Department: Financial & Housing
How Much is One Undergraduate Life Worth?
Our undergraduate members deserve nothing but the best, from programming to brotherhood. Chapter houses are the same, and the Sigma Alpha Epsilon Financial & Housing Corporation can help you protect lives — and save money while doing it.
Does your house have a fire-sprinkler system installed? To provide coverage, fraternity insurers generally consider a hard-wired smoke-and-heat detector system mandatory. Either could save members’ lives in the event of a disaster, but they could also reduce your F&H loan-interest rate to as low as 5 percent. For houses that include sprinkler systems, property-insurance costs could be reduced by up to 50 percent. And with those savings, the systems could pay for themselves in as little as 10 or 15 years — not to mention providing surveillance while protecting life and property.
F&H is ready to assist house corporations with the specifications, purchasing, installation and financing of fire sprinklers, alarm systems and other life-safety equipment. Its board of directors recently authorized a new loan program that would allow house corporations to borrow money at an interest rate as low as 5 percent for up to 15 years. This is a great opportunity to retrofit your house or provide for those much-needed life-safety enhancements, including sprinkler systems, emergency lights, fire and smoke alarms, fire doors and more.
Current building code requires this equipment to be installed in every new fraternity house, and it is only a matter of time before every state, city or municipality mandates these rules be applied to existing structures. In addition, several states have already mandated sprinkler-system compliance for current houses. Other states and local fire departments will likely do the same, and every year the cost of installing the systems will increase.
The F&H board realizes that these emergency events can happen to anyone at any time. There are both positive and tragic examples. A recent fire at Washington State University was extinguished by the new fire-sprinkler system in minutes with no loss of life and minimal property damage. But there is a flipside: The recent fire at the University of Mississippi, where no fire-sprinkler system was present, caused the death of three Alpha Tau Omega members and resulted in a large liability suit.
According to the National Fire Protection Association’s statistics from 1990-2000, there was an annual average of 1,700 fires in on-campus dormitories, which includes fraternity and sorority housing. More than 50 fire deaths resulted. But then there’s the even more bleak downside: Half of the fires and 75 percent of the deaths occurred in fraternity and sorority housing with an average property loss of $580,000.
So what is being done to address these issues on college campuses? Undergraduates and alumni are often educated on saving lives from a variety of sources. Most colleges and local communities conduct yearly inspections of chapter houses. And an increasing number of communities are requiring the installation of life-safety equipment, most notably fire sprinklers.
The importance of fire sprinklers cannot be overstated. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has stated that fire sprinklers, when used in conjunction with smoke detectors, could reduce the deaths caused by fire by 82 percent. It is believed that had the Phi Gamma Delta house at the University of North Carolina had fire sprinklers in 1996, the five lives lost would have been saved. That fire rapidly changed fire codes in Greek housing. As a result of the deaths, the National Fire Sprinkler Association stated that it would be seeking increasingly stringent fire-code mandates from local communities in the form of fire-sprinkler retrofits. Together, we can all save lives.
If you are interested in taking advantage of this opportunity or would like a loan application, contact Financial & Housing Associate Executive Director Gregory Somers at (773) 590-1056 or at gsomers@sae.net.
