Why Society Must Change First II

Previously, I mentioned the case of the "well-endowed" Hulk doll and the drive to ban them for (and let's be completely real here) the dolls' honesty about human anatomy. Now, let's talk about something considerably more serious: House fires.

Working where I do and doing what I do means I get to deal with mail of a mostly safety/OSHA/public school/office grunt variety. One of these publications is the NFPA Journal from the National Fire Protection Association. Being the curious and lazy sort, I took some time to thumb through it since the cover of the July/August issue had some interesting topics.

Unfortunately, all the ones I wish to discuss are locked behind a wall which requires both the reader to register (which I did) and to be a member of NFPA (which I am not). So I can't link to the actual text, only the URL where the abstract is located. However, I do have the magazine proper and have copied the relevant sections for this post. All legal complaints should first reference this page before attempting to fuck with me.

The first article that caught my capitalist attention certainly was titled to do so.

Building to Code

Can We Afford to Let a Man's Home Be His Castle?

by Jerry Wooldridge

While trying to explain why codes are enforced in residential properties, I've heard owners say, "A man's home is his castle. Why can't I just build it the way I want it?" Perhaps the best answer lies in statistics. As with most statistics, fire loss statistics provide us with both good news and bad. First, the good news: The number of fires across the nation continues to drop.

Over the last 20 years, fires have decreased by about 36 percent, and the number of civilian deaths caused by fire has decreased by approximately 53 percent.

The bad news is that our home, the place we spend most of our time, continues to lead the way in the number of civilian deaths.

During 1999, 3,570 civilians died in fires in the United States, and 81 percent of those people died in a home. It comes as no surprise that 71 percent of all structure fires occurred in homes.

Mr. Wooldridge then goes into the various codes (you'll also need a login for this section) the NFPA has regarding the definition of a home, requirements/defintions of and for primary and secondary escapes, requirements for door dimensions and locking devices, stairs, smoke alarms, and sprinkler systems.

The issue of residential sprinklers in one- and two-family dwellings sparked one of the more contentious debates during the development of the NFPA 5000. One of the arguements against requiring their installation suggests that their impact on overall fire losses would be minimal because most existing U.S. dwellings don't have automatic supression systems and won't get them.

However, I'm not so sure I agree with this reasoning.

I'd suggest that a significant number of fires still occur in newly or recently constructed homes and that the impact on fire losses of automatic supression systems might be greater than we think.

Between 1994 and 1998, 41 percent of the reported fires in homes occurred in properties protected by working smoke or fire alarms, according to the NFPA's 2001 report, The U.S. Fire Problem Overview Report.

During that same period, home fire deaths dropped by 77 percent.

Maybe the time has come for all our castles to be equipped with an automatic fire suppression system.

Now, Mr. Wooldridge does not come out and explicitly say it. He doesn't mention anything about using the force of law to compel people to buy and install automatic fire suppression systems (though the sharks are circling, in a tax-incentive way) and he didn't say he wanted to shame consumers into the market with a media campaign.

But, realistically speaking, how else can you say "the time has come for all our castles to be equipped with an automatic fire suppression system" and not have some idea of using force to make people install them? Some people will refuse out of monetary concerns, some will refuse because they like to refuse all things ordered of them, and some will refuse because they think they are safe without one. What to do in those cases and the others I didn't mention? Write another article? His airily dismissal of the phrase "A man's home is his castle" says volumes about his outlook on what he'd prefer to do.

The problem is a simple one: either a homeowner truely owns the property under his or her name and can dispose of it as he or she wishes, or someone else owns it and has the rights associated with ownership.

Mr. Wooldridge believes the statistics of deaths due to fires in residences without strong fire-fighting safeguard quite obviously overrides any claim a homeowner has to determining the best way to protect his or her house. I don't dispute the statistics or the reasoning behind automatic fire suppression systems being extraordinarily useful for combating fires. I do dispute that Mr. Wooldridge's arguement and word choice are the wrong ways to go about enacting this change.

Trivializing property ownership should be scrapped in favor of simple statements of fact and reason, which I admit Mr. Wooldridge engages in for the bulk of his article. In a way, it's an article about self-interest, though it arrives at that conclusion through twisted means. He wants people to be safe in their homes and he wants them and their property to escape as unscathed as possible from a fire. But under the rubric of forcing people to comply, I cannot agree.

Yeah, it's nit-picking, but it's worth mentioning.

A second article takes a much more rights-respective tack. In "Residential Fire Safety Relies on Education," Chip Carson says:

Almost three-fourths of the fire deaths in the United States occur in one- and two-family dwellings. Yet, the building codes and NFPA 101®, Life Safety Code®, have very few fire safety requirements for such homes. These codes do require smoke detectors on each level of the home and the newer codes also require smoke detectors in each sleeping room. The newer codes also require that the detectors be interconnected so that if one activates, all the detectors in the residence sound.

Codes pertaining to one- and two- family dwellings don't address the protection of vertical openings, a basic principle of fire safety, even though stairs may be open to several floors, and upper floors may have open balconies looking over floors below, allowing a fire to spread quickly between floors. Nor do the codes require fire-and smoke-resistant construction in corridors in one- and two-family dwellings as they do in other residential occupancies, such as hotels and non-sprinklered lodging and rooming houses. These features usually include self-closers on sleeping room doors.

At this point, the Classic Lefty would demand new regulations, laws, and rules mandating these changes so people would be safe once again. Also at this point, the Classic Righty would tell Classic Lefty that such mandates hurt consumers by driving up the costs of home ownership. Both sides entirely miss the point.

Why is this?

Part of the reason goes back to old English law, of which property rights are a major tenet. We've all heard the saying, "A man's home is his castle." Once a one- or two-family house is built and a certificate of occupancy issued, no re-inspection program is required. This applies to individual apartments, as well.

I don't believe most of us want the local fire marshal to come knocking on our door and announcing that he or she is there to inspect for fire hazards. Without enforced fire protection in the home to reduce fire deaths and injuries, the only other option is education.

Quite right! Even ignoring the implicit arguement that such inspections would be acceptible if most people agreed with them, Mr. Carson understands that "enforced fire protection" would be a violation of property rights and a better idea is effective education.

Who will tell the weekend mechanic that using flammable liquids to clean parts in a garage next to a gas-fired water heater may result in a gas explosion? How will homeowners know that installing burglar bars without interior emergency releases may prevent their families from escaping from their burning houses? Who will tell children not to play with matches or lighters?

How will students living in dorms know that stringing extension cords together so they can move the portable heater to the other side of the room may cause the wire to overheat and start a fire? How will the apartment dweller know that using a charcoal grill on a wooden deck may cause the deck to ignite, or that bringing the charcoal grill inside may result in carbon monoxide poisoning? How will families learn that practicing their home escape plans is the only way to be confident they'll follow it in a real emergency?

He's not immune to a bit of elitist hysteria, though ("Damn! The Proles can't figure this out on their own! Quick, to the schools!").

There are two other articles worth posting and commenting on that I'll get around to the rest of this week. One is from John Paradise and is about the dangers of home security bars that do as good a job of keeping criminals out of the home as they do keeping habitants in. The other is from Shelly Reese and covers the (previously unknown to me) scary new data saying children fail in astoundingly high percentages to awaken at the sound of fire alarms.

Posted by Drizzten at July 16, 2003 12:05 AM