Hi, welcome to today's webinar, Construction Fire Safety Codes that Safeguard Buildings During Construction, hosted by Inland Marine Underwriters Association. I'm Eileen Monreale, Education Training Specialist for IMUA, and I'm glad that you joined us today. Also, I would like to thank my colleagues, Lillian Coulson and Ali Monreale, for working behind the scenes to coordinate this webinar. We have over 70 attendees and we look forward to a great session. Please be aware of the IMUA policy statement that reminds us all to refrain from entering into any discussions of matters affecting rates or conditions of insurance contracts. You will find on your screen the attendee control panel and it sometimes minimizes by default, but at any time you can simply right click on the orange arrow that does remain and it will bring it back to view. And if you want to keep it in permanent view, you can click the view tab across the top of the control panel and uncheck the auto hide option. Also, you will notice a question box in the control panel and our presenters look forward to your questions during the Q&A portion. We do have all your microphones muted, but during the Q&A, if you want to open your mic, just raise your hand and we could do that. Other than that, you could type them in. To encourage your questions, because we definitely want to hear from you and we want to make it a little bit fun, we will send a $25 Amazon gift card to the most engaged slash best question that comes in today and our instructors will pick that at the end. So without further delay, I would like to introduce today's instructors, Ray O'Brocki and Steve Lavelle. Stephen Lavelle is a risk manager at NTTACT. After graduating from the University of Rhode Island with a Bachelor of Science degree in Industrial Engineering in 1987, Stephen started his insurance career with Industrial Risk Insurers. He spent almost 10 years at IRI assessing large HPR properties before moving on to One Beacon Insurance, now Intact Insurance, where he has spent the last 25 years in various positions. He holds the Charter Property Casualty Underwriter, CPCU, designation from the Institute and the Certified Fire Protection Specialist, CFPS, certification from NFPA. Stephen is now the Risk Control Manager for Intact's U.S. operations. He was born and raised in Rhode Island, where he now resides with his wife and two children. Ray O'Brocki is the Manager of Fire Service Relations for the American Wood Council. He was previously the Chief Building Official for the City of Rockville, Maryland. Ray was also the Assistant Chief, retired, of the Baltimore, Maryland Fire Department until 2013. He was appointed Fire Marshal for Baltimore in 2008. Ray also has served on the Maryland State Fire Code Update Committee, the Steering Committee for the Mid-Atlantic Life Safety Conference, the National Fire Protection Association, NFPA, Urban Fire Safety Task Force, and is on the NFPA 1 Technical Committee. He is the Administrator of the Construction Fire Safety Coalition, a graduate of the University of Baltimore School of Law, and a licensed attorney. We are thrilled to have this vast experience with us today. Steve and Ray, the floor is all yours. Thank you, Eileen. Before we jump right into Ray's presentation, he put together a real nice, detailed presentation. Just wanted to set the table for us all. Ray, as you know, comes from the American Wood Council, but this presentation that he put together doesn't just cover wood construction, it covers all construction, so keep that in mind as you're going through non-combustible building, all these code requirements, which they are, covers non-combustible buildings as well. When we're talking about code requirements, it's just what it says, it's a code requirement. It's not something that's recommended, best practice, or advisement, or nice to have. These are actually code requirements, so they are needed. When we're going through some of these everyday challenges, that's something you want to keep in mind, is how sophisticated is the GC to look out for safety? Are they a large national company, or are they small regional? Large companies don't necessarily mean better. There are some good small companies that manage safety quite well. When you're looking at the safety plan itself, who's executing the plan? Is it the company, do they have their own dedicated on-site safety person that's there every day looking out for only safety? That's all they do is safety. Or do they use a third party that comes in occasionally, maybe once a week just to spot check to see how things are going, or do they use a superintendent? Our own superintendent, he's doing multi-tasks, multi-jobs, and safety is under his umbrella. Maybe he enhances his safety aspects with a third party, so it could be a combination. Just another thing to keep in mind as we're walking through this. On the underwriting consideration side, these requirements, not just for new construction, they're also for renovations as well. Keep that in mind. The quality of risk, when you get a quality of risk on a submission, how do you know a good one from a bad one? You could have a loss history that looks great, perfect, no losses, but frequency for fires usually isn't an issue. If they do have an issue for frequency on fires, then you better run it correct. Seriously, though, if they have no losses, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's a great account, because they could have some losses that just aren't reported. They might be under the deductible that someone put out with a fire extinguisher. Keep that in mind as well. Last but not least, we're going to start things off with a poll. Did I do that right? Oh, I went too far, didn't I? There we go. We're going to start out with a quick poll. We'll see how well you've paid attention to the introductions to the emails that went out. On average, how many fires did local U.S. fire departments respond to annually for buildings under construction or renovation? We have zero to 100, 101 to 1,000, 1,000 to 10,000, or more than 10,000. Take a look at that as we're going through. Like I said, if you paid attention to your invitation, that's my hint for you on that one. We're rolling in here as we speak. You guys did your homework. You are right on with that one. Well, actually, yes, you're right on. 49% chose the 1,000 to 10,000. The actual number is 6,420. That results in about 18 fires a day that happen every day on a job site throughout the U.S. With that, I'm going to just jump to the next slide and turn that over to Ray. Thanks, Steve. I'm going to turn my camera off. I'm in coastal Delaware. Sometimes bandwidth is an issue. I want you to look at the slides anyway, not me. This is the nature of the fire problem in the country. I'm not going to read all the stats. I am going to say they look like big numbers. They're not small numbers. To put it in perspective, both fires under construction and during major renovations combined only make up 1.7% of all structure fires in the country. Just new construction makes up less than 1%, 0.08%. While it's an issue, I want to put it in perspective. Single-family homes are still the fire problem in this country. That doesn't mean we should ignore these because these are huge fires that do a tremendous amount of property loss and bring a lot of devastation economically to a community. I was going to tell you real quick about a fire in Brown Brook, New Jersey. Brown Brook, New Jersey. I actually went up there after the fire was out. I highlight this one because it didn't just burn one construction site. It burned two. If you look at the picture on the bottom left, you see a podium. That had four stories of wood above that. It was all burned away. It jumped the street. You