Flammable Furnishing Called ‘Burning Issue’ : Emphasis Placed on Safer Materials to Lessen Risk of Death, Damage in Public Facilities
No doubt about it: It’s a hot subject. And despite the pun, it’s a serious one affecting many lives.
Rich Mulhaupt, administrator of the National Fire Protection Research Foundation, calls it “the fire safety issue of the next five years or so.”
The issue: Flammability of furnishings and toxicity of ensuing gases in high-risk public places.
Hotels, hospitals, nursing homes: These are the places that Susan Jonas, a manager of Owens-Corning Fiberglas in New York, says “present the greatest potential for loss of lives.”
In her work she has been closely involved in the development and testing of new flame-resistant textile systems for upholstered seating, bedding, window treatments and wall coverings.
The need for new flame-resistant furnishings has been underscored by fires in buildings that serve the public.
In motels and hotels alone, there were 9,000 fires in 1984, the last year for which statistics were available, that caused 120 deaths and property losses of $50 million, the National Fire Protection Assn. recently reported, and in 33% of these fires, soft goods and furnishings were the materials first ignited.
Jonas gave these statistics in a seminar appropriately titled “Burning Issues” at the American Society of Interior Designers National Conference held in Los Angeles earlier this month.
The seminar also featured Gordon Damant, chief of the California Bureau of Home Furnishings and a national leader in product evaluation and regulation, and interior designer Norman DeHaan of Chicago, whose firm has completed several projects in the last few years involving state-of-the-art flame-resistant furnishings.
The technology is growing so rapidly, he noted, that what was state of the art up to four years ago may not be state of the art today.
Some wonderful fire-retardant materials are being used now, he noted, and still others are being developed. He talked about using fiberglass textile threads that look and feel like traditional fabrics, fiberglass beams and fiberglass moldings.
Jonas described how fires of the early ‘80s--among them, the MGM Hotel fire in Las Vegas, which took 84 lives, caused more than 600 injuries and resulted in millions of dollars in damages--inspired textile companies such as Burlington and United Merchants to work with bedding and furniture manufacturer to develop furnishings that would resist fire and, hopefully, reduce the number of casualties.
The Missing Link
The coalition acknowledged the fire safety “systems approach” of the Boston Fire Department, which has the strictest fire safety code in the country. The approach recognizes four elements of a building’s fire safety system: fire detection, notification, suppression and control of combustible furnishings. The Boston Fire Department looks at effective furniture flammability control as the missing link in most fire safety systems.
“The emphasis has been on sprinklers and smoke detectors,” Jonas observed. “We’re talking about stopping the fire before it starts through the flame-resistant furnishings.”
With this in mind, the coalition of manufacturers, hotel interests and others learned to use woven glass fabrics as barriers to encapsulate volatile materials, such as foam, to prevent contact with flame.
Mattresses, which Jonas termed “a prime contributor to a room’s fuel load,” are being encapsulated, for example, in a flame-resistant woven glass ticking, sewn around the mattress with special glass-fiber thread, locking-up the flammable contents to prevent their ignition in a fire.
Barrier to Flames
The same theory was used in developing an encapsulation process for upholstered furnishings, sewing in a flame-resistant material between the standard fabric and standard foam. The idea is for the barrier to prevent flame from reaching flammable cushioning.
It works, Jonas says, pointing to tests conducted in 1983 that convinced some hotel owners to join forces with furnishings manufacturers (Serta, Kaylyn, Shelby Williams and Sealy) in installing the new textile systems.
The Americana Hotel chain was one of the first to install the materials, and other hotel owners followed. Holiday Inns developed a prototype flame-resistant room using the encapsulation concept and other new flame-resistant textile systems, including tightly woven carpeting and fire-extinguishing collapsible wastebaskets. The room is on display at its Memphis franchisee showroom.
MHM Inc., which calls itself the largest independent hotel management company in the country, recently opened a Hampton Inn Hotel in Addison, Tex., where flame-resistant materials were used in all upholstered furnishings, bedding and window treatments. Inter-Continental Hotels presented a prototype high-performance flame-resistant room at the first restaurant/hotel international design exposition and conference held in Chicago in April.
Materials More Costly
New flame-resistant yarns and fabrics are being developed, Jonas said, and Len Corlin, editor of Contract Magazine and seminar moderator, said that there is even a new vinyl wall covering that emits gases that trigger an alarm when there is a fire.
Even so, fire-resistant furnishings are not being used in many places, and there are several reasons.
First, they cost more than traditional materials, and hotel, hospital, retail and office building owners are reluctant to pay the extra costs, DeHaan said. Private club owners are less difficult to persuade, he added.
Second, exactly what materials to use is sometimes questionable. Gordon Damant, of the California Bureau of Home Furnishings, said that some flame-retardant materials have proven to be worse than untreated materials in fires caused by smoldering cigarettes.
Suggestions for Change
So what is an interior designer to do? There are some practical solutions.
The designer could use naturally flame-resistant materials such as wool, a wool and nylon blend, or Naugahyde, as Damant suggested.
DeHaan said the designer could use low-wattage light bulbs, a new type of hair dryer that automatically turns off, door handles that are simple to operate--”so it doesn’t take two hands to get out of a room,”--room air conditioning that does not draw air (or fumes if there is a fire) from outside corridors, and tables of brass and glass on brass or marble pedestals.
