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The Providence Journal burn test.
10.1.03
By G. WAYNE MILLER and PETER B. LORD
The Providence Journal
The burner shoots a small flame at the foot of the bed, something akin to a wastebasket catching fire, or a candle being knocked over.
The response is immediate, and dramatic.
The purple floral comforter erupts into foot-high flames.
The bed skirt goes up.
Within 30 seconds, a wall of flame rises from the queen-size mattress.
More flames drip from the burning mattress and the polyester-cotton comforter and spread in a pool across the floor.
Within a minute, the end of the bed is engulfed. The flames crackle like a bonfire.
The fire spreads with breathtaking speed.
In another minute, the bed burns with the same energy as a half-gallon of gasoline.
The fire spews carbon monoxide and other deadly gases.
And it generates incredible heat, soaring past 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit.
Seconds later, the bed becomes a potential killer -- the point at which flashover ignites every other combustible object in the room. It's the flashover that destroyed the LaSalette Shrine and the house in Westerly.
The intensity of the fire clearly demonstrates why time after time firefighters
report that they can't fight their way into rooms where beds or upholstered
furniture burn.
Journal
photo / Mary Murphy
SAFE DISTANCE: The bed in a burn test commissioned by The Providence
Journal was fully engulfed in just three minutes.
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It shows why people who fight or study fires say bedding, mattresses and upholstered furniture are causing houses to flash over and become engulfed in flames in roughly three minutes -- more than twice as fast as fires of a generation ago.
Bedding, mattresses and upholstered furniture -- much of it containing polyurethane foam similar to that which helped make The Station nightclub fire so deadly -- killed almost 30,000 Americans from 1980 to 1998, the latest year for which National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) data are available. Another 95,655 people were injured, many for life.
TO LEARN firsthand why these fires are so dangerous, and to better appreciate firefighters' dread of the superheated air and poison gases produced by such infernos, The Providence Journal commissioned a fire laboratory in Washington state to burn a bed and record the results.
The staff at Pacific Fire Laboratory, based in a warehouse near Interstate 5 between Portland, Ore., and Seattle, Wash., purchased the mattress and box spring for about $1,000 at a nearby store. The salesman said it was the most popular brand in that price range.
The mattress label said it contained 54 percent polyurethane foam and 46 percent polyester.
The Journal bought the bedding from a home furnishings store in Providence.
The pillow was filled with polyester and covered with cotton fabric. The
sheets and pillowcases were 50 percent cotton and 50 percent polyester.
The comforter and bed skirt were mostly polyester.
On the day of the burn, the Pacific Fire staff carefully sets the bed on sensitive scales that weigh every component of the bedding, from the 85-pound mattress to the 3.5-ounce pillow case.
The bed is set in a cavernous room under a hood big enough to cover a two-car garage. Fans will suck the heat and flames up into the hood and instruments will measure temperatures and deadly gases.
The staff carefully makes up the bed with two sheets, a sham, bed skirt, pillow and comforter. The cover mixes flowers and a checked pattern.
It looks like a beautiful, safe place to sleep.
The lab follows a protocol established by the state of California to test the flame resistance of beds used in hospitals and college dormitories. The protocol calls for applying a small propane flame to the foot of the bed for 180 seconds -- simulating a "common accidental fire," such as burning newspaper in a wastebasket.
Like most mattresses now sold in the United States, this test mattress is designed only to resist ignition by a burning cigarette. Safety experts want mattress manufacturers to meet tougher safety standards to resist small open flame. That would give the consumer more time to escape a potentially lethal fire.
"The protocol is for a mattress that won't burn. This will burn," says Joseph Urbas, co-owner of Pacific Fire.
Two staff members test two fire hoses to ensure water will flow when needed. They nod to Urbas.
Urbas counts down. When he gets to zero, the crew ignites the propane.
The comforter instantly melts and bursts into flames.
Just 20 seconds into the burn, with the comforter fueling bigger flames than the propane, Urbas quietly announces, "I think the burner is probably not needed anymore."
The staff shuts off the gas and pulls the equipment away.
The fire grows.