can see that CMU column in the background on the right side of the street. Burned that one to the ground. It did a tremendous amount of damage. It was an arson fire. An arrest was made. Arson is trending up. That's why I put that one in there. The next one is Fairfax County. It wasn't that long ago. This also did a tremendous amount of damage. This was a combustible garbage chute that did not have a recessed head in the top of it. It had a sprinkler head. That's required by the code, actually. A cigarette was in there. It burned it. It burned the whole place out. Tens of millions of dollars in damage. It occurred on a Saturday morning. The other fire in Boundbrook occurred on a Sunday morning or Sunday mid-morning. This is what I call the three-legged stool of effective firefighting, fire department access, water supply, and early navigation. So when you think of construction fire safety, think in these three terms. What good is access if you don't have a water supply? What good is a water supply if the fire is too far gone by the time the fire department gets there? So you have to have all three or the stool cannot stand. I'm going to move very quickly through these slides. This is like a 90-minute to an hour program. So I'm going to move very, very quickly. I'm not trying to get down in the weeds with you folks. I'm just trying to introduce you to the universe of construction codes. So I'm going to move very quickly. I think you'll pick up more than you realize, but I have to move very quickly through it. So let's talk about some of the risk and hazards on a construction site. It's no secret that there's many sources of ignition on a construction site. You can see those listed here. And at the same time, you have several sources of fuel. And like Steve said earlier, just because it is a Type I building, which would be a noncombustible, quote-unquote, building, don't believe that there can't be combustibles on site. Even concrete buildings have wooden forms to them. They still have packing material. Things still come on pallets. So don't think that just because it's a concrete or steel building, it is immune from fire. There was a fire in Brooklyn like two weeks ago that was a Type I building, and it had a very bad construction fire. So here's poll question number two. Here we go. What is the cause for the highest number of fires on construction sites? We have smoking, torch burner or soldering iron, usually called hot work, heating equipment, cooking equipment, or electrical. So we'll take a few minutes, a few seconds, just to see how the numbers come in there. And you can see all these, except for maybe cooking, you'd probably say, wow, I can understand all these being a source of fire. And I probably would have guessed that too, that hot work would be right up there, and smoking. But actually, the right answer is cooking equipment. So kind of a surprise there. So we'll move back on. Okay. Well, here are the causes of fires on new construction sites. Cooking is number one at 22%. Electrical is at 16%. Intentionally set fires are at 11%. The reason I highlighted those three is even though cooking is basically 22% of all fires, it only does about 3% of the total property loss. So those fires are small in nature. They don't generally do a lot of damage, but there are a lot more of them. They also are responsible for one third of all the civilian injuries that occur on construction fires. Now, electrical and intentionally set fires combined make up about 27% of all fire causes on construction sites, but they do 72% of the property loss. So while they don't occur as much as cooking fires combined, those two, electrical and intentionally set, are the ones that cost the most when you have to pay out those claims. They occur frequently in colder months. The peak times are between 1600 hours, which is 4 o'clock, and 2000 hours. But 12% that occur between midnight and 4 in the morning do the most property loss damage. So they occur more frequently in off hours, as you might as well guess. They probably occur during work hours, but because someone is there to extinguish them, we never hear about those, and they never get out of the incipient fire stage. So it brings us to poll question three. All right, so what is the cause for the highest direct property damage of fires on construction sites? And we have the same categories. We have smoking, hot work, heating equipment, cooking equipment, and electrical. And if you were paying attention to Ray, he kind of gave you the answer as he was speaking. But again, all these things, with the exception of cooking equipment, you don't really expect to see much cooking equipment on a job site. But that's these guys with their, you know, when they're on a break to doing, eating out their lunches and things. And let's see, we got electrical at 53%. You guys are good. You paid quite close attention, and that is the correct answer. Moving on. Okay, this is just fires occurring during major renovation. Most of these fires are confined fires. More than a third of them are confined fires that really don't go anywhere. But these are the causes. Cooking falls way back. I don't need to read the whole slide. Now, there are codes and standards to govern construction fire safety, or they apply during construction. And the problem is not a lot of folks know about that, even in the code enforcement world. You have the International Fire Code, Chapter 33, which I'm actually on the technical committee for that. NFPA 241, which is the NFP standard, sort of the grandfather of all the codes that safeguard construction. It was adopted in 1933, so it's been around a long time. It's a very short standard. It's only about 22 pages long. It's referenced in the IFC. The IBC deals with construction safety, maybe a little less emphasis on the fire safety. And then NFPA 1, Chapter 16, talks about it. But owners have responsibilities to prevent or to not prevent, I'm sorry, to create a culture of safety. And they can do it through being engaged in these methods. Now, this is the only slide I'm going to read. A fire safety program shall be included in all construction, alteration, or demolition contracts. And the right of the owner to administer and enforce this program shall be established even if the building is entirely under the jurisdiction of the contractor. So that means that all construction contracts, not just big ones, not medium ones, all of them are supposed to have some kind of a safety plan and a fire safety program with someone responsible for it. And the owner must designate that person if they're not going to be that person. And they're still responsible for it even if it is delegated. They can delegate the responsibility. They cannot delegate the accountability. And the program manager, the NFPA 241 calls it the fire prevention program manager. The IFC calls it the site safety director. But they both have to do the same things. And you can see the different things that they would do here. Employees also have a responsibility to report hazards, observe all the safety rules, and to use their tools in a safe manner and wear their personal protective equipment. Now, here's a slide that I do want to talk about a little bit more. In my intro, I was introduced by Eileen, and she said that I used to be a fire official in Baltimore, and I was, and I used to be a building official in Rockville, and I was. So I ran the building department in Rockville. I ran the fire marshal's office in Baltimore City. And there is a gap in responsibilities on what the traditional role of the building inspector and the fire inspector do. The building inspectors look at the fire inspectors, and they say construction fire safety, that's in the fire code. That is a fire inspector issue. That's what