This fall — for the first time — all occupied University dorms have sprinklers. A four-year old law enacted in response to a Seton Hall University dorm fire had prompted the University to accelerate the installation.
The most recent installations occurred during spring and summer in 1903, 1901, Henry, Laughlin, and Lockhart halls.
Passed on July 5, 2000, the state law was a response to the Jan. 19, 2000, Seton Hall dorm fire that killed three students and injured 58 others. The law mandated that all dormitories have water sprinklers by the end of summer 2004.
Prior to the Seton Hall fire, only a handful of dorms on campus had sprinklers because "a lot of life safety measures had already been implemented in the dorms. Sprinklers, perhaps, were considered something that weren't justified by their cost," said Michael McKay, vice president of facilities.
However, McKay said the University had intended to equip all of the dorms with sprinklers in the upcoming years during renovations.
If the law had not been passed, McKay estimated that it would have taken another two or three years for all of the dorms to be equipped with water sprinklers. In the past four years, 20 to 24 graduate and undergraduate dorms were outfitted with sprinklers, with most of the work being done during the summer.
The University struggled to schedule the installation of the sprinklers into the state-mandated timeframe.
"It's a fairly hectic and intensive schedule to design a sprinkler system for all the buildings, especially within that time period," McKay said. "We reviewed each of the buildings to see what types of improvements we could afford, and suggested that they should be made when we installed the sprinklers."
In addition, the sprinkler installation has cost the University a significant amount.
"We've spent $20 to $25 million to install sprinklers in dorms just over the past four years," McKay said.
The only two dorms on campus without fire sprinklers are Hamilton and Holder halls, which are closed for construction. These dorms will undergo major renovations within the next year that will include the installation of sprinklers.
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