Each time a fire causes significant damage at an old residential high-rise without sprinklers, it usually sparks renewed talk of requiring owners to install the potentially lifesaving equipment.

If deaths are involved, such as in the recent Marco Polo fire, the talk intensifies.

But since a city task force looked at the issue in 2005, estimating that about 300 residential high-rises did not have automatic sprinkler systems, not a single one of those projects has voluntarily installed the equipment, according to an informal survey of industry officials and a review of city building permit records.

Cost has been the biggest obstacle.

“You do the math,” said attorney Jane Sugimura, president of the Hawaii Council of Associations of Apartment Owners, which lobbies for condo owners and their associations. She said costs per owner can be thousands of dollars, and many retirees on fixed incomes live in the older projects.

In the wake of last week’s Marco Polo fire, which killed three people and injured a dozen others, Mayor Kirk Caldwell sent the City Council a proposed bill requiring installations in high-rises with residential floors more than 75 feet above the highest grade.

Ways to soften the financial hit to owners are among the issues that are expected to be discussed as the bill moves through the legislative process.

Residential high-rises built since 1975 on Oahu have been required to have sprinklers. But scores of projects were erected without sprinklers during the building booms of the 1960s and early ’70s, including the 36-floor Marco Polo.

Fire officials have said Friday’s blaze, which started in a 26th-floor apartment, likely would have been confined to that unit if the building had sprinklers. Without them, the flames spread quickly, and about 200 of the building’s 568 units were damaged.

People ‘paying attention’

Spooked by the tragedy, representatives from some sprinklerless condos have contacted contractors inquiring about the cost of installing systems.

Jason Blinkhorn, fire protection operations manager for Dorvin D. Leis Co., which does sprinkler installations, estimated his office has received about a half-dozen calls since Friday’s fire asking about cost estimates.

“I think that’s a really good sign that people are paying attention,” Blinkhorn said in a phone interview.

Besides the cost issue, mandating sprinkler installations would come with a legal hurdle, according to condo representatives.

Under Hawaii law, Sugimura and others said, condo associations cannot compel individual apartment owners to install sprinklers in what is their private property. That would be akin to a homeowner association that oversees a housing subdivision requiring individual owners to do modifications inside their houses, according to Sugimura.

City Councilwoman Ann Kobayashi, however, said a condo building is different. If a house catches fire, its occupants are endangered, but if a condo catches fire, the close quarters means people in other units are endangered as well, she said. “You have to think of the whole property,” she added.

Cost varies widely

The cost of installing sprinklers can vary dramatically from project to project.

To illustrate that point, the city task force hired a consultant in 2005 to evaluate four condos: Marco Polo; a Wilder Avenue building with 67 units; the 300-unit Pearl One in Aiea; and the 112-unit Royal Court on Ward Avenue.

The estimates ranged from a low of $1,995 per unit at Pearl One to a high of $22,902 at Royal Court, according to the task force’s report.

The Marco Polo estimate was $4,306 per unit and the Wilder Avenue one came in at $10,460.

By 2013, Marco Polo’s estimate had nearly doubled, according to Samuel Dannaway, the consultant who did the task force analysis and then subsequently updated Marco Polo’s number.

Because condo associations typically don’t have funds in their budget or reserves to pay for such a major expense, one option would be to charge owners a special assessment to raise the money, Sugimura said.

But that would require the approval of more than 50 percent of the owners — something that would be hard to get, especially if the building has a lot of retirees on fixed incomes and absentee owners, according to condo officials.

“You know what it’s like trying to get owners to agree, especially in a building like Marco Polo or Yacht Harbor Tower where half of them live in Japan, Korea and China,” Sugimura said.

Creating an incentive by offering tax credits was a proposal pursued by task force members in the mid-2000s, but it wasn’t embraced by the state Legislature, partly because of lobbying by condo owners.

Installation obstacles

Dannaway’s 2013 sprinkler cost estimate of $4.5 million — about $8,000 per unit — for Marco Polo included installing sprinklers in the common areas and in individual apartments.

But the board subsequently approved pursuing installations in the common areas only, given the legal problem of getting access to individual units, a board member at the time recently told the Star-Advertiser.

Sam Shenkus, who left the Marco Polo board in 2013, said the work was to be paid for through the owners’ monthly maintenance fees, not via a special assessment. But she and another owner said the actual installation was never started.

Fire protection experts, including Blinkhorn, say excluding apartments from sprinkler coverage would undermine a system’s effectiveness, particularly given that a unit’s kitchen represents the biggest risk of fire.

“The common areas are not the big issue,” Blinkhorn said.

Since 2000, only one residential high-rise on Oahu that was not originally built with sprinklers has since installed them, according to the city Department of Planning and Permitting’s check of building permits over the past 17 years. A system was installed at the 11-story, 44-unit Diamond Head Apartments on the Hilton Hawaiian Village grounds in 2004.

Hilton paid $443,600 for the work, according to a Hilton spokeswoman.

If the city eventually approves a mandatory sprinkler bill, Sugimura questioned what impact it would have.

“They can legislate all they want,” she said. “I just don’t know how effective it’s going to be.”