they need to inspect. We go on site. We look at the approved plans. We look at the as-built. We apply MEP codes. And that's what we do. The fire inspectors say, wait a minute, we don't go on new construction sites. The fire code is a maintenance code. We go when there's a finished building to inspect. New construction is the building inspector's job. And they're not saying it to be lazy or to be mean or to be neglectful. They just are trapped in their traditional roles. So I call it the responsibility gap. And in that gap falls all the bad practices that you see that lead to fires on construction sites, really bad fires on construction sites. So here's just a quick overview of what a safety program should consist of. It should consist of all the following. Because I'm going to go through each one individually very briefly. I'm not going to read them here. And this is actually the code language. It says what you need in a fire prevention plan. These are the items. And you can go to either NFPA 241 chapter 7 or the IFC chapter 33, section 3308. And you can read up on these if you're interested in those. These are just additional things that should be included or must be included in a compliant fire safety plan. And usually in my talk, I go through these in more detail. And that is, it brings us to poll question 4. Okay, so which of the following is not addressed in a fire safety program? Good housekeeping, on-site security, training of employees, development of a pre-fire plan with the local fire department, or adequate personal protective equipment for all on-site workers. So this is what is not. So four of the five are in a fire safety program. One is not. So let's see what we have here. Give me a few more minutes, seconds. And that is correct. Fire plan really does not deal with personal protective equipment for site safety people, workers. It's all the other four. So very good. Okay. This section, I'm going to talk about individual code requirements. There might be best practices in here. If I put those in here, that's because some places already started to take and codify those best practices. And that's usually the way it happens. Site security is a big deal right now because arson is trending upward. The guard service. See, in the code, it says guard service will be provided when required by the authority having jurisdiction. Security fence is required when we're provided by the authority having jurisdictions. Well, there's a new provision in NFPA 241 that has triggers built in that a guard service is required when the structure reaches 40 feet above grade plane. That's when it's required. But some jurisdictions have changed this older default setting to say that you need the security fence, you need the guard service, unless the authority having jurisdiction says you don't. So they're changing that default setting, like LA City did that. And the codes are starting to do that as well. And this used to have a site security plan and have a security assessment based on the following criteria. The guard service must be trained. And this was a stat. I track all multifamily construction fires around the country, or 24 of them. That was a 10-year high. 16 in the media were reported as suspicious. See, they always put up security fences after the fire occurred. This was a fire that occurred in Long Neck, Delaware, that I actually went to. And there were three guarding departments. This was the one in the middle. And the Delaware State Fire Marshal told me that he believed, his investigators believed that folks came out of the tree line, went to the back, were in there doing drugs and other things, caught the place on fire. So site security was an issue here that could have prevented this. So they put a fence up around this one. The other two, they still left unfenced. So I couldn't believe it. And they said, no, we have to put a fence up around this one. It's a safety hazard. The other two, we don't have to. So they learned nothing from the fire, but it is important. And convincing corporate leadership is a challenge because they feel that's unnecessary expense sometimes in urban settings is also a challenge. These are just final thoughts on security. In fact, that picture is one of the unfenced garden apartments for the Long Neck Delaware Fire that I took a picture of that didn't have a fence. The other apartment looked just like that one. It doesn't anymore, but it did when it was built. There has to be adequate separation distance between temporary buildings and the subject building. That's one of the things that's covered in NFP 241. Housekeeping, very important. And just because you have rules on the books, if you don't enforce them, it doesn't really matter. And 241 does deal with waste disposal. I'm gonna tell a very quick story. I'm cutting out a lot of the war stories, but I had a renovation I did in my house in Baltimore City. And I found a bunch of bags, Taco Bell and KFC bags in my duck work that I surmised that workers stuck there when they were building the house or remodeling the house. And it was just a single family home, actually a row home. Imagine a big construction site. They're not gonna go, they may have 30 minutes for lunch. They're not gonna go walking around for a trash can. They're gonna shove it in a wall cavity and it's gonna be combustible. And guess what else gets shoved there? Cigarettes, when there's no smoking on the site, they smoke and they stick it to hide their cigarette butts there. But you really should clear all your refuge waste daily. Keep dumpsters from overflowing and pull them away as far as you can. And they wanna provide adequate dumpsters and waste receptacles for the workers. This is just the standard on hot work and hot work permits and fire watches. That's referenced in 241. And these are some hot work definitions about what is hot work. I'm not, I don't have time to read them all, but this is an internal practice. This wouldn't be something that you would get from the authority have in jurisdiction. It would be a guy or a girl or a female that is the permit authorizing individual and they have certain duties. These things are the hot work that 51B applies to. There's other things that it doesn't apply to. It should be controlled. It should be monitored. You should have a fire watch. The person issuing the permit should go up ahead of time to clear out combustibles and go back to make sure that there's no hotspots or anything like that. Make sure there's clear paths, there's extinguishers present, that kind of stuff. They can keep track of it if they have an internal permitting system, which is actually required. Fire watch is important. Electrical, we talked about. Just because it's temporary wiring doesn't mean the National Electrical Code doesn't apply NFPA 70. All the branch circuits have to originate. There's a lot of issues on construction sites with extension cords. People run them over, they splice them, then they just take tape and they wrap them together. And if any electrical equipment is damaged, it should be removed. Just good practices. With temporary lighting, they shouldn't be secured by the cord itself, by the wire itself. They should be into a fixture, that kind of stuff. These are just examples. This was actually a construction fire in Somerville, New Jersey that I went to. Obviously, this area isn't burned, but it was electrical fire up in the attic. So I saw these, open splices. You see the wire, then tapping off an outlet to do some temp lighting and just really bad practices. Now, there's two schools of thought on smoking. One, where you ban it completely. The other one, you allow it, but you regulate it in smoking areas. Smokers are relentless in smoking. And I think if you ban it completely, that you run the risk