Many of you have heard “NFPA: Not For Practical Application.” To a certain extent it's true. End users equate the “fire service” to what they do day-in and day-out: a few EMS calls sprinkled with an electrical short, a dumpster fire and maybe a room-and-contents fire call. NFPA committees deal with the what ifs. What if a room-and-contents fire becomes a fully involved apartment building? What if that simple truck fire really became a tractor-trailer full of hazardous materials? What if that person you were performing CPR on has an infectious disease?

We always deal with the edges of the envelope. It's one of the reasons it seems to so many that we are out of touch, and it's not hard to understand why they think that. Because we spend so much of our time on the fringes, we develop a sense of reverse tunnel vision. This, in part, explains the proliferation of all the “fringe” documents over the last 10 years or so. The overwhelming reason, however, is the protection of emergency service personnel from the conditions they might face at a non-structural fire event and the assurance that protective clothing and equipment meet some basic minimum standards of performance. Better said, you get what you think you are paying for.

Anytime service

The fire service has transformed itself from literal fire protection to hazard mitigation, any time, any place. The only bad part is we aren't always prepared to deal with any hazard, any place, any time. That is what NFPA standards are all about: learning from mistakes, assessing the what ifs, dealing with new technologies, and keeping up with the department that has found a new niche in public safety that will eventually become an expected service of every fire department. In a way, we are trying to protect ourselves from ourselves.

Over the past 10 years, we have taken it on ourselves to be responsible for every type of emergency that could befall the average citizen in the United States. In response, the NFPA has developed standards to address any type of emergency situation, be it EMS, technical rescue, crash fire rescue, or wildland or structural firefighting. These standards have been developed with the what ifs you might not have thought of in mind. This has led to standards that address very narrow definitions of incident types and requirements to use a particular set of protective clothing or equipment only for a particular set of conditions — all well and good until you try to operationalize the concept.

Right now, I can think of five different ensembles you would need to carry to perform fairly standard tasks: NFPA 1971-compliant garments for structural firefighting, NFPA 1999 garments for EMS, NFPA 1976 garments for crash-fire-rescue/proximity incidents, NFPA 1951 garments for USAR/technical-rescue situations, NFPA 1991 and 1992 for hazmat incidents, and the newest NFPA 1994 for chemical and biological terrorist incidents. Many of us operate on the fringes of these incidents every day. The lines often blur between structural and hazmat or structural and medical services when a rescue suddenly becomes an EMS call as you valiantly try to resuscitate a smoke inhalation victim.

Many of the NFPA technical committees have struggled with addressing these edges. In public safety, nothing is simple. So why should we expect simple, one-dimensional protective clothing? We can't carry five ensembles on our apparatus. Our budgets won't expand enough to purchase five ensembles. Even if you could afford all five sets, how can you be assured of having the right one with you when you need it? The Technical Correlating Committee on Fire and Emergency Services Protective Clothing and Equipment Visions Task Group is attempting to address this very issue.

All-purpose protection

The visions task group is made up of professionals from across the broad spectrum of public safety specialties. Our mission is to develop recommendations for a long-term strategy to address restructuring of NFPA protective clothing and equipment standards. This project will look at all nine protective clothing standards within the TCC project.

We began our discussions last June with a brainstorming session over which fire service environments should be considered unique mission areas with unique hazards. We also discussed the issue of user acceptance. If end-users neither accept a garment nor purchase it, we have done nothing to protect them.

By exploring the barriers to ensemble or equipment use, be they subjective or objective, we can evaluate constructive ways to overcome those barriers. Are we giving the fire service what it wants or what it needs? Should we consider cost, value, logistics and life-cycle management? Are we overburdening the manufacturers with unnecessary certification and recertification testing? Are the standards driving products that provide overly conservative levels of protection? We even discussed the nebulous issue of comfort. If clothing isn't comfortable, chances are the end-users won't wear it, or wear it only when they absolutely have to, potentially putting themselves at risk during the call that goes bad.

The group came to a consensus rather quickly on the question of having too many niche garment standards — we do. But how do we narrow down the field? Our first and most logical step was to evaluate the hazard environments addressed by each standard. Are there some obvious commonalities? Is one environment really a niche environment of another? What environments really demand unique levels of protection? Structural and proximity firefighting are the only standards that address a hazard environment demanding high thermal protection in conductive, convective and radiant heat. Proximity garments are essentially structural garments with added radiant-heat resistance and a few design changes to ensure that protection is head to toe. (NFPA 1971 and 1976 are being merged and the 2006 edition of 1971 will address protective clothing and equipment for both disciplines.)

Hazmat and CBRN environments, we quickly concluded, address mission areas that required very specific protective clothing and equipment that perform at a very high confidence level. It was agreed that NFPA 1991, Vapor-Protective Ensembles for Hazardous Materials Emergencies; 1992, Liquid Splash-Protective Ensembles and Clothing for Hazardous Materials Emergencies; and 1994, Protective Ensembles for First Responders to CBRN Terrorism Incidents, should remain stand-alone documents.

