Fire marshals: Safety rule needed for upholstery
By Furniture Today Staff -- Furniture Today, January 22, 2007
Haven't enough people died and been seriously injured? Haven't enough homes and businesses been destroyed? Haven't enough lawsuits been filed? The time has come for an effective fire safety standard for upholstered furniture.
Whether or not the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission can effectively finish the job it started 13 years ago, all of us have good reasons to want to do much more to prevent these common and often tragic fires.
The absence of a credible federal fire safety standard for upholstered furniture has left manufacturers and retailers vulnerable to lawsuits and higher insurance premiums. Manufacturers and suppliers are on record saying that the lack of a standard complicates their strategic planning and long-range contracting.
The National Association of State Fire Marshals takes no pleasure in adding to the pressures on upholstered furniture suppliers, manufacturers, shippers and retailers. But public safety officials are sworn to protect lives and property. Fire departments cannot outrace most upholstered furniture fires, and homebuilders continue to block our demands for automatic residential fire sprinklers. We cannot force consumers to be careful. We know that we must continue to pursue faster detection and fire department response times, requirements for residential sprinklers and public education. But safer consumer products are a key element of our plan to make a safer world, including mandatory fire safety standards for cigarettes, candles, mattresses, consumer electronics and, yes, upholstered furniture.
As many as 60 people have died from fires originating in upholstered furniture since we invited Andy Counts of the American Home Furnishings Alliance to sit down to agree on effective fire safety standards for upholstered furniture. We have yet to hear back from Andy Counts, CEO of the AHFA, but individual companies have offered to sit down, and so we will move forward in early 2007 without him.
What good is a standard if the CPSC is unwilling or unable to adopt it?
Consumers may find it useful. We have resumed our public education program aimed at alerting consumers to the dangers of upholstered furniture fires. This effort will increase substantially at the national and regional levels with more of an emphasis on pointing prospective buyers in the direction of retailers such as La-Z-Boy, JCPenney, Ikea and Ethan Allen, which voluntarily do more than is currently required to address the safety of their products.
The states may find it useful. The federal government's inability to address cigarette fire safety prompted California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and all of Canada to adopt requirements that are identical to the requirement in effect in New York State. Numerous other states — including my own state of Maine — will consider bills in 2007, not only for cigarettes, but for upholstered furniture as well. The current political environment is ripe for fire safety legislation at all levels of government, and because there is a lack of consensus on an upholstered furniture fire safety standard, some states are considering California Technical Bulletin 133 for residential products.
Local building and fire code officials may find it useful. Ever since Rhode Island's The Station Nightclub fire killed 100 persons in a matter of minutes, fire code officials are taking conservative approaches to large volumes of polyurethane foam in commercial buildings.
These concerns were heightened with the realization that at least seven upholstered furniture stores and warehouses have been destroyed by fire just since August of this year. The Safe Buildings Coordinating Committee — a panel of prominent state and local building and fire code officials — is now considering guidance to code officials that may require a reclassification of furniture stores and warehouses from mercantile and storage to hazardous occupancies to achieve a more effective level of safety. NASFM envisions using an effective fire safety standard as a means of enabling retailers to exempt themselves from the higher levels of fire protection required of hazardous occupancies.
Hazardous materials transportation regulators may find it useful. This past summer, a fire broke out in a truckload of upholstered furniture, blocking traffic on a California freeway for several hours. The national fire incident data reveal numerous transportation incidents in which upholstered furniture was a major culprit. The Swedes have taken a scientific look at the question, with full-scale fire tests of a truckload of upholstered furniture conducted in an abandoned roadway tunnel in Norway. The test produced one of the most intense fires ever measured under laboratory conditions. Earlier this year, NASFM petitioned the U.S. Department of Transportation to classify polyurethane foam and products containing it as hazardous materials for transportation. Again, NASFM envisions using an effective fire safety standard as a means of enabling shippers to exempt themselves from hazmat transportation regulations.
Insurance companies may find it useful. State departments of insurance are being provided incident data to communicate on this issue with the actuaries at companies such as AIG and Travelers, which provide coverage to so much of the industry.
Corporate lawyers may find it useful. In his presentation to the furniture industry entitled "Risk Management for Furniture Flammability Cases," attorney John Burwell Garvey talks about the importance of furniture producers' demonstrating their honest commitment to fire safety. Any jury would find relevant testimony as to the good-faith efforts of the companies that join NASFM in developing an effective fire safety standard.
It all comes down to an honest commitment to public safety that may shield a company from punitive damages. Several years ago, Larry Liebenow of Quaker Fabrics made a good-faith effort to bring the furniture industry to the table to resolve these issues. The proposal he put forth came close to what we would find acceptable, which is the updated version of the California Technical Bulletin 117 standard. Mr. Liebenow's coalition melted away, but his good-faith proposal and ours remain on the table, as do other approaches. Underwriters Laboratories has agreed to conduct full-scale validations of viable approaches, which will be used to determine test methods and criteria.
Individual companies already have agreed to join with us, and that is how we shall proceed. Through our collective efforts, we not only will decide how upholstered furniture will be made, transported and sold in the near future; we will save lives, prevent burn injuries and protect property.
John C. Dean, president, National Assn. of State Fire Marshals