of them doing it where you don't want them to do it and then hiding the cigarette butts in wall cavities and interstitial spaces. These are just pictures that I took at a construction site. And that's a pack of cigarettes, a cigarette butt is literally underneath that no smoking sign. I couldn't fit them in together because you couldn't see what it was. But they knew I was coming too. That's what kills me. Cooking, there's been a change. There's been a cultural change in the workforce where you have more employees that want to cook on site, either with a hibachi or a hot plate or something. And obviously, it's caused a lot of fires. So you want to designate a smoking, a cooking area outside of the building that has still no open flame devices should be allowed. It should be hot plates, microwaves, that kind of thing. And away from the building, we actually had a hotel in College Park, Maryland was being built. And we had trouble with workers coming back on site, off hours and sleeping in the rooms and cooking in the rooms off hours. So it's not even work hours you have to worry about. See, the Guard Service would have cured that, but they didn't have one. These are just some requirements on having equipment and how to fuel them and where to store the equipment and that kind of stuff. Waste materials, that's a big combustible material. So you want to segregate that and you want to limit the quantity on site every day. If you can and you should. Heating equipment, there's a big fire. When I was in Rockville, started by a torpedo heater that was left unattended. So they're supposed to not be ever left unattended, even though many of them have proximity switches. So if you knock them over, they turn themselves off. Many don't. You can't tell the ones that do from the ones that don't. And there has to be adequate clearance around it. In colder months, it's hard, but you should never allow burn barrels on job sites, ever. That's strictly prohibited. So let's see here. So also where there's significant volumes of wood framing and other combustible materials that have to be stored on site. If you have the lot size, they need to be moved at least 30 feet away from the building. They should be secured and they should have aisleways for the fire service to get through there if they need to be. It's not required by the code. This is a building that was being built in South Baltimore. And you can see that there's non-combustible cladding going up with the building. That red wood you see on the outside is FRDW. This isn't required by the code. This is above code, but it's a very good idea if you want to protect your building. In tall mass timber construction, it is a code requirement that non-combustible cladding go up with the building, but other types of construction, you do not have to do that. It's also a good best practice. It's not required yet. It is required in LA City that if you have a passive system, it's like a firewall or fire door. It doesn't do anything. It passively helps against fire spread where a sprinkler system is an active fire protection. And they're saying, if you have a fire barrier that's required according to the approved plans, you should complete that. Complete it fully with the openings and everything as soon as possible. Because if you compartmentalize these fires, it slows them down. It holds them in one area. That's why these fires take off so quickly. And if we have time, I'm gonna show you exactly what I mean by that with a video. And so it's open with a lot of ventilation. It moves very quickly, burns very hot. But if you have the passive protection in place, it segregates the fire from other parts of the building. And this is just more on temporary separation walls. Like I said, they're not required by the code except in LA City, because they codified it. New Jersey's looking at codifying something similar to that. Just because it's a construction site doesn't mean that you can just store your flammable liquids and gases. These standards still apply to those. This is actually about gas line purging. Because this isn't just a construction problem, it's also a demolition problem. And the 241 standard covers new construction, modifications, and demolition. That's why it refers to NFP 56 about the correct way to gas line purge. Flammable liquids, you need to train your employees. This is an actual picture I took on a construction site. It didn't cause a construction site fire because it was electrical, but I saw it. You have mineral spheres, highly flammable. They lose the cap to it. They shove a rubber glove and a paper napkin in there. It's sitting on an OSB temporary table. There's a combustible box right by it. I mean, it's like the everything you could imagine and what not to do on a construction site. I mean, that napkin basically would act as a wick. You want to deal with flammable liquid spills promptly. And this has to be trained into the employees to know how to deal with this. They're not going to know inherently. Garbage chutes, you saw the construction fire in Fairfax. If they're of non-combustible material, which a lot of them are, they need to be protected with a recessed sprinkler head at the top. It could be supplied with just a commercial rubber hose, but it has to be three quarter diameter, inches in diameter. And most of those chutes come with a recess and you just buy a head and put in there and hook it up. We talk about the built-in fire protection features. You can't really rely on those because they don't come online until the building is almost complete, like the sprinkler system or the fire alarm or that kind of thing. Same with the fire doors and penetration seals and that stuff. This is a new provision in 241. This has to do with firefighting access. A suitable location is supposed to be picked out for a command post. And these items are supposed to be in it, like plans and keys and communication equipment and that good stuff. Also, there is a provision where if any of the area is locked or unduly difficult to get into, you have to put a key box in there, a knox box, they call it. That's a universal key box within every jurisdiction. The fire departments can gain access to that box where the persons or people would put keys to places within the building. Now you have to have exterior access. So you have to have 20 feet of unobstructed width with all weather driving service, 13 and a half feet of unobstructed height. And it has to be within 150 feet of all first floor exterior walls. There was an incident in West Des Moines, Iowa about a year and a half ago where they had the all weather driving service crush and run and the contractor asked the fire department if they could pull it up on Friday because they were having it paved on Monday. They allowed them to do it. It rained all weekend. There was a construction fire that Sunday. In fact, it was Easter Sunday and the fire trucks sank down to their axles in mud. Stairs, at least one stair has to go with the building. As the building goes up, it has to be usable, has to be lighted, has to be marked and enclosed once the exterior walls are complete. LA City is saying all the stairs have to be usable. If you have four stairs required, four stairways need to go up with the building, at least one floor below the floor back to construction. Now with the exterior, okay, this slide duplicated for some reason where I talked about that. We'll go backwards, sorry. Hit the wrong button. Hydrants, they have to be free from obstruction. If the fire department cannot get to the fire hydrant or the fire department connection on the building itself, the water supply is absolutely useless. They don't have enough, they don't carry enough water with them to put out fires and buildings with just their tank. Now