Word: sprinklers
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...land characterized by the atmosphere of a San Clemente golf club locker room; golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism. It is a land of Jack Daniels and Vietnamese maids, of luxurious home sprinkler systems, of helicopters which hover over the city to catch purse snatchers making their grabs on the main streets and then disappearing into arroyos of impenetrable chaparral in the canyons...
...morning for a day at the ranch. He put up a fence made out of used telephone poles, carting in the 22-ft. lengths and chain-sawing them down to 15 ft. for the rails and using the remaining 7 ft. for posts. He and Barney put in a sprinkler system and hauled in beams that they stained and set across the ceilings...
Haunted by the memory of the 1942 Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire that killed 504 persons, Boston has one of the nation's most stringent fire codes. Every building over 70 ft. tall, for instance, must have a sprinkler in every room, closet and corridor. Just as important, owners of some existing buildings have voluntarily modernized their fire-safety systems. The venerable seven-story Copley Plaza was built in 1912, but its owners are spending $460,000 to install smoke alarms in every room after an arsonist's blaze in 1979 killed two people...
...twice as expensive as installing the same system in a new one, and owners are usually reluctant to do so voluntarily. Las Vegas fire department officials, for example, claim they have urged the MGM Grand Hotel and other hotels built be fore the 1979 building code to install sprinkler systems and smoke alarms, but to no avail. "Retrofitting of the older hotels has always been an economic tug of war," says Clark County Manager Bruce Spaulding. Perhaps now they will. Says Gordon Vickery, director of the U.S. Fire Administration: "We usually lose people in ones and twos, and the public...
Even as the fire still smoldered, troubling questions were being raised about the tragedy. Built in 1973 at a cost of $106 million, the MGM Grand met the require ments of the county building code in effect at the time by installing sprinkler systems only in the basement and on the first and top floors. There were no smoke detectors in the guest rooms. A new code requiring sprinklers on every floor and the use of smoke detectors was passed...