THE JOURNAL test would hardly surprise industry insiders or government officials charged with protecting lives: the fire hazards of mattresses, bedding and upholstered furniture have raised alarms as far back as the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Polyurethane and other plastics that were coming into widespread use during that era in homes and business were creating new fire dangers. Congress established the National Commission on Fire Prevention and Control, a panel of firefighters, professors, insurers, the president of Underwriters' Laboratories, and a burn specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital.
"Appallingly, the richest and most technologically advanced nation in the world leads all the major industrialized countries in per-capita deaths and property loss from fire," the commission stated in 1973 in "America Burning," a 177-page report that followed two years of study.
The report was illustrated with photographs of a dead child and a horribly scarred woman. Another haunting image showed the shadow left by a person who was overcome on a mattress. "Many of fire's victims never awaken," the caption read. "Smoke, toxic gases, or lack of oxygen kills them while they sleep."
This ran contrary to popular belief, which held that flame usually killed. In fact, the commission observed, flame ranked last of five causes of death: behind asphyxiation (fire depletes the air of oxygen); attack by superheated air or gases; smoke; and the toxic products that smoke can carry, including carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide.
The fire commission urged safer products, and better research and education
-- and it hoped the new Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) would
play a significant role. The commission hoped the agency would provide
the United States a "refined understanding of the destructive effects
of smoke and toxic gases, development of standards to minimize those effects,
development of labeling requirements for materials, and outright ban of
materials in uses that present unreasonable risks."
Journal
photo / Mary Murphy
SETTING UP: Before the test burn at the Pacific Fire Laboratory,
in Kelso, Washington, July 30, 2003, each item of bedding was carefully
weighed.
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But the panel raised a caution.
"We feel that we should be candid in expressing our concern that, because the CPSC is still in its formative stages, and because other hazards (many of them better publicized than combustion hazards) will be competing for attention, the problem of fire safety may become a delayed priority."
AMERICA WAS in the mood to protect when the CPSC was born, in 1972. President Richard M. Nixon had just created the Environmental Protection Agency, Congress was moving to pass the Endangered Species Act, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration was requiring seat belts and shoulder straps in cars.
"Today is truly a momentous day for the American consumer," said Sen. Warren G. Magnuson, the longtime champion of consumer safety, when Congress in the fall of 1972 passed the act establishing the CPSC. The act directed the agency "to protect the public against unreasonable risks of injuries associated with consumer products . . . (and) to develop uniform safety standards for consumer products. . . ." Among the products were upholstered furniture and mattresses.
One of the fledgling agency's first actions -- and the subject of its very first press release -- was a unanimous vote by commissioners, on May 24, 1973, to deny requests by some mattress makers to delay implementation of the Commerce Department's regulation that mattresses resist ignition by lit cigarettes.
"Our principal responsibility is to reduce the risk of injury to consumers from consumer products," CPSC chairman Richard O. Simpson said.
The CPSC accomplished much in the 1970s, including initiatives that made toys, cribs, children's clothing, power mowers -- even aluminum baseball bats -- safer. It exercised its recall authority frequently. But with a budget in 1980 of less than $42 million and only 978 employees, it was small (by contrast, the EPA that year had a budget of $5.6 billion and 14,715 employees).
With the inauguration in 1981 of President Ronald Reagan, who campaigned on a platform of government deregulation, it was about to get smaller.
Reagan wanted to abolish the CPSC, but lingering Congressional support for
the agency stopped him. So Office of Management and Budget director David
Stockman in 1981 vowed to strip the agency "down to the bone." Testifying
on Capital Hill, Stockman said that the agency has "embarked on activities
inconsistent with sound economic principles and with plain common sense."
Journal
photo / Mary Murphy
IN SECONDS: Lab technician Jerry MacPherson quickly pulls the gas
ignition flame away from the burning bed.
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Stockman did strip the CPSC, in Reagan's first budget.
Funding was cut to $32 million, and staffing shrank to 649 employees. As Reagan's presidency unfolded, Stockman continued with his ax. Staffing fell below 590 employees in 1985, prompting CPSC commissioner Stuart M. Statler to tell a Washington Post reporter: "In 1981, OMB sent us up the creek without a paddle -- this year, they're drilling holes in our canoe."