the standpipe is important. Any building over 40 feet is required to have a standpipe. So that standpipe has to go up with the building once the building hits that 40 foot mark. The fire department connection, FTC, has to be conspicuously marked and readily accessible. It's the most important fire safety feature on a job site because the sprinkler system is not gonna be online. Any special extinguishers aren't gonna be online or extinguishing systems rather. But the standpipe is the quickest and easiest way to convey water to upper floors for firefighting until those other systems come online. So it's very important. There was a fire in College Park where they had a sprinkler system. It wasn't online like the code requires and the fire department hooked up to the FTC. And instead of bringing water upstairs, they wound up filling the stair tower, the first floor with water. And this is just the temporary FTC as a picture from a place in Milwaukee. And it's telling you, this is the water supply requirement. It doesn't give you a whole lot of guidance on how much water you need. It just says like a suitable amount basically or an approved water supply system. But NFPA doesn't give any guidance. The International Fire Code does. It says basically a minimum 500 gallons a minute will be provided. Is that sufficient? Well, I don't know, but they give you some guidance. And there's some also some higher requirements if that building construction is closer to lot lines and adjacent buildings, like 30 to 60 feet. I mean, zero to 30 feet is the full unbound of fire flow for the finished building is required. From 30 to 60 is 50% of the fire flow of the finished building. And then anything over 60 feet, it's just 500 gallons a minute. This was a fire in Rockville. I said about the construction heater was on the upper floor. It caused combustible debris that wasn't taken out at the end of the night to catch fire. The guard service didn't patrol. So this thing ran all weekend, caught on fire, got in the roof. It had a dry sprinkler system, wasn't turned on, even though it was operational, they didn't turn it on yet. And the fire chief there said they were flowing as much as 5,000 gallons a minute. So I don't know if 500 is adequate or not, but that's the requirement. Avalon Bay, a builder, after a series of very unfortunate multifamily construction fires, decided to bolster their site security. They reduced their ignition sources and detection. They used Wi-Fi enabled remote sensors. I think one's made by Ram Tech, one's made by Pilar. They monitor like 12 or 14 channels of data, including smoke, heat, heat rate arise, humidity, that kind of thing. And that info can be sent to any smartphone, any tablet. You can even go right to 911 to inform of any of the benchmarks that go off. But they do exist on the back of a lot of these. They have magnets, they have hooks, they have straps, they can attach to a lot of different types of construction, they're portable. But they're not required by the code, it's above the code. I'm just gonna briefly go over some new construction fire safety requirements that came out in the new edition, in 2019 edition of NFPA 241. It adds definitions, it adds a requirement for electrical service disconnecting means, a guard service requirement with certain triggers, command post and key box requirements that I talked about, tall mass timber, building construction, requirements, because tall mass timber buildings, these are mass and heavy timber buildings that can go as high as 18 stories, need to be protected during construction. They feel a little bit more than other types of construction because it is combustible and it is higher than type one construction. These are just the definitions they added. They had to add a definition for cross laminated timber because of the tall mass timber codes that came out in the 2021 edition of the International Building Code. So this is the electrical service disconnecting means, all of the electric has to be able to be disabled with one flip of a switch. It can't have all these different shutoffs and that's been on construction site. You have to go to the panel and shut off each sub panel separately. This is a firefighter safety issue because they don't wanna throw water on this fire, this construction site if they have a hot electrical equipment. That's the purpose behind that one. The guard service requirement is anytime a building is above 40 feet of grade plate, it should be provided with a guard service. And in the 2022 edition of the NFPA 241, it's gonna be 40 feet in height or 50,000 feet in aggregate floor area. But right now it's just 40 feet above grade plane. Tall mass timber has to have a guard service all the time in fencing. I talked about the command post and the key box requirement. This is the tall mass timber building construction requirements. They have to have a fire exposure analysis, although they don't really do a great job of defining what that is. So they have to have FPE, I'm guessing come in there and do basically a risk assessment and then have a plan geared towards to address that fire exposure analysis. Like I said, a guard service and a fence are always required on tall mass timber projects. Now these are some new provisions for the safety code for the international fire code. And here's our first poll question or the fifth poll question rather. Okay, poll number five is one of the new constructions safety code provisions in the IFC 2021 edition is a cooking separation requirement. Is that true or false? And if you are paying attention, you're probably going to get this right. It should be pretty high in the number, I would guess, but we shall see as the numbers come in. Excellent, 88% you are all paying attention. Good job. And the cooking requirement is, which you'll see is 10 feet. So these are just an overview of the construction provisions, a daily fire safety inspection. You can see the other ones. I will read them separately. The daily fire safety inspection. If this is enforced just by itself, if this is enforced, it will reduce the size number and severity of construction fires, okay? So what this means is that the site safety director has to do a daily inspection. That means they have to walk the whole job site, exterior and interior, okay? And they have to document this every day until the certificate of occupancy is issued. And they have to have this documentation made available to the fire official or fire inspector when requested. And if they can't do it three times in a row, or three times rather, the fire official can issue a stop work order. A lot of jurisdictions, the fire inspectors cannot issue stop work orders. This will give them the ability to issue a stop work order until they receive satisfactory assurances of future compliance. Here we go. And these are some of the requirements of the daily self-inspection. And if these look familiar to you, I've talked about every one of these. All these need to be addressed. In fact, our construction fire safety coalition, we're trying to get an app together to put on our phones. And that way, if the site safety superintendent or whatever you wanna call them, or her, they can have a checklist in an app and it would automatically document it. So they just walk around and hit this stuff on their tablet like checklist. Now this is the international fire code requirement. And this is for a fire watch, a guard service requirement when it's above 40 feet in height or 50,000 square feet aggregate. Now, like I said, half the country uses international fire code. The other half of the country uses the NFPA. One is their fire code. There's a little difference. I think moving forward, they're gonna try to get more in step with each other, but just keep in