A state Senate committee spent more than two hours Wednesday hearing testimony from fire and safety experts, along with the hospitality industry, on whether to require hotels and motels to install sprinkler systems in existing buildings. The chairman of the committee, Sen. David Thomas of Greenville, says he'll suggest that his committee write and pass a bill to do that.

The fire at a Comfort Inn in Greenville last month that killed six people and injured a dozen is the reason lawmakers are spending so much time on the issue of sprinklers.

They got a graphic look at what can happen in a building that does not have them. They watched unedited video shot at a Rhode Island nightclub last year, where the band Great White's pyrotechnics set fire to the ceiling. The fire spread quickly, and many of the people couldn't get out of the overcrowded club.

One hundred people died.

Bert Polk, former South Carolina fire marshal and now a fire and life safety consultant, told senators about another fire at an overcrowded nightclub in Wisconsin just two weeks later.

"This fire was started by a candle that was part of decorations on a table. The building was sprinkled. There were no deaths, no serious injuries. The building sustained about $100,000 damage and was re-opened within 30 days."

Senators discussed a bill introduced by Sen. J. Verne Smith of Greer that would require all hotels and motels to have sprinklers by 2007. That bill has been carried over by another committee because of concerns about the cost to businesses.

Sen. Scott Richardson says the cost of retrofitting some hotels and motels could be so high that the businesses would have to close and the buildings torn down.

Tom Sponseller, executive director of the SC Hospitality Association, says one Charleston hotel checked into the cost of adding a sprinkler system. It would be $1 million.

That's why Sen. Thomas is looking into incentives to help hotels and motels afford the retrofitting. "You help them through that, perhaps figure out a way to give them some deductions. You give your fire marshals authority to write them up and enforce. And then you're going to end up saving lives down the road," Sen. Thomas says.

Sponseller says, "Incentives actually help the business do something like this. It would make it a lot more palatable to do it."

What would also help are savings on insurance premiums. The state Department of Insurance's chief actuary testified that adding sprinklers to an existing hotel or motel would cut their insurance premiums by 50 or even 60 percent.

Using an example of a 24 unit motel, he said insurance would go from $22,737 without a sprinkler system to $10,248 with sprinklers.

The Senate Banking and Insurance Committee will take the information gathered at Wednesday's hearing and come up with a bill to try to balance requiring sprinklers with the costs involved.