NFPA Journal - Summer 2022 - 28

Dispatches
corridors-complying to such low tolerances is nearly
impossible and requires exorbitant sums of money, health
care officials say. Many would like to see the maximum
gap allowance expanded to 1 inch. " A lot of people don't
understand that doors and buildings themselves are almost
living, breathing things-they expand and contract, and
as the doors get worn they adjust themselves, " said Chad
Beebe, the deputy executive director of American Society
for Health Care Engineering (ASHE) and a member of the
NFPA.ORG/
DISPATCHES
Read " Mind the Gap, "
a 2019 NFPA Journal
feature, for a more
detailed look at NFPA
80 and the fire door gap
issue in hospitals.
HEALTH CARE FACILITIES
DOOR
DILEMMA
HOSPITAL AND CODE OFFICIALS HAD
HOPED THAT NEW RESEARCH WOULD HELP
RESOLVE A LONG-SIMMERING DEBATE ON
FIRE DOOR GAPS. BUT THE FINDINGS HAVE
ONLY LED TO MORE QUESTIONS.
By Jesse Roman
H
ospital officials, codemakers, and other
stakeholders were hopeful that the results of a
much-anticipated research project on fire doors
would bring clarity to an issue that has proven
both contentious and costly for health care facilities across
the country.
Instead, the study's findings, which will be published in May
by the Fire Protection Research Foundation, seem to ensure
that the impasse will persist for the foreseeable future.
At the heart of the matter is a provision in NFPA 80,
Standard for Fire Doors and Other Protective Openings,
which states that the space, or gap, between a fire-door
sill and the floor can be no more than three-quarters of an
inch. If an inspector finds that the gap is too wide by as
little as a sixteenth of an inch, rules administered by the
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services give the facility
60 days to fix it or risk losing its accreditation.
Since most health care facilities contain hundreds of
fire doors-many installed in wide and slightly uneven
28 | NFPA JOURNAL * SUMMER 2022
Read the Fire Protection
Research Foundation
report, " Fire Door
Experimental Testing
Project to Study the
Influence of Door Gaps
Around Swinging Fire
Doors. "
Watch a webinar on the
door gap issue hosted
by the FPRF.
NFPA 80 technical committee.
" When you're talking about
sixteenth-of-an-inch tolerances,
those shifts are enough for a
perfectly compliant door on day
one to be noncompliant in just a
couple of weeks. You could have
a dedicated full team of staff to
check doors monthly and still
not be able be 100 percent compliant.
It's just the nature of it. "
While many code officials are
sympathetic to that argument,
they worry that permitting
larger gaps could defeat the
purpose of the fire doors by
potentially allowing smoke and
flames to spread throughout the hospital in the event of
a fire, said Keith Pardoe, a fire door consultant and the
chair of the technical committee that oversees NFPA 80.
" I know some are in the camp that we should increase the
allowances at the bottom of a door to an inch or even an
inch and a quarter, " he said. " But the committee has been
reluctant to make any changes to the standard until we
have some data that supports it and shows that any change
we make is safe. "
In 2019, the NFPA 80 committee asked the Fire Protection
Research Foundation to help it get that data. During
two years of starts and stops due to the COVID pandemic,
researchers conducted a series of 13 fire tests on a variety
of single and swinging double fire doors, some hung with
the allowable three-quarter-inch gap under the sill, and
some with larger 1-inch gaps.
The findings, published this month, didn't provide the
tidy resolution that hospitals and code officials were looking
for.
In 12 of the 13 experimental tests, the doors did not
" meet the acceptance criteria " to pass the rigorous fire
test, regardless of gap size; only a double set of steel doors
with a three-quarters-of-an-inch gap were able to meet
the criteria to pass both tests required in NFPA 252, Standard
Methods of Fire Tests of Door Assemblies. The tests
generally showed that larger gaps increase airflow, which
seemed to make it more difficult for doors to meet the
acceptance criteria to pass, the report's authors noted.
The report's conclusions were further complicated by
the inherent difficulties of trying to replicate real-world
FPRF
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NFPA Journal - Summer 2022

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