NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 47
E.R. CHAR A blaze that tore through a hospital in Miryang,
South Korea, in January 2018 left 41 people dead and citizens
enraged over the country's weak building safety regulations.
engineer who serves on several NFPA technical committees.
Koffel's Maryland-based fire protection engineering consulting firm, Koffel Associates, specializes in health care facility
design, and it has worked on a number of projects overseas.
"There are health care organizations in other countries that
are reaching out to consultants in the US because they're
interested in having their facilities operated and managed
similar to a hospital in the US," he said. "There are also a
number of hospitals outside the US that are now being managed by US health care organizations. I think both of these
trends certainly have the potential to grow in the future."
GETT Y IMAGES
'Learning from our mistakes'
Statistically, virtually nobody dies in hospital fires in the US.
That's according to data from an NFPA report published in
2017. From 2011 to 2015, less than one death occurred on
average each year in fires in hospitals in the US, the report
says. Hospital fires simply don't happen that often. US fire
departments respond to roughly 1,100 such fires each year,
compared to about three times that number in schools.
But this wasn't always the case. Some of the world's deadliest hospital fires occurred in the US in the 20th century, such
as the Cleveland Clinic fire that killed more than 120 people
in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1929, and the St. Anthony's Hospital fire
that took 74 lives in Illinois in 1949. As recently as the 1980s,
over 8,000 fires occurred in hospitals in the US annually.
"In the United States, we have a history of killing people
in nursing home and hospital fires," said Robert Solomon,
director of Building Fire Protection & Fire Protection Systems at NFPA. "But we've learned from our mistakes."
The building safety deficiencies that drove the high death
tolls in past US hospital fires, such as a lack of compartmentation to prevent smoke spread and the absence of fire
sprinklers, have largely been eliminated from American
facilities, Solomon said. And that's due to the fact that in
the US, a robust, multilayered system of code enforcement
N F PA . O R G / J O U R N A L * NFPA JOURNAL
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NFPA Journal - January/February 2020
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NFPA Journal - January/February 2020
Contents
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - Cover1
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - Cover2
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 1
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 2
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 3
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - Contents
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 5
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 6
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 7
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 8
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 9
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 10
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 11
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 12
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 13
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 14
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 15
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 16
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 17
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 18
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 19
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NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 21
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NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 24
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NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 26
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NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 29
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NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 31
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 32
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 33
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 34
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 35
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 36
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 37
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NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 43
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 44
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 45
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 46
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 47
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 48
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 49
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 50
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NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - 80
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - Cover3
NFPA Journal - January/February 2020 - Cover4
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