AN ABSOLUTE GUARANTEE THAT HOMES WOULD BURN The home is where the Americans burn.

Approximately 95 percent of all fire deaths due to building fires occur within the home. Pre-school children are especially at risk because they spend most of their time in the home and because they are the least likely to be able to escape a fire without help. Our so-called national fire code maker, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) conceals the extremely high burn rate in homes as best as it can. The NFPA includes outdoor fires and automobile crash fires in the fire death statistics. With this strategy the NFPA is able to say that (only) 80 percent of the fire deaths are due to fires in the home. That is bad, enough, but it is not the full story. No doubt one of the reasons why the NFPA hides the home death rate (as best it can) is because the NFPA is the primary cause of the unsafe home. There are two easy solutions and affordable solutions to the home fires. These solutions have been available for more than ten decades but the NFPA has knowingly and deliberately prevented the solutions from being installed in homes. The reason why I know this is because I have spent nearly all of my professional life attempting to solve the home fire problem and at every turn the NFPA was intentionally blocking the solutions, usually by illegal means. There are a number of reasons why the NFPA would prevent the solutions to home fires from being available to the public. Fire in America causes more than 300 billion dollars in losses according to the NFPA. Personally, I believe if the true and largely hidden costs of fire are calculated the total would be several times the 300 billion dollars. In any event, the losses are balanced by the gains; that is for every dollar that comes from the public there are people and organizations that gain that dollar. The home is a cash cow for the fire insurance industry. Eliminate home fires and the fire insurers would suffer enormously. It is the home fire and the fire deaths that motivate the public to pay for fire stations, the fire trucks and the manpower. Sometimes the fire stations seem seem to be more plentiful than the bars and every time a child burn in the neighborhood the public demands more stations and closer ones. The public has been taught to believe that firefighters located a mile or ten can arrive in time to save the children. It is more myth than reality but the rare save is promoted to the hilt. It is the rare rescue of the burning kids that makes the firefighter the hero. I have no quarrel with the ordinary brave firefighter. More power to him. But, it is the corrupt fire service bureaucrat that uses the fire, the deaths of the children and the deaths and injuries to the firefighters, for their own evil gains. The NFPA fire codes are written almost exclusively with committee members representing businesses and bureaucracies that benifit from fire. The one thing that unites all the code committee members is the profits and benefits generated by fire. The codes are structured to exploit fire, not eliminate fire. There are two solutions to the fire that would eliminate at least 90 percent, and probably close to 100 percent, of all destroyed homes and all injured and killed occupants. One is the practical residential fire sprinkler system engineered to use the amount of water normal to a home. A home may have as little as 5 gallons a minute (GPM) or perhaps 15 GPM depending on city pressure, length of the supply line and the diameter of the line. To be practical and to sell significantly a residential system must be designed to use the amount of water normal to the home, perhaps only 5 gpm. This is not a problem, if there is enough water to take a shower there

is enough to completely extinguish the early small fire or to at least control it so it can be completely extinguished by supplemental manual means. At the very least the fire will be contained and held small while all are able to exit safely. I installed such life safety systems in many homes and the state fire marshal of California created a California Residential Standard based on my research. The NFPA set about deliberately to prevent the continued marketing of practical and affordable residential systems. Prior to the 1980 NFPA Convention the NFPA organized a fire test program for residential sprinklers. The tests were deliberately rigged and falsified to prove that a fire sprinkler system could not control a house fire except the amount of water available was 40 GPM. Assuming some homes have as little as 5 GPM available, that means that eight times more water than would be available would be required. Almost no home has 40 GPM available. To obtain 40 GPM probably a 1-1/2 inch line would be needed. This is a large commercial building supply line. The monthly cost for the water will be astronomical for a home owner. To put the icing on the cake the NFPA mandated a two sprinklers open flow requirement, with an orifices sized too large to produce an effective water spray at low flow. To illustrate how the NFPA and related goons can influence our federal government agencies I can tell you that the acting head of the Federal Fire Administration came to that NFPA convention meeting room, where the falsified test mandating a 40 GPM supply as a minimum was being presented, and he rose to deliver absolutely blatant lies relative the validity of the fire test program. With the Feds certifying as valid the blatantly phony test data, those assembled voted the kiss of death requirements into the standard which was then enforced by law. The best fire solution for the home is a practical properly engineered residential fire sprinkler system (I termed my available water system a Life Safety System). As far back as 1959 I had data confirming that a central station monitored fire sprinkler system, over the prior 25 years, had controlled the fire 99.98 percent of the time. Of course, this was for commercial properties, (many containing high hazard contents) as homes were not sprinkler protected. I do not believe there is any medical cure that is that effective. So, this is the solution to the home fire deaths that the NFPA went to great lengths to bar from public usage. The children still burn at an awesome rate thanks to the NFPA.

A fire protection engineer that graduated from IIT I the same year that I did, a friend when we were at school, testified in deposition in a legal case of Jim Stevens vs. A.T.O. (Civil Action File No. D-42131). The civil case was being tried in the Superior Court of Fulton County, State of Georgia and the deposition was taken in Baltimore, MD dated May 10, 1988. The issues that were involved were the fire detection code of the National Fire Protection Association, the detection capabilities of the heat detector and the smoke detector, the fire testing of these devices during the Dunes Tests and the role of Mr. Bright relative the Dunes Tests and the requirements of the NFPA code. Mr. Bright was a fire protection engineer for the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) and he became the Washington D.C. federal monitor of the Dunes Test program.

On page 36 of the deposition, Mr. Bright is being questioned regarding the role he played both in monitoring the fire test program and in revising the NFPA code. Mr. Bright stated, and in 1973 the NFPA came to the National Bureau of Standards, Center for Fire Research, and asked for me to take over and chair the standard (NFPA 74, Household Warning System) and come up with a more suitable and efficient method of protecting the home, particularly as we were beginning to get the idea that smoke detectors could do a lot more than they were given credit for in the past. Mr. Bright accepted the chair to the fire detection code and promptly began to bring about revisions in the code that the NFPA desired. By the time the Dunes Tests began during 1974 the code had already been largely revised to mandate smoke detectors and to stop reliance on heat detectors. Accordingly, when the testing began the die was already cast, the code would require smoke detectors only, the reliance on heat detectors for the flaming (hot) fire was effectively eliminated from the code.

Phase 1 of the dunes Tests (conducted during 1974) involved 40 fire tests in real homes testing the smoke detectors. At the conclusion of the Phase 1 testing the published report stated on page 8, In general, all smoke detectors responded well to all fires. On page 15 the report stated, The results of the experiments indicate that these heat detectors, including the one in the room of origin, failed to respond to the majority of fires. Thus, conclusions were included at the beginning of the report to justify the removal of reliance on heat detectors and the placing of full reliance on smoke detectors. Heres the rub. There were no fixed temperature heat detectors installed anywhere during Phase 1 testing. There were some rate of rise type detectors (not pertinent to the NFPA code requirements) installed but they were mainly tested against extremely slow to develop smoldering type fires that filed to raise the temperatures fast enough to have an response (a mere 15 degrees F. per minute required). What was not stated is that the code change was assigning a potential multi-billion dollar market to the manufacturers of the ionization type smoke detector and that the NFPA was profiting from advertising the device. .