Making a Difference

INTRODUCING THE FREDERICK J. BENN III AND KATHY L. BENN SCHOLARSHIP LIGHTING FIRES OF AMBITION

BY JUSTIN A. COHN

As president of Advanced Automatic Sprinkler, Inc., which specializes in the design and installation of residential fire sprinkler systems, Fred Benn cares deeply about making people safer. It just so happens to make financial sense, too.

“If you look at it from a homeowner’s point of view, if you buy a house with fire sprinklers in it, it’s going to cost you less to live in that house than the same house without fire sprinklers because the insurance company likes them so much that they’re going to take half the cost of the fire insurance off your homeowner’s (policy),” Benn said.

Benn’s career has been one of innovation and safety initiatives, the kind of thinking he helped hone at Indiana Tech, where he graduated in 1970 with a degree in mechanical engineering— unaware that it would take him into an industry where he could help design technology used by NASA and nuclear power plants and to make average people’s homes better.

With the creation of the Frederick J. Benn III and Kathy L.

Benn Scholarship, which will provide for a student’s fouryear education, Fred Benn hopes future Tech students can be empowered to find their own paths to innovation and altruism.

“I just thought that when this whole thing started it would be good to find somebody who’s deserving and needs some help, to put them through college and help them do something with their life and hopefully do something good for humanity,” said the 74-year-old Benn.

Benn, who came to Indiana Tech from Massachusetts, was working for General Motors through a summer training program while studying in Fort Wayne. He assumed that

Frederick J. Benn, c. 1970 BSME Degree Program

Receiving the Russell P. Fleming Technical Service Award, the highest technical honor of the National Fire Sprinkler Association, in 2019

To learn about scholarships available to Indiana Tech students, visit:

↘ giving.indianatech.edu/funds/ scholarships

↘ financialservices.indianatech.edu/ scholarships after graduation he’d be set for a career in the automotive industry, but he wound up a victim of downsizing.

“One summer, I was in the tool engineering department. The next summer, I became production line foreman at the Cleveland automotive plant and on the line with UAW workers,” Benn said. “Here I am, a 20-yearold snot-nosed kid, and I got grievances for the color of my tie or by telling somebody they had a phone call, and they weren’t happy with somebody like me.”

His Tech degree helped him land at Automatic Sprinkler Corporation of America, which took him around the world on various engineering projects, such as the space shuttle launch facility at Cape Kennedy. To illustrate the complexity of those tasks, Benn said to imagine a fire and how you can smother it in 35 milliseconds.

A turning point in his career came in the early 1980s with Operation San Francisco, an initiative that involved fire chiefs, sprinkler executives, politicians, insurers and others at a Marriott hotel slated for demolition. The concept was to run scenarios and compare the existing technology, namely smoke management systems akin to giant exhaust fans, with sprinklers.

“I met a lot of fire chiefs and I saw a need for residential sprinklers from that and that’s how we started our company,” said Benn, who started Advanced Automatic Sprinkler, Inc., in San Ramon, California, in 1985.

He’s spent much time working with fire marshals, writing safety codes that have become standard and sitting on boards with like-minded people, and he was a force in helping California and Maryland adopt mandatory sprinklers for new homes. He hopes sprinklers will someday become mandatory everywhere.

“For years, we’ve fought the home builders’ association because they were just adamant they didn’t want to put sprinklers in because it’s a bottom-line cost to them,” Benn said. “They can sell that house for $100,000 whether it has sprinklers or not, so it’s just a cost they didn’t want to do and it kind of became a lightning-rod situation for them that they were fighting.”

Flashover, when a room gets so hot that everything is set ablaze at once, is something Benn talks about when it comes to safety, especially with modern materials difficult to suppress.

“Flashover now happens before the fire department gets to the scene. So anyone that’s in the house is dead before the fire department can get there. You’re talking 3,000 to 4,000 people per year die in home fires,” Benn said. “And there’s an answer for it. You get sprinklers in and the sprinkler closest to the fire goes off, probably a minute after it starts, and it lowers the temperature at the scene and smothers the fire, so a lot of times when the fire department arrives, the fire is already out. If it isn’t, it’s just contained.

“It’s hard to justify, in my mind, if you have an answer to these deaths, and it’s going to cost the people less money, then why aren’t you putting it in?”

Benn received the Russell P. Fleming Technical Service Award, the highest technical honor of the National Fire Sprinkler Association, in 2019.

He appreciates the skills gained at Indiana Tech.

“It was more of the hands-on engineering education than the theoretical education,” he said, noting that he hopes future students are able to excel similarly, perhaps through the Frederick J. Benn III and Kathy L. Benn Scholarship.

“I just thought that when this whole thing started it would be good to find somebody who’s deserving and needs some help to put them through college and help them do something with their life.”