NFPA Journal - July/August 2017 - 12

Dispatches

12 | NFPA JOURNAL * J U L Y /A U G U S T 2 0 1 7

TECH SESSION 101

MEMBERS CONSIDER MOTIONS ON 13 DOCUMENTS,
INCLUDING THE LIFE SAFETY CODE, AT THE ASSOCIATION
TECHNICAL MEETING IN BOSTON. ALSO, A WRAP-UP OF
C&E AWARD WINNERS. By Jesse Roman
Discussions over door locking to
prevent unwanted entry, as well as
other issues related to NFPA 101®, Life
Safety Code®, highlighted the recent
2017 NFPA Technical Meeting, held as
part of the NFPA Conference & Expo in
Boston in June.
For more than 11 hours, NFPA members debated the merits of numerous
changes to the 13 NFPA codes and standards presented for floor action at the
Technical Meeting. Some of the other
prominent codes up for debate included
NFPA 99, Health Care Facilities Code;
NFPA 1, Fire Code; and NFPA 5000,
Building Construction and Safety Code®.
A group of motions pertaining to
door locking to prevent unwanted entry
was the subject of considerable debate.
The proposed next edition of the code
had included text allowing existing
educational, day care, and business
occupancies to install locks on doors
that require two latch and/or lockreleasing operations to open. Those
provisions were successfully challenged
and the new text was deleted, keeping

a requirement that latches and locks
have only one releasing operation.
These revisions are subject to technical
and correlating committee balloting, as
well as appeals to and final action by
the Standards Council.
In all, 69 certified amending motions
were made on the 13 documents up
for review. Appeals to the tech session
action were due by June 27 and will be
heard by the NFPA Standards Council
at its August meeting.
To see a list of the motions and how
they fared, visit nfpa.org/techsessions.

AWARD RECIPIENTS
Here's a wrap-up of the major awards
announced at this year's Conference &
Expo:

DiNenno Prize
The inventors of the Very Early Smoke
Detection Apparatus, known as VESDA,
were awarded the prestigious DiNenno
Prize along with its $50,000 in prize
money. David Packham, John Petersen,
and Martin Cole were presented with

NFPA

organizations respond to these types
of events. Everyone from FBI agents
to nearby emergency room doctors
can be involved.
"The language that we use operationally between law enforcement,
fire, EMS, and the hospital medical
community is not consistent, so I think
that would be well-suited to be made
more consistent, and a standard like
this can help," said Dr. Richard Kamin,
a trauma and emergency medicine physician at the University of Connecticut,
who responded to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012. "The
industry as a whole-the community of
responders and receivers-understands
that this is an increasing and ongoing
threat and that until we become more
consistent, more practiced, and more
cohesive with our operations, language,
training, and standards, we are probably not as likely to continue to be
successful."
Drozd, who is on the committee
along with Kamin, said communication
between organizations was a significant challenge in the Pulse shooting
response. "Communications could
have been better on [the Pulse] scene,
because there was not a direct communications link between police and
fire," he said. Instead, like a game of
telephone, there was a police officer
at the fire command post who was
communicating with an earpiece to the
dispatch center that was communicating to the police command post. "You
can see the different links in the chain.
Communications weren't direct, faceto-face communications, which is what
we train and advocate for, but it didn't
happen. That was a gap."
Similarly, Serino said there are areas
of the country, including major urban
areas, where public safety and medical
officials simply don't have any regular
communication with one another. With
a new standard, though, there will
essentially be no excuse to not step up
efforts. "There are places still in this
country where people just don't talk
to each other," he said. "If there's a
standard to say, 'this is how it should
be done,' it's going to be very hard for
people to ignore that."
http://www.nfpa.org/techsessions
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NFPA Journal - July/August 2017
