By Karla Schuster
Newsday
NEW YORK — Sen. Charles Schumer yesterday called for tougher federal testing of a safety device that can fail in high heat and water and has been linked to the deaths of at least 15 firefighters nationwide.
“Our firefighters ... are first-rate; the equipment they carry shouldn’t be second-rate,” Schumer said at a news conference yesterday in front of Engine Co. 16, Ladder Co. 7 on East 29th Street in Kips Bay.
Schumer (D-N.Y.) said 15 deaths in the past decade have been linked to malfunctions of the device — a motion sensor called a Personal Alert Safety Systems, or PASS.
The device is designed to repeatedly sound a high-pitched alarm and flash a light if a firefighter stops moving for between 20 and 30 seconds. It is a part of most firefighters’ breathing apparatus. About 1 million firefighters nationwide use the PASS alarm device.
In 2003, Thomas Brick, a New York City firefighter, died after being trapped for a half-hour during a mattress warehouse fire in Inwood. The alarm in his PASS device did not go off properly, a union official said yesterday, apparently due to the heat of the fire.
“It wasn’t what killed him, but we believe there was a failure of his PASS device,” said Jim Slevin, vice president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association. “It wasn’t as loud as it was supposed to be.”
Two years later, in 2005, the National Institute of Standards and Technology tested the devices and found that the volume of the alarm diminished at 300 degrees, heat levels routinely encountered by firefighters. Some models also were shown to have problems when water seeped into them.
Tougher tests for heat and water are called for in new standards from the National Fire Protection Association, issued this February, but there are no plans to test existing models still in use.
Schumer said that while the malfunctions occur in a “small percentage” of the devices, government regulatory agencies must develop a program to weed out those with problems.
He called on the U.S. Fire Administration and the National Institute of Standards and Technology to test all new PASS devices before they are sold, and to inspect all the devices now in use to make sure they comply with the new safety standards.
“It’s only a small percentage,” Schumer said, “but the problem is you don’t know which ones.”
Copyright 2007 Newsday
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