How much water damage is caused by sprinklers?
Because sprinklers attack the fire while it is still small, the total amount of water needed for fire suppression is small, often less than 50 gallons per minute. If the fire is permitted to grow, the fire department will typically apply hundreds of gallons of water per minute during their operations. For this reason, total amounts of water used in sprinklered buildings approximate one-tenth the amounts used in fires in non-sprinklered buildings.
