Good day all .... As Roland guessed - I'm going to weigh in with how this AHJ (me) views impairments.
In my early days as the local official (marshal) I took the position that impairments needed a fire watch - either using FD personnel in some cases or privately hired security personnel to wander or patrol the premises. I would spot check them or even stay myself to oversee things so personnel werent just hanging out and talking over coffee. Somehow I had convinced myself that I was doing not only the right thing but also a 'good' thing by covering the bases and heck, even I'm here .... we're in good shape. Well time went on in that capacity and I read, learned, listened, and also criticized myself. I was actually sanctioning the use of people (firefighters or not) to wander (occupy) a building that was sprinkler impaired!! Let me re-phrase that .... I'm allowing more people than normal to occupy a building that on its face could not be built or occupied without a sprinkler system in the first place. If this building came across my desk in the form of plans for review I would have rejected it because it lacked code required sprinklers, end of story. Well so now its built .... and in the process of putting in sprinklers for one code reason or another (height & area modification, contruction type, rating of members, egress capacity, egress travel distance, occupant loads, haz-mat storage, process, or any others in the book) I end up with a building that MUST be sprinkler protected or else it violates 1 to 100 sections of the building code which governed its first occupancy. Sprinkler protection is just that - there aren't really any equivalents to it. If I'm going to substitute fire watch people for sprinklers then I'm going to need an awful lot of people to stand under every sprinkler head and watch for fire .... and what if .... what if one of these fire watch people actually finds a fire ???? The obvious answer is sound an alarm .... then you might even say that an incipient stage fire and a trained person could deploy portable extinguisher in an attempt to suppress the fire .... but what if ??? .... What if the fire isnt incipient when its discovered? What if there is no trained personnel? What if the one or even two portable extinguishers arent able to EXTINGUISH (not suppress) the fire .... before long its chaos and we surrender ourselves to the fact that we just get the people out. Terrific, except for the people who come next ... the responding firefighters. The responding personnel now must battle a fire that is well invovled in a building that was never meant to be without sprinkler protection. Sure there is an FDC and we will supplement the connection ASAP but the likeliehood that this fire has already achieved trmendous headway is likely and may have extended beyond the area of origin. Regardless though we are now subjecting fire fighters to a situation that was designed to never have happened in the first place. The risk to responders is great enough without dealing with impairments to protection systems. If you asked me now how to protect an impaired property in order to maintain occupancy I'd tell you with the straightest face and firmest tone .... however many engine companies it will take to provide a constant water supply at the immediate ready. The number of personnel is more or less dictated by the specifics of occupancy and local conditions. I guarantee you this is going to cost less than renting rooms at the Holiday Inn or Motel 6 down the street. Fire sprinklers were never intended to be supplemented with a fire watch, its the other way around ... everything we do is always in support of the sprinklers. This ran a bit long - and Roland is probably wishing he hadnt invited the AHJ's to reply :) Thanks for listening. Dave P. An AHJ in NJ _______________________________________________ Sprinklerforum mailing list [email protected] http://lists.firesprinkler.org/mailman/listinfo/sprinklerforum To Unsubscribe, send an email to:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Put the word unsubscribe in the subject field)
