HARRY R. CARTER, Ph.D., MIFireE

On Tuesday evening, April 3, I sat with tears in my eyes as I watched my dear friend, Chief Dan Jones of the Chapel Hill, North Carolina Fire Department on the CBS television show 48 Hours. Dan was the subject of an interview by CBS-TV Correspondent Erin Moriarty. The discussion revolved around the topic of fire safety on college campuses.

Dan’s message was real simple folks. "Kids don’t go to college to die in a fire." Unfortunately, Dan is an expert on this topic. He is a graduate of the school of hard knocks. Five years ago, five students lost their lives in a fraternity fire at the University of North Carolina, in Chapel Hill. The key point of the whole interview was that these kids didn’t have to die. The same holds true for the three students at Seton Hall University who died in January of 2000. And both of these mirror the story of the three people who died in the fraternity house fire at Bloomsburg State University in Pennsylvania just two months after the Seton Hall fire just adds more fuel to the fire.

In New Jersey, the state acted in its usual swift, after the fact manner. Through the eminently clear looking glass of 20-20 hindsight, a law was swiftly drafted and quickly enacted mandating automatic fire sprinkler systems in all college dormitories. This might not bring back the dead, but it helps to insure that the students of the present and future will be much safer, both now and in the years to come. As a father of three, with all three going to state universities in the fall of this year, I can breathe a little easier.

However, across the Delaware River in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the story is quite different. There has been no such push for the creation of a safer college and university dormitory environment. This is sad. But then again, it took Pennsylvania a long time to overcome the building and real estate lobbies to create a building code. I can only imagine how hard the battle for sprinklers will be.

We in the fire service share the blame for these deaths. We have been so busy buying bigger and better fire trucks, state of the art equipment, and responding to all manner of community issues that we have ignored the most effective method of firefighting. We have believed the suppression-oriented view of life for far too long. We have become addicted to the adrenaline rush of going to fires.

Ladies and gentlemen, the secret to effective fire safety is not really a secret at all. Automatic fire sprinkler systems are a product of the 19th Century. They have been around in one form or another for more than 150 years.

As one small part of the American Service, I have not done anywhere near enough to push for the critical inclusion of fire suppression systems into our arsenal of fire safety defenses. One of the documents that I studied as an undergraduate in the fire safety administration program at Jersey City State College was a classic of my generation. It was the report of the National Commission on Fire Prevention and Control issued in May of 1973, entitled America Burning.

This landmark document called for shifts in the operational paradigm of the American Fire Service. Let me share some insights from this document for those of you who were not even born in 1973. Here are some bullet points from page X and XI of an original copy of the report:

• There needs to be more emphasis on fire prevention
• The fire service needs better training and education
• Americans must be educated about fire safety
• In both design and materials, the environment in which Americans live and work presents unnecessary hazards
• The fire protection features of buildings need to be improved
• There is a need for automatic fire extinguishing systems in every high rise building and every low rise building in which people congregate
• Important areas of research are being neglected
• Progress in most of these areas (research) is hindered by a lack of fundamental understanding of the behavior of fire and its combustion products

So how well have we done in the twenty-eight years since those words saw the light of day in May of 1973? Thousands have died and hundreds of thousands have been burned and broken by the ravages of fire. We have not done well as a nation, if my experience is any indication.

I say that advisedly, because New Jersey has labored diligently to bring our state to a higher level of protection. Our building code dates from 1977 and our fire prevention codes came on line in the early 1980’s. Unfortunately, you have Pennsylvania right next door who did not have a fire prevention code until a very short time ago. We are far safer than we were when I was a young lad in the fire service, but we still have a ways to go.

During my time in the City of Newark, I saw the low priority placed upon fire safety, code enforcement, and training. My training budget for New Jersey’s largest city was at one point in 1998, smaller than our training budget in the Adelphia Fire Company (salaries excluded). It was a standard refrain that the sick, lame and lazy went to training. I can even recall the boss asking me why I wanted to stay in training when the real fun was in the firehouse. I originally made it to training as a result of a fire-related injury. When I was healed, I went back to the firehouse. So I guess the refrain was correct.

