With the Sussex County Council considering when to establish an adoption date for the ordinance that will update the county residential building code to the 2021 edition of the International Residential Code (IRC), I would like to encourage the council to do more research regarding the costs of residential fire sprinklers and continue to postpone the adoption of this ordinance.

At this time, the council is preparing to adopt the 2021 edition of the IRC with a deletion on the requirement for residential fire sprinklers. Previous published comments from council members expressed concerns about the installation costs of these systems as one of the reasons for the deletion.

I would encourage the council, as well as Sussex County administrative officials and the 14 separate municipalities in Sussex County who follow Sussex County building code requirements to take into account the following costs, as well that three Sussex County families have incurred just this week:

• Single-family dwelling house fire on May Drive in the Bethany Lakes neighborhood with damages estimated at $500,000;

• Single-family dwelling house fire on Fir Drive Extended, Rehoboth Beach, with damages estimated at $175,000 (unfortunately, separately, one firefighter hospitalized for possible heat exhaustion);

• Townhouse fire on Catalina Circle, Rehoboth Beach, with damages estimated at $650,000.

Within three days, Sussex County suffered an estimated $1,325,000 in fire damages. What these estimates do not include are the costs of displacement for these families, costs of time working with their insurance companies for replacement of items and reconstruction, environmental costs of the air and groundwater pollution from the fires, the costs to the fire companies for operating at these calls nor the hospitalization costs for the transported firefighter.

But if these homes are rebuilt, and all other new homes in Sussex County are built with residential fire sprinkler systems, all the costs, direct and indirect, would be significantly reduced. The penny-wise, pound-foolish approach of deleting the residential sprinkler requirement, which has been in the IRC since 2009, is short-sighted and flat-out dangerous to residents and responders of Sussex County.

Sussex County Council should immediately revise all aspects of the considered edition of the building code to include residential fire sprinklers and then proceed with an enactment date. Allowing the building code to be enacted with the fire sprinkler deletion intact is nothing short of irresponsible, as well as life-threatening.

The Coastal Point is a local newspaper published each Friday and distributed in the Bethany Beach, South Bethany, Fenwick Island, Ocean View, Millville, Dagsboro, Frankford, Selbyville, Millsboro, Long Neck and Georgetown, Delaware areas.