mind there's two different fire codes and I've covered provisions in both. These are fire watch requirements. They allow the fire watch to also serve as security. Now that's not the hot work fire watch. That's the guard service fire watch. They can do more, but they have to have the means to notify the fire department, have a little training or notifying the fire department. Here's the cooking separation requirement that's in the IFC. Has to be 10 feet away from combustible materials with signage. I don't know that it is 10 feet sufficient. I guess it's better than nothing. I'd probably go further than that, but 10 feet is the requirement. A site safety plan is now a requirement and must be submitted before the issuance of the building permit. I really hope this is enforced because as a building official, once someone got that building permit in hand and they can start putting shovels in the dirt, getting anything out of them paperwork wise was very difficult, especially if you're on the fire side and couldn't issue a stop work order. This way it holds them accountable. They're gonna give you everything they need to give you ahead of time. And a site safety plan isn't something, oh, you have some FPE draw up and it gets stuck on the shelf. It should be a living document that changes as the sequence of construction changes or the completions of the building or as contents of the building shift or has seasonal variations. And it should be trained on. It shouldn't just be this pro forma document that just sits on the shelf to check a box at the building department. So these are things that the site safety plan, this is ISC. So this is very similar, same as what's required in NFPA 241. So we have a plan for hot work, a plan for a lot of stuff here. Now, every job site is supposed to have a site safety director according to ISC or a fire prevention program manager under NFPA 241. And there is a training requirement for that. If you remember nothing else of anything I tell you, they're supposed to have this position and it's not a standalone position. They can have other duties. It could be the project manager. It could be the superintendent. It could be some work crew supervisor, but it has to be one person from beginning to end on that job site, as long as they're still working there. And they have to have training qualifications specific to their roles and responsibilities. So what does that mean? I don't know. They're leaving it up to the authority having jurisdictions to figure it out. Is it my full class that I give? It talks about all the roles and responsibilities, but I'll tell you a more standardized way of doing it is the National Association of State Fire Marshals, which I am not a member of, I'm not hawking for them, I'm just telling you about a resource I know of. They have an online class and they have an online class that goes over everything I went but in much more detail and in a much longer format and self-paced online modules and at the end you get a certificate. I think most jurisdictions I'm going to the different state fire marshals and saying you need to enforce this and this is an easy way to let the local jurisdictions office just say this is good enough to meet that standard from a state point of view and you know so if you have construction folks that are wondering how to do it, it's NASM, National Association of State Fire Marshals if you google construction fire safety. I looked over the whole program because I used all my pictures and I had sort of final editorial control over that and it's a really really really well done program and it covers everything you would need to be covered and these are the duties of the safety director as you can see very similar to the NFPA requirements things you would expect to see there. Here we go. These are the requirements for tall mass timber buildings. As I said three new construction types were added to the international building code in 2021 type 4a type 4b and type 4c and type 4a is the tallest. It can go as high as 18 stories tall and it could be made of cross laminated timber. I'm not going to go into all the details because it's a lot. So, the building committee that came up with these proposals said we have to safeguard it during construction because during the 2016-17-18 when they were deliberating all this, there were a lot of construction site fires. It wasn't in these type of buildings because they didn't exist yet, they were in the multi-families that we've been talking about all day and so they came up, the standpipe has to go up, the water supplies would be approved by the fire official, it has to be clad with non-combustible cladding inside and out as the building goes up. If the requirement for cladding on the inside is there for type 4b and 4a, 4c doesn't require to cover any of the mass timber on the inside, just the outside. So, it goes up as the building goes up and the reason this became a requirement is because the building has to be clad with non-combustible cladding as the building goes up and the reason this became an issue is because in London around the same time as this was being deliberated, there was a fire called Grenfell Towers where they had aftermarket cladding that caught fire and ran up the building, killed like 70 some people and the building wasn't a mass timber building, it was a concrete building, it wasn't sprinkled and had one staircase but they just were afraid that because this cross-laminated timber is combustible, they wanted to make sure that there could be no outside factors leading to fire spread on the outside of the building. Now, I've moved really quickly through this because I wanted to get to this video to give you some food for thought on how quickly these things, this is video from the first arriving unit in the Fairfax County fire I told you about, the one that happened on a Saturday morning with the combustible garbage chute that wasn't sprinklered, that had the dumpster that hadn't been emptied in a while so you had stuff backing up in the chute and somebody put a cigarette down there, just how quickly this fire moves. So, let me just hit this, this is the first arriving unit, you can see it's only fire out two windows so you're thinking okay no big deal as a company officer, I'll go in there, we'll stretch a line up there or do the standpipe and the video is lagging just a little bit so let's say pull in, you can actually see the scarring of the, where the garbage chute was, it's right behind that pole, you got a better shot, you can see exactly where that scarring, that smoke staining of the cladding of the place is. So, it's just out of two windows, right? They could put that out really quick. Well, this was eight minutes later, eight minutes later. So, I just wanted to give you that food for thought, I ran through this very quickly, I know about it, but I wanted to be very respectful about the time I was given and I wanted to leave time for questions and anything that Steve wanted to do. They thought I couldn't get through it, I knew I could, but I couldn't go into as much detail as I wanted to. So, if anybody wants to go back and talk about any of the things that I've talked about, whether it's site security or housekeeping or sprinkler systems not being turned on when they could have been or any number of things, feel free to ask now. Hey, Ray, nice job. I just want to expand a little bit on the guard service. I know it's a requirement in the code and as an insurance company, we get some applications from time to time where they'd say, you know, they check the box for watchman and the watchman just may be situated, if he's there, out at the front, just controlling access at a guard shack. They don't get inside the building and actually do rounds as the code