It isn't too hard to envision there might be some document merger between these three some time in the future as the protective materials technologies blur between the closely related disciplines. As many of us in the fire service say, “CBRN terrorism is really hazmat with an attitude,” and there is a lot of practical truth to that. As more precise ensemble evaluation methodologies are developed, we might see the protective challenge layering that we saw with structural and proximity garments, where one ensemble is essentially the base garment for another layer of protection.

Document convergence

That leaves us with NFPA 1977, for wildland firefighting; 1999, for emergency medical operations; 1951, for USAR operations; and 1975, for station and work uniforms. The Task Group eliminated the wildland standard as a document that easily could be merged with another without potentially losing momentum. There may be future ties with the 1975 document, but for now we agreed the 1977 document addressed a specific environment, had tremendous user acceptance and should be left alone. We're down to three.

We talked about the market for the three remaining standards. Is there voluntary end-user support? Some jurisdictions have no choice but to comply to local or state adoption of NFPA standards. But many jurisdictions have a choice, and they are the ones that are a better barometer of user acceptance.

What are the barriers to acceptance? Are we overbuilding protection so that the garments are uncomfortable during routine wear? Very often this is the case. How can we balance the need for adequate protection against the most hazardous challenges of the mission with comfort? Can one layer provide a base of protection for another? Are our performance expectations realistic and objective? In other words, are we overdoing the what ifs?

We needed to step back and reassess on a number of levels. First of all, we needed to look at actual incidents and the protection challenges presented by those missions. Do our standards address those challenges? Are there anticipated challenges in our standards that don't occur regularly? What are the accident and injury statistics telling us?

Mechanisms of injury often are great indicators of gap in our performance standards. We must however, be careful not to assume too much from these statistics and over-generalize a threat. It can cause us to divert away from meeting the needs of the many. Are documents really trying to address some common challenges?

In particular, EMS and USAR are the two documents that rise to the top on that question. Both address protection from bloodborne pathogens and mechanical/physical damage at their core. Based on updated information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the medical community regarding types of pathogens, methods of transmission and availability of vaccines, we can reassess our definition of reasonable levels of protection from body-fluid pathogens.

Comfort, in terms of a high total heat loss requirement, is identified as a need for both. Flame resistance is addressed by NFPA 1951 but not in the EMS standard. We must ask ourselves if this is an important attribute of a garment for the vast majority of incidents in either mission group. A similar question can be asked of visibility requirements. If a USAR incident is conducted primarily when there's sufficient lighting, then what are the realistic garment requirements? However, EMS personnel operate under less-than-desirable conditions on interstate highways where visibility may make the difference between life and death.

The task group is exploring the commonalities, as well as the differences, between these two working environments. One thing is very clear: Neither discipline is limited to one type of event or hazard. Their operational arenas are varied and complex. In this need to be multipurpose, we may find the basis for commonality.

Standard checklist

Also required is an objective evaluation of each standard. An example of this might be something like a two-pound difference in the tear strength for the outer layer of a jacket between EMS and USAR standards. We need to ask if that difference is significant. Our suspicion is that many of the subtle differences between standards addressing similar working environments have been driven primarily by the isolation between the two standards development groups rather than by true uniqueness of working environments.

Design requirements must be evaluated and eliminated where they aren't significantly contributing to protecting the service provider. Design requirements have often found their basis in the garments that were already in use by the industry as the standards were being initially developed and then driven further by isolation of the technical committees.

The Visions Task Group is just beginning its work. Intuitively, we are seeing possibilities for a more generalized ensemble that will cover the protection needs associated with 80- to 90% of fire/EMS or USAR incidents. For many departments, actual fire calls are a small percentage of overall incidents. So why are we spending all our time in an NFPA 1971 ensemble when we really need something lightweight and comfortable that will give us limited protection from body fluids, physical damage and weather, and possibly provide some visibility?

The task group will continue to assess the industry for data to better define our direction. We will need accurate injury statistics to evaluate possible protection deficiencies, as well as equipment performance reports. Incident investigations, reports and studies will provide valuable information on incident types and operational challenges faced by response personnel. Surveys and purchasing trends also will provide insight into market acceptance of product types and designs.

We are very excited about this project and its potential contribution to fire and emergency services. Our goal is to increase the use of appropriate protective clothing and reduce exposures and injuries to service providers. The best way to increase protective clothing use is to keep it simple, functional, affordable and, most of all, comfortable.

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A 28-year veteran of the fire service, Donna Brehm currently serves as the battalion chief of administrative services for the Virginia Beach (Va.) Fire Department. She has served on the NFPA 1971 committee since 1988 and is currently chair of the NFPA 1999 committee. She has a bachelor's degree in biology from Old Dominion and a master's degree in public administration from Golden Gate University.