Statler resigned the next year after another round of budget cuts. "We are at a point right now where we can't effectively target new trouble spots or correct many of those already threatening," the resigning commissioner, appointed by Jimmy Carter in 1979, wrote to Reagan. "As a result, more Americans will be maimed and charred and killed before we can even begin to seek solutions."
In England, meanwhile, the government was moving to improve the safety of mattresses and upholstered furniture containing foam.
THROUGH THE 1990s in the United States, studies were conducted, hearings held, and commissioners came and went, but the CPSC still failed to enact a standard like England's that would require mattresses and upholstered furniture to be resistant to ignition by small open flame.
Home fires involving foam kept killing hundreds of Americans every year. Thousands continued to be hurt. And millions of new products containing foam came into homes, where many of them would remain for generations. Unlike some consumer goods, furniture and beds last.
This was the status quo when Hal Stratton, the agency's current chairman, took
office in June of last year.
Journal
photo / Mary Murphy
FATAL FIRE: Superheated air, smoke and poison gas killed a young
woman in this house in Narragansett on July 17, 2002.
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A former New Mexico attorney general, lawyer Stratton chaired the Rio Grande Foundation, a self-described "free market think tank" that envisions its role as promoting "prosperity for New Mexico based on principles of limited government, economic freedom and individual responsibility."
That philosophy concerned some consumer advocates. Ed Mierzwinski, of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, told the Associated Press that Stratton had "a worrisome anti-regulatory zeal."
But in confirmation testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee, Stratton, nominated by President George H. W. Bush, painted his agency's mission as noble.
"I can assure you that with two young daughters, I think of consumer product safety every single day," the new chairman said.
But his agency has no great champion in Washington like the late Senator Magnuson, and it remains tiny by federal standards: from 978 employees in 1980, staffing has shrunk to 471 today, and its budget to oversee more than 15,000 consumer products is just $56.6 million (adjusted for inflation, that is less than half of the CPSC's budget in its founding year). The Pentagon spends almost five times as much for a single F/A-22 fighter jet.
"[The CPSC] has always had an enormous jurisdiction and a very small staff," says Ross E. Cheit, Brown University political science professor and author of a book on safety regulations. "We have more professors at Brown than they have total staff at the CPSC, and their jurisdiction is the entire country and close to 20,000 products.
"Unfortunately, things have only gotten worse under the current administration. The CPSC is outmatched by industry and barely supported by Congress. They are often a scapegoat, but rarely an effective regulator."
THE POLYURETHANE Foam Association (PFA), with executive offices in Wayne, N.J., represents manufacturers of the plastic material. It also sponsors fire-safety education programs for the public, including pages on its Web site, www.pfa.org/firesafe.html, and shares its expertise with government regulators.
"The PFA has worked closely with both state and federal regulatory agencies and the affected industries toward the development of regulations, either voluntary or mandated, that will provide improved fire safe home furnishings products in the marketplace," PFA executive director Lou Peters said in a written statement.
"However, improved fire safe products do not mean fire proof or nonburning products. It is important for the consumers to be educated with regard to common sense approaches to fire safety in the home and to install and maintain fire detection, alarm, and suppression systems."
The PFA's general business meeting this past spring in Arlington, Va., featured CPSC chairman Stratton as keynote speaker. More than 150 representatives of foam manufacturers, raw materials suppliers, and makers of furniture and mattresses attended the meeting; Dow Chemical, BASF and Shell were among the multinational corporations represented.
Before Stratton took the podium, industry speakers acknowledged the tragedy of The Station nightclub fire, in which polyurethane foam used for soundproofing caught fire. No one at the meeting blamed foam for the 100 deaths, but one man noted the absence of sprinklers in the club, the use of pyrotechnics, and the fact that many materials burned. "The role of each product is being assessed," PFA legal counsel Jim McIntyre said.
In his keynote speech, Stratton updated the group on the status of proposed mandatory open-flame regulations for upholstered furniture and mattresses. Any new standards would apply to new products, not the untold millions of foam-filled mattresses and upholstered sofas and chairs in houses across America.
In an interview with The Providence Journal, Stratton would not predict when the CPSC might adopt an open-flame standard for new upholstered furniture: his employees, he said, "are very particular about following the statute to make sure we get the right findings so regulations won't be overturned. It's an extremely complicated process and it takes a lot of time."