“But some (materials that claim to be) marbles today can burn,” DeHaan cautioned. “So marble should be tested.”
Conversely, polyurethane was strictly a bad thing in the past, but recently, new types of urethanes have been developed. “So they can be bad or good,” Damant said.
Testing Combustibles
Knowing exactly what materials to use can be, for the interior designer, a real dilemma, Jonas conceded. A three-year, $1-million research project begun July 1 by the National Fire Protection Research Foundation should help.
From his Quincy, Mass., offices, Mulhaupt said, “We’re trying to build on the work being done at several labs around the country on fire-hazardous materials that go into buildings: carpets, rugs, chairs, wall coverings and ceiling materials, to name a few.”
His agency will test home furnishings and combustibles in concealed spaces. Products will be assessed for their abilities to resist fire. Findings will apply to commercial buildings, airliners and other forms of public transport, as well as to residences.
“Our objective is to develop an objective, comprehensive, generally applicable and widely recognized fire-risk assessment methodology,” he said.
Regulations Scarce
The project will bring together the fragmented efforts of labs all over the country to provide information for product liability and regulations.
That’s the third reason fire-resistant materials are not being installed everywhere. They are rarely mandated.
A study by the Boston Fire Department of hotel fire safety codes in the top 10 U. S. business travel destinations found that eight out of the 10 cities, including Los Angeles, do not regulate the flame-resistance of upholstered furnishings or beddings. Boston has regulated upholstered furniture since 1979, when the city also took an unprecedented step in hiring a department chemist, Edward V. Clougherty.
Boston’s lead stemmed from the 1942 Coconut Grove nightclub fire there, which killed 496 people, he said in a phone interview. Still, it took Boston a long time to enact a formal fire-prevention code. The city’s first was in 1959.
California Regulations
“Now it’s not unusual for me to get calls asking for our regulations,” Clougherty said. However, he pointed at other places that are making strides in formulating more thorough regulations. Among them are the New York Port Authority and the state of California.
After the seminar in Los Angeles, Damant talked about California regulations. “We are in the position of having a mandatory flammability standard for residential furnishings because 75% to 85% of the fatalities from fires occur in residences,” he said. “No other state has anything like this.” California has had it in effect for 10 years.
Where California is weak in regulating furnishings is in hotels, hospitals, commercial and some other types of public buildings. In 1984, California had 1,063 hotel/motel fires, causing just under $2 million in property damage, two deaths and 143 injuries, according to the state Fire Marshal’s Office.
“The bureau’s original flammability standards for furnishings were primarily intended to address hazards of those furnishings (including mattresses) in residential occupancies, as well as being the minimum standard for any other type of occupancy,” Damant explained in the seminar.
Evacuation Problems
“However, in recent years, the bureau has developed new flammability standards for furnishings intended for use in high-risk occupancies and certain types of public buildings.”
The reason? “In many types of buildings, there are special factors that must be considered when assessing the increased risk of fire to the building occupants,” he said.
There are facilities, like penal institutions, that prevent rapid escape from fire, he noted, and there are facilities that house occupants who are physically unable to evacuate raidly, such as hospitals and nursing homes. He also cited structures that house many thousands of people at one time, like stadiums, auditoriums, high-density office buildings, high-rise apartments and hotels.
Damant’s bureau adopted two technical bulletins requiring flammability testing of mattresses and upholstered furniture in high-risk and other types of public buildings. The regulations are voluntary, but he expects either or both to become mandatory statewide within a year.
Information Packet
The bulletins are detailed in the “Flammability Information Package,” available through his office, a division of the state Department of Consumer Affairs, at 3485 Orange Grove Ave., North Highlands 95660. San Francisco already adopted the one relating to testing furniture, Damant said.
The National Fire Protection Assn. writes fire codes that are adopted at a variety of governmental levels. “Sometimes they are adopted in their entirety, but in many instances, they are altered somewhat to fit other existing regulations,” Jamie E. Haines, director of public affairs, explained.
As interior designer Guy Ramsey, of Integrated Design Associates in Los Angeles, observed, there are many considerations in adopting fire-safety regulations, and a prime one is: How important are they to the jurisdiction’s economy? Tourist-oriented Palm Springs would have more interest in hotel fire safety than the City of Industry, he said.
He was also critical of the insurance industry, saying that it values buildings more than it values lives.
Peter Barile of Shelby Williams Industries in Tennessee suggested that insurance companies lower rates as a way of providing an incentive for building owners to use fire-resistant interiors. “But insurance companies hardly even require sprinklers,” he said with a sigh.
Smoke as the Killer
Damant is not holding his breath for a federal standard regulating fire-resistant furnishings in public places, but Barile says that a combination of codes and technology could reduce the number of deaths and injuries suffered from fires each year.
Damant estimated that between 6,000 and 7,000 Americans die in fires annually, and of those, about 80% are from smoke inhalation.
“Nothing is flameproof,” Barile explained, “but if we can provide escape and (more) reaction time through fire-resistant materials and buildings built to code for escape, we should be able to evacuate more people and save more lives.”
Industry has responded to the need, he stressed. “We have the product to make for greater fire safety, though it costs a little bit more. So the onus is now on building designers, builders and owners--and to some extent, fire and building officials and the insurance industry--to request it.”
So far, he lamented, only a few individuals have.