When I served in Community Relations in 1991, our public education budget for the city school system was a mere $3,000. You can imagine how far that went when I had to spread it among the 65 schools in the city ($46.15 per school for you non-math scholars). And I can recall getting yelled at for the size of my telephone bill, until the city business administrator discovered that one of these "expensive calls" garnered a public education program for every school in the city. God bless the folks at the State Farm Insurance Company, in Bloomington, Illinois.

The same held true for the fire prevention function. What mattered then and now was the size of the suppression force. Staffing was continually cut from the staff functions to be placed into the suppression lines in the budget. And frankly, speaking for many in my generation, Firefighting was the sexy part of the whole show. We were adrenaline junkies.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is a sad thing indeed to reach the age of 53 years, and discover you have lived a great part of your life improperly. I should have taken more cues from my friends Jim Dalton of Montgomery County Maryland, Bob MacLeod of Sarasota, Florida, Dan Jones of the Chapel Hill Fire Department, Deputy Chief (ret.) Vincent Dunn of the New York City Fire Department, and everyone’s all-around hero, Frank Brannigan. Each of these people has devoted their careers to a proactive educational effort in three really critical areas:

• Jones Automatic Fire Suppression
• Dalton Automatic Fire Suppression
• MacLeod Automatic Fire Suppression
• Dunn Building Collapse
• Brannigan Building Construction

Please do not think that I am slighting any of my fellow travelers in the world of training and education who have devoted years of their lives to other topics. Each of us who has struggled to impart knowledge has taken part in a noble endeavor. And since fires are a result of the failures caused by human nature, they will continue to occur. We must train for them.

It is just that we could have placed a greater emphasis on the put to build safer buildings and protection them with automatic fire suppression. All of us could have done more.

How many of the people who died in fires would be alive today if they had been protected by automatic suppression? How many of our firefighter fatalities would not have occurred had the fire been snuffed out in its earliest stages? Dan Jones referred to the classic fire protection statistic that tells all of us the real story about fire protection and life safety. There has never been a recorded multiple death in a sprinkler-protected property where the units were in service and operating. This is still the case, even in light of the numerous tradeoffs that have been placed into the world of construction codes for the installation of automatic fire sprinkler protection.

I can recall an address that Leo Stapleton made in New Jersey back in 1999. He was giving us his perspective on the successes and failures of the entire 20th Century. He told the audience in attendance that one of the great fire service failures of the century was its failure to embrace automatic fire sprinkler systems. He called upon us to do more in the 21st Century.

I am asking each of you to do more about working for automatic fire suppression, as well as better construction methods and materials. We all need to bring this issue to the attention of the people in our state legislatures, for that is where these changes will occur. Perhaps the area that needs the greatest attention is retroactive installation of these systems. Let’s go for it.

When you sit down at your computer (or your typewriter) to pound out your grant application for the FIRE Bill money, stop for a moment. Stop thinking fire trucks, stop thinking SCBA, and start thinking fire prevention. I have heard of one application that is being prepared to fund a fire safety area within a public school. I sure hope that application sees the shinning light of approval.

I want to thank my dear friend, Chief Dan Jones of the Chapel Hill, North Carolina Fire Department for his unwavering support of installed fire protection. Good job buddy.

The commentary in this column does not necessarily reflect those of Firehouse.Com, Firehouse Magazine, their employees or parent company Cygnus Business Media. Harry R. Carter, Ph.D., MIFireE, is an internationally known municipal fire protection consultant and contributing editor to Firehouse Magazine. He recently retired as a Battalion Commander with the Newark, New Jersey Fire Department. His commentary appears regularly on Firehouse.Com. For more commentary and information, visit Carter's web site at www.harrycarter.com Harry has published several books available for online ordering, including Firefighting Strategy and Tactics and Management in the Fire Service