really requires. So, that's something to be careful of. And the other thing, they're supposed to maintain a log. It doesn't say what kind of log, but again, if they're just using a notebook and they're checking it off, you know, are they really doing it or are they just sitting down in their guard shack and every hour they're checking it off? And every hour they check the boxes as they watch TV and eat their doughnuts, you know. There are some cheap services or I should say cost-effective, reasonably priced systems out there where they scan barcodes or some kind of electronic device where you can walk through the building and someone who's, you know, an authority for the GC or the owner actually reviews those tapes every night and make sure that whatever the guard service is contracted to do, whether it's, you know, going through the building every hour or every other hour and hitting the whole building, that they're doing it. So, that's very important and it's not, again, a very expensive. You're looking at, you know, a couple of thousand dollars, if that, and some of these buildings are worth many millions of dollars. So, it's a small investment to make sure that not only is the guard there for security, but he's there for fire as a fire watch, and we're not going to talk about too much about this as well, but water damage as well. If there's any burst pipes or things like that, he's going to catch that as well, you know, as they weren't doing their rounds. So, something to keep in mind when you're talking about guard service. And also, I think we overestimate some people's sort of fire safety literacy about notification, you know, train employees on notification. And you think, well, who doesn't know not to call 911? And there was a fire in Edgewater, New Jersey, where there's a couple actually, but the one, they were doing unpermitted hot work in a wall cavity, okay? They hear crackling. So, do they call 911? No, they go to lunch. So, when they come back from lunch, they smell smoke. Do they call 911? No, they call their boss. So, before the boss can call 911, the fire was already well-situated in the wall and interstitial spaces, burned through a sprinkler pipe, a plastic sprinkler pipe, because it was a 13-hour system, and a water flow alarm went off, and that's how the fire department was notified. Nobody ever called 911, and they didn't know that. The fire in College Park, the fire investigator told me that they found 12 expended fire extinguishers at the point of origin, because these folks were never trained on how to use extinguishers, and also when to give up using them. And I can tell you, if one extinguisher doesn't put it out, 12 isn't going to put it out. So, they wasted all that time where they could have called 911, and the fire was already too far gone before the fire department even got there. One other thing about guide service I just wanted to mention, it is a costly expenditure to employ guards, and a lot of municipalities or jurisdictions, they will allow alternatives. Ray mentioned that Avalon Bay, with their sophisticated alarm system, that's probably top of the line. It's very expensive, but it's well worth it if you're looking at what you're trying to protect. There are a lot of more systems out there that are more cost effective, wireless, portable systems that you can really monitor almost anything, not just smoke detection or fire detection. There's numerous data points that you can monitor throughout a building. And again, it's a portable wireless system. There are some other systems out there that have central station monitoring as well. There's a lot of material out there on the alarm system side, as well as cameras too. Camera systems are coming down in price, get a lot of bang for your buck, and some of those can be monitored. They set off alerts to whoever is on the alert notification list, whether it's the GC, the owner, superintendent, right down the line. So another good alternative to guard service, it's a little more cost effective. It's a little more attractive when they're putting together a budget. So something to keep in mind. Excellent. We do have a few questions. Thank you for that, Steve. We do have a few questions in here and comments. One from Ann Layton. She said, thank you for all you do to protect us. We have a question. What are the FRWD? What is that abbreviation for? FRWT? No, D. FRWD. Which slide was it on? I don't remember. Michelle asked the question. So if you could put that in. FRWD question mark, it says. But we have a question from Brian. Have you seen any fire CLT losses? And if so, are they better or worse than stick frame, normal stick frame? Well, the thing about cross laminated timber is the sheer mass of it. You really, like for instance, we had some ATF fire testing, not we, the USDA Forest Products Lab tested CLT, fire tested CLT extensively in the ATF lab in Powder Mill, Maryland. And it burned. We had a full compartment with 570 megajoules per meter squared of fuel load. It was equivalent to about 400 gallons of gasoline. Burned it until it burned itself out. Okay. It was a seven inch CLT slab with five laminations, five layers. It never even burned to the first bond line of the first lamination. So it burned for three hours and only went about an inch and three quarters into the seven inch slab. So there are ways to plane out that char layer and then put a patch in there. And there's been experimenting with that too, but it doesn't burn completely. It's just, the mass is so great. So the surface area per sort of square inch of wood is so low compared to stud and repetitive member systems that you're used to with lightweight wood. So there haven't been any because there's not that many buildings. There's a bunch in Europe and there hasn't really been any over there. And they're usually room and contents fires. All of these CLT buildings have to be fully sprinklered. Sprinkler systems are effective about 93% of the time. So, and many of them are covered with one or two or three layers of 5A type gypsum wallboard, which is a rated wallboard. So when they're covered with any wallboard, it usually protects them pretty far into the fire. Excellent. Thanks Ray. And actually Brian has a follow-up question. Is there any data points on how effective tattletale or similar monitoring systems reduce fire damage losses? I think I'll take that one, right? I think, you know, a system like tattletale or any other system out there is going to give you the early notification. So anytime you can get the fire department out on a job site earlier when there's a fire, the better. I mean, you saw that video after eight minutes that Ray showed, the whole building was fully engulfed. Now, excuse me, if they discovered that fire earlier, they might've had a better chance of controlling that fire to, you know, just a dumpster, you know, if they caught it that early. So obviously the sooner it's reported, the better the chance it's going to get controlled and extinguished. Excellent. And Michelle, you had your hand raised. If you have a question, I think you can open your mic, Michelle. And I will ask, Renee has a question she typed in. What is the best fire detection system that you would recommend for large buildings to be installed while a building is under construction? I don't know that any one is superior to the other. I mean, the only two I know of is RamTech and P-LAR make those. There's other systems coming online. I think any system is superior to no system. Like, especially you have the guard service and have the monitor at the same time, sort of a belt and suspenders approach, because those detectors are going to detect fires, but they're not going to detect people coming onto the job sites. So you might even be able to scare those