As we continue to enhance our standards development site, NFPA looks for ways to make it easier for the public to get involved and participate in our codes and standards process.
A recent feature added in the standard development site is the capability for the public to "View Public Inputs" and "View Public Comments" after all submissions have been completed. Starting with documents in the Annual 2015 cycle, with the exception of NFPA 1730 which has a public input closing date of September 9, 2013, links are available to "View Public Inputs" on each Next edition tab of the document information pages under the category "First Draft". You will be asked to sign-in or create a free online account with NFPA before using this system.
To view a complete list of the Annual 2015 documents, go to the document information pages and use the search feature in the upper right gray box to search by cycle.
!http://nfpa.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8351b9f3453ef0192ac4a30b2970d-500wi|src=http://nfpa.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8351b9f3453ef0192ac4a30b2970d-500wi|alt=BAB4906AF425424A812A1BCB93E36BE2.ashx|style=margin: 0px 0px 5px 5px;|title=BAB4906AF425424A812A1BCB93E36BE2.ashx|class=asset asset-image at-xid-6a00d8351b9f3453ef0192ac4a30b2970d!Finally, there is scientific evidence to support requests for adequate staffing levels and response times for fire departments that protect high-rise buildings, say Russ Sanders and Ben Klaene in their column "Diminishing Returns" in the July/August issue of NFPA Journal. In April, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released its report, High-Rise Fireground Field Experiments, which confirms what every firefighter knows: the fewer firefighters that respond to a fire and the longer it takes them to get to the scene, the larger the fire gets and the greater danger it poses. Armed with this data, say Sanders and Klaene, it may be time to for fire departments to re-examine their resources to see if adding more units to high-rise alarms, staging more companies at the scene, or revising your standard operating procedures will help you do your job better.
Here's an NFPA history lesson: the requirement for smoke alarms in one- and two-family dwellings made its debut in the 1976 edition of NFPA 101®, Life Safety Code®. Only one smoke "detector" (as they were referred to in this edition of the code) was required, and its location wasn't specified in the code.
In the latest issue of NFPA Journal, columnist Chip Carson discusses how the Life Safety Code has continually expanded the number of smoke alarms required in homes, which has contributed to a decline in civilian fire deaths since 1976.
"Even so, there is more work to do," says Carson. "NFPA data indicates that more than four million households in the U.S. remain unprotected. Other studies have found that in some high-risk neighborhoods more than 75 percent of homes do not have working smoke alarms."
Read Carson's suggested solutions to this problem in the latest edition of Journal.