigation was completed, we were vindicated. There was nothing we had done wrong.

Every night for a year, I’d come home and see the burnt carcass of this house. This is when I first started investigating fire sprinklers. I initially raised the topic with my father, Brian [Gold Seal Homes’ founder]. He said, "You don’t want to do that because…" and he gave me the litany of reasons he’d heard over the years. We’d been told by the homebuilding industry and our peers that sprinklers were too expensive, that sprinklers were too difficult to install, that customers didn’t want them, that there would be accidental discharges, that insurance companies charge more to insure these homes. So we dismissed sprinklers. It wasn’t until I went to the NFPA Conference & Expo about four years ago that I realized we’d made a big mistake.

Read the entire interview.

NFPA's Faces of Fire campaign is a tool to help people and groups across the country promote the use of automatic fire sprinklers in one- and two-family homes. By containing fires before they spread, home fire sprinklers protect lives and property. The personal stories told through the Faces of Fire campaign will show the experiences of those who escaped or lost loved ones in home fires and those whose lives and property were protected by home fire sprinklers.