Apartment Building, Residential Damage minimized in apartment fire thanks to sprinkler system (Bismarck, ND) August 22, 2014 viking210 Bismarck Fire Department Battalion Chief Jeff Holte reported that his crew was alerted to a fire at an apartment building at 2:45 PM on Wednesday, August 20. When the firefighters arrived to the scene, people were evacuating from the building. The fire, which began when a tenant inadvertently turned on a stove top while a box was on top of it, was suppressed by the building’s fire sprinkler. “That’s what saved the whole building was the sprinkler system,” Holte said. No one was in the unit at the time of the fire, and all occupants of the building evacuated safely.