UL Drawing Fire on Product-Safety Tests

It’s on the alarm clock that rousts you out of bed in the morning, the reading lamp you turn off at night. It can be spotted on your coffee maker and toaster, your refrigerator, stove and gas grill--and your TV, CD player, telephone and computer monitor.

It’s the UL mark, a small circle surrounding the letters UL. It certifies that the appliance, no matter what size or purpose, has been approved by the world’s largest independent testing service, Underwriters Laboratories. Stamped on nearly 15 billion products a year, it is, in the words of a top UL official, “the American mark of safety.”

But over the last several years, a number of UL-approved products have not been safe. Space heaters, halogen lamps, baby monitors and toasters have caused fires. A popular fire sprinkler system failed 30% of the time. And some smoke detectors and carbon monoxide alarms designed to pass UL laboratory tests didn’t work in real-world situations.

There’s no question that UL-approved products, such as Christmas lights, are safer than ones that don’t have the mark, and even UL’s sharpest critics say the not-for-profit company provides a valuable service. But many federal safety officials, firefighting officials and building-code administrators say they are increasingly troubled that the gold standard of safety signified by the UL mark is falling short in an era when Americans increasingly put their faith in devices purported to save time and lives.

“We’re having more problems than we had before,” said David Smith, president of Associated Fire Consultants, an Arizona fire-investigation firm. “A lot of products seem to be hitting the market that are not fire safe but have been through UL.”

Debra Rade, UL’s chief legal officer and senior vice president of administrative operations, said that among the 17,000 different products tested by UL, “there are very few [approved] that present a substantial hazard.” Problems that do occur, she said, are caused by new technology--or old technology put to a new use. Through those problems, what “we’ve learned is that the system works,” Rade said. “As soon as problems are uncovered, the wheels are set into motion to analyze the issue and respond.”

High-profile recalls, lawsuits and private industry spats have put UL under increased scrutiny. Firefighting officials, who for many years championed UL as a world leader in safety testing and standards, have begun to express doubts openly in the wake of the recall of more than 8 million sprinklers.

Interviews with more than 50 fire experts, safety officials, building-code authorities, engineers and lawyers around the country and a review of thousands of pages of documents obtained from court suits and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission under the Freedom of Information Act highlight a number of concerns about UL:

* UL’s safety tests may not reflect what happens in the real world. More than 350 smoke detectors have failed to sound an alarm in residential fires; about one-third of those same detectors were sent back to the manufacturer for retesting and were found to have passed a UL smoke test. And in testing pop-up toasters, UL has never included any kind of food in its fire tests--even though there have been an increasing number of reports of bagels, pop-up pastries and thick slices of bread getting stuck in toasters and starting fires.

* UL doesn’t always consider factors that could affect the long-term integrity of the product, and it rarely tests products once they leave the factory. UL, for instance, didn’t consider how the key components of the Omega fire sprinkler would react over time with some of the chemicals commonly found in the sprinkler’s water supply. The defects came to light only when the sprinklers failed to operate in two fires. More than 15 years after the product was first approved, it was found to have a 30% failure rate, forcing thousands of buildings to be retrofitted with new sprinkler systems.

* When a problem develops, there is evidence that UL is slow to react--and when it does, UL has first faulted either consumers for not using the product properly or electricians, plumbers and other workers for not installing it correctly. To correct problems, UL may require new warnings or consumer instructions before requiring modifications to the product itself.

For example, after a number of fires were started by halogen lamps, UL first told consumers to reduce the wattage of the halogen bulb from 500 to 300 watts and then, a few months later, directed manufacturers to place “Hot Surface!” warning labels on the lamps. But the Consumer Product Safety Commission also found 300-watt halogen bulbs started fires--even though they passed UL’s fire tests. It took two more years before UL adopted a tougher fire test.

Similarly, UL blamed the faulty Omega sprinkler on bad installation and anomalies of local water systems for more than two years, repeatedly saying it was a “site-specific” problem. UL maintained that position even after millions of sprinklers were recalled for what the CPSC labeled a design defect. UL stopped calling it a site-specific problem after the CPSC accused UL of misleading the public.

* Product-safety decisions are typically made in private, with manufacturers having greater opportunity to comment than the public or other interested parties, including competitors. And when questioned, UL often cites client confidentiality, making it hard to research how decisions were made and thus difficult to get standards or listing decisions changed.

Many experts interviewed contend that UL’s recent problems can be traced to the way the company is organized and funded--with more than 90% of its revenue coming from companies for testing products.

Because manufacturers provide almost all of UL’s revenue, many fire-safety officials say UL doesn’t always set the most rigorous safety standards or follow through to make sure the products remain safe once they have been sold.

Few manufacturers contacted would comment on UL, but UL officials reject any suggestion that they are too close to manufacturers. “We are a completely independent organization, dedicated to safety,” Rade said.

Not all fire and safety officials find fault with UL. Patrick Coughlin, executive director of the Residential Safety Institute, a public interest group that promotes fire protection, said he thinks UL’s critics are wrong. “It’s easy to be critical of them based on anecdotal evidence, but I think UL is very open and responsive,” he said.

Rade acknowledged that sometimes UL’s decision-making process may seem slow and mysterious, but that’s only because UL “is an engineering organization,” she said. “We pay very careful attention to detail” to make sure everything is in order before issuing any decision, she added.

Jesse Aronstein, a New York engineer who has persistently taken UL to task over the past 20 years, challenging many of its standards, said, “The UL mark guarantees that the product is probably safer than if UL were not around.” But he added: “The question is how well it is doing its job, whether it is truly independent and whether it moves fast enough when problems occur--or even moves at all. Those questions have to be answered on a case-by-case basis.”