folks off or call the police when you see somebody breaching that perimeter security. So, you know, they can't set a fire. The fire in Boundbrook, New Jersey, the reason it caused the arsonist so quickly is because he put on Facebook, two hours before the fire, he was going to light up downtown Boundbrook. And they had them on camera going into the job site. It was a little temporary, flimsy, weighted base fence, went in there. They had a quote unquote scrap room, which was one of the rooms that was going to be used had a quote unquote scrap room, which was one apartment, a future apartment where they put all the scrap in one room. They did the arsonist job for him. All he had to do was throw gasoline on it, which he did and light it off with the match, which he did. But if there's a guard service there and decent perimeter security, he probably doesn't even go on that site. And if he does, they get called right away. It sounds like a good deterrent. We have another question. What do you know about the NetWatch surveillance that uses solar panels to work the cameras? I never heard of it. Maybe Steve did. I haven't heard of NetWatch, but I know there's some systems out there that do have solar panels. And depending upon where you're located, I guess, is the thing to look at. I mean, if you're in Arizona or California, cloudy days, then you're good. But if you're in the Northeast where there's a lot of gray in the winter, you may have some problems. I know some of the systems out there, I know, for instance, Tattletail, that was mentioned, that system can run on a marine grade battery for a week or two before they have to change it out. So another alternative, again, if they don't have any temporary power on site. There's a guy based on the West Coast. I always ask any tech questions like that to Joseph Cervantes. He works for SpaceAge Technologies, and they have several emerging technologies that are going to be used or could be used for construction job sites for monitoring and that kind of thing. So if anybody wants to get his contact information, if you contact me, then I can give you his contact information. Believe me, he loves talking about it, so you better have a good half hour to spare if you ask him about it. Excellent. And we have, Michelle did say that she thinks it could have been FRWT that she was asking about. That's fire retardant treated wood. Ah, there you go. And we have another question that might be similar to the Tattletail. It says, Tattletail, etc. Do you have any examples of systems that have detected a fire before it broke out? I don't know of a system that could detect a fire before it broke out until they have either smoke or heat present. So that's already broken out. Okay. And that was from Renee again. And then we have a question from Brian again. Third question from Brian. I love the engagement. Is there an increased cost to repair the charging to CLT after a fire? Would the whole beam that is charred need to be replaced or can just the damaged portion be replaced? I get that question a bunch, and it really depends on where the damage is. I think if it was a glue lamp column, it might be easier to replace it. But when you have a big CLT slab, now they can be replaced. You can cut those out and replace them with another full slab. But if you're in a corner or something like this, SmartLamb came up with a technique. The Research Institute of Sweden did some additional fire testing of CLT, and they did an experiment where they burned it to burn itself out. Then they took the slab, they planed it out. It was like a six-step procedure where they screw glue lamp to fill in where they planed out the char layer and then a finishing layer. And then they tested it, and they found out that its flexural stiffness and its bending moments were fine. It just was its shear capacity was reduced, but sufficient enough for most applications. It's just like if you have short span with a high shear load, you probably wouldn't want to do that. You probably want to replace the whole panel. So it really depends. Just like if you have a fire in a precast concrete garage, a car fire, and the concrete spalls, it exposes the rebar, which commonly happens in those places when there's a car fire. You get an engineer come in, he does an engineering analysis, and then he comes up or she comes up with a fix on how to patch that. Or structural steel, same way. It's usually engineering judgments. There's not a cookie cutter way because they occur under different circumstances and that kind of thing. I know that answer might be emotionally unsatisfying, but it's just no easy answer to that question. Excellent. And we have a final question from Sarah. Do you have an example of what an acceptable safety program should look like? I have a template program. I mean, a plan that if you had a company that said, oh, I don't want to hire an FPA. It's not that big of a project. It's a tenant fit as a single family homeowner where they could just kind of fill in the blanks and it hits every one of these. And it's actual safety program template that certain jurisdictions use and even private consultants use when they do it. And if you went to the Fire Safety Coalition website, if you just Google Fire Safety, Construction, I'm sorry, Construction Fire Safety Coalition, that website will come up and then it has resources and there's a template plan within those resources. And I'm just to piggyback on that fire safety plan. A lot of companies will have a corporate plan to be tailored to the specific job site. So be cognizant of that. It really needs to focus on the particular project that's being built, not just a generic one. And the other thing to keep in mind is I've been on some job sites where you look at the safety plan. It's very well written, well worded, everything, all the ducks are in line. And then you walk in the site and you say, is this really the same place? Because housekeeping is atrocious. People are smoking uncontrolled. There's hot work going on with no controls. So you can have the best plan. If they're not executing the plan and really overseeing the workers, then it's useless. So really the only good way to make sure that you have a safe job site is to visit it regularly, pop in unannounced and do a walkthrough. Because anything can look good on paper, but until you get out and walk a job site, then you'll get a really good flavor of how things are working. I agree 100%. Excellent. Well, thank you both for sharing your expertise today. And you did keep it in the timeframe of the hour and 15 minutes. This is fantastic. Allie has shared a post for a link to a survey in the Q&A box. So anybody can take it in the chat box, can take the survey. We'll also send a follow-up email with that link. Look forward to your feedback. Thank you for your great questions. Now, Steve and Ray, we would love to hear the most engaged best question. And we'll send a $25 Amazon gift card because there were some great questions in there. I think Renee asked the most questions. I wasn't keeping like a total. I forgot about that part. I think Renee is fantastic and great questions. Thank you so much, Renee. Excellent. Fantastic sharing today. Really kept it moving and shared some very unique, important information for the insurance industry. So congratulations to Renee and thank you to everyone for attending today and for your participation. Hope to see you soon. And that does end the webinar for today. Have a great rest of the day. Thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Inland Marine Underwriters Association

Eileen Monreale

construction fire safety codes

safety plan

daily fire safety inspection

guard services

monitoring systems

Tattletale

mass timber buildings

fire exposure analysis