Did he have an estimate?
"I mean I could tell you," he said, "but it would be wrong."
Regarding a tough national mattress standard, Stratton said that progress has been affected by the agency's realization that bed-clothing -- not just mattresses alone -- will have to be incorporated in some fashion into new regulations. As numerous studies have shown, burning comforters, mattress pads (some containing polyurethane foam), pillows and the like often ignite mattresses. The Journal test with its purple comforter graphically demonstrated this.
"That process has been slowed up a little bit because of the inclusion of the bed clothing issue," Stratton said.
Asked if bureaucracy frustrates him, Stratton said: "Of course it does. I get up every day and try to think of ways to make it faster."
CRITICS ACKNOWLEDGE the CPSC's scant resources and the ponderous nature of rule-making -- but they note that despite its limitations, the agency is capable of moving swiftly and decisively, even against corporate giants.
Two years ago, the agency sued Wal-Mart for failing to report injuries associated with an exercise machine that the world's largest retailer sold -- and in April, Wal-Mart agreed to pay a $750,000 penalty to settle the case. After a similar suit involving nine minor injuries to children from ride-on toy vehicles, Mattel, the world's largest toymaker, agreed to pay a $1.1 million penalty in 2001.
And every year, the CPSC initiates hundreds of recalls involving millions of consumer products.
"Isn't it strange," says Whitney A. Davis, director of the Children's Coalition for Fire Safe Mattresses, "that [with] the CPSC, when one child chokes on a Pokemon ball from a Burger King prize, they will lock down the entire burger industry. But when 600 people a year die . . . they do nothing."
National Association of State Fire Marshals president Donald P. Bliss has spent years advocating tough national flammability standards for upholstered furniture, bedding and mattresses. His anger at the slow pace of rule-making was evident in a taped address he sent to a meeting last October in Aspen, Colo., of the International Sleep Products Association.
"We have a legal and moral responsibility to make sure that mattresses and bed clothing sold and used in this country are safe," Bliss said. "When it comes to these responsibilities, I make no distinction between those of you who make and sell sleep products, and those of us who are sworn to protect the public. We all have the same responsibility.
"We are surrounded by lawyers who will share their interpretations of each sentence in every statute. But at the end of the day, America has no patience with clever legal options when it comes to the safety of a single child. . . . Why is it that we even put up with this nonsense in fire safety? Is one seriously burned child insignificant?"
AS THE JOURNAL TEST approaches the three-minute mark, lab co-owner Joseph Urbas's voice rises with urgency above the crackling.
"Let's extinguish it. Let's extinguish it," he says. The fire, he says later, nearly exceeded the capabilities of his lab.
The crew quickly puts down the blaze with two hoses. But small gobs of foam continue to smoke and sputter.
When the test is over, the bed looks like many others after fires across Rhode Island and around the country.
The metal bed springs remain intact, though charred.
The foam mattress, the box spring and the bedding are nearly gone -- fire had converted them into poison gases, superheated air, black smoke and intense heat.
In less than three minutes, a plush, comfortable bed created the kind of energy that kills faster than many people can imagine.
A week later, Urbas completed his report on the fire.
Duration: 170 seconds.
Extent: Most of bed fully involved.
Peak heat release: 4004 kilowatts -- enough to ignite an entire room.
Peak temperature: 1,429 degrees Fahrenheit.
People raised on movies and television shows that show firefighters heroically battling flames only an arms-length away don't readily appreciate that a bed can look like a military flamethrower seconds after ignition.
Within just three minutes, a single queen-size bed produced the temperatures that melted and burned the aluminum window casings at LaSalette Shrine. It produced the levels of heat that triggered flashover in the NFPA educational video, and the Westerly, Woonsocket and East Greenwich house fires described in earlier stories. The more it burned, the more deadly carbon monoxide it produced.
The Journal test mattress, which contained 54 percent polyurethane foam, ignited almost immediately and was all but gone in less than three minutes of a nasty, intense burn. The bedding contributed pools of liquid fire.
THE EVENING BEFORE that a fire involving upholstered furniture killed four in the house in Westerly -- July 17, 2002 -- someone at a beach cottage at 22 Rhode Island Ave., Narragansett, was smoking. Somehow, smoldering materials came in contact