There is a perception that NFPA standards for personal protective equipment are created by individuals who may be out of touch with the practical realities of fire service. In fact, many believe that manufacturers dominate the whole standards-development process.
Certainly, there are aspects of equipment standards that appear relatively complicated and overwhelming in their level of detail. Just an examination of NFPA 1971 — which covers both structural and proximity firefighting protective garments, helmets, gloves, footwear and hoods — reveals a standard that is 145 pages long and full of numerous references to other documents.
Understanding that the standards business is its own specialty, some question how much this information directly relates to ensuring safe and reliable PPE, and more importantly, how well the average firefighter is able to understand the bases of these standards.
Committee make up
In general, the fire service relies on the standards process to keep them safe and healthy. For the most part, firefighters rely on the judgment of the committees that create the NFPA standards so that they themselves do not have to go through the process of creating detailed specifications.
Of course, this only works when the applied design and performance criteria are meaningful, relevant and valid.
The standards are created by individuals on committees who are attempting to define the most appropriate requirements. While it is far from perfect, the standards process does attempt to involve general fire service interests.
For this reason, the composition of members making up the various technical committees are mandated such that no one interest category can dominate the number of voting participants. A system of balanced membership has been in place for several decades, which ensures that no one group can bias a committee.
NFPA established membership categories for users, consumers and labor, which all tend to be actual firefighters. These individuals represent fire departments and can be either line firefighters (consumers) or staff firefighters involved in the department’s PPE program (users). Members classified as labor are from firefighter unions.
Gaps in the process
The proportion of individual firefighters on the committees is relatively small when compared to the overall fire service. Consequently, those who do represent the fire service on the committees have a large responsibility for ensuring that the various needs of their constituents are being met.
Yet, sometimes there are gaps in the process of providing firefighter feedback to standards committees simply because of the overwhelming number of opinions and experiences in the fire service. To this end, the NFPA standards-development process must be based on input from sources other than its fire service technical committee members.
It is our opinion that NFPA needs to do a lot more to establish an outreach program to garner specific opinions that are related to fire service PPE needs.
A special meeting was held in April with representatives from various NFPA technical committees to consider this problem among others. One of the key findings was that many firefighters do not understand the NFPA standards and how these standards can affect them.
Therefore, NFPA and the committees should do a better job educating the fire service on what the standards mean, their limitations and what individual firefighters can do in recommending changes.
Spreading the word
This does not mean that firefighters should be expected to read NFPA standard — certainly, to the layperson, these standards may as well be written in Greek. Still, the committees can put out supplemental documents that explain the requirements, their value, and how to interpret information from the industry.
This can include the history of why certain requirements exist and how the current values have been set, but most importantly the specific limitations for protective clothing and equipment, as based on the current criteria.
Getting this information out to the fire service through a variety of forums will improve how the fire service selects, uses and maintains their PPE.
Fire service participation in the NFPA standards process takes a variety of other forms that are important and valuable to the quality of PPE standards. Some of the most significant changes in PPE clothing and equipment have occurred when key evaluation programs were performed with the cooperation of local fire departments.
Working with fire departments
In the early 1980s, the International Association of Firefighters undertook a multi-study research project with FDNY and other fire departments to transition the fire service from long coats and hip boots to the modern protective-clothing ensemble. In the late 1990s, a study carried out at the Indianapolis Fire Department resulted in the mandate that clothing materials used in PPE garments be breathable.
We have had the good fortune of working with several fire departments in different studies, including the San Antonio Fire Department in a series of evaluations to examine various features of PPE. Most recently, this included examining how firefighters get wet during structure fires to determine the adequacy of tests for how structural firefighting garments are evaluated on overall water resistance.
Field-study work is increasingly becoming valuable in validating changes and other criteria being developed by committees to become part of PPE standards. These studies become most relevant when they directly involve significant input from fire service representatives.
Certainly as an open and transparent process, NFPA allows end-users to provide proposals and comments on new or revised standards. This process can be a little intimidating because it requires firefighters navigate the NFPA website and have a clear understanding of the standards to be able to suggest proposed changes.
For anyone who would like to make changes to a particular standard, we will provide the necessary assistance to make the appropriate submissions to the appropriate committees. Hopefully, through the renewed education initiative of the NFPA project on PPE standards, better tools will be available to facilitate the level of general input from the fire service.
The committees responsible for standards are also more likely to become reliant on various tools to gather information. It is important to justify changes and new direction in standards based on evidence of need.
This, of course, can be found by examining statistics for various hazardous exposures and their consequences. But feedback at the grassroots level from firefighters on what works and does not work is critical to the process.
To this end, surveys will more likely be put out by the NFPA committees or associated groups to capture information about specific needs and issues. We have one such survey out that addresses liquid exposures to firefighters on the fireground.
Survey information as part of an outreach program will help keep the fire service better connected to the process of NFPA standards development. Our hope is that the committees recognize the current deficiencies of a limited membership and find new ways to educate and involve the fire service as a whole and deliberating on how standard should be created and revised.
Certainly, it has generally been proven that more fire service involvement in the standards process results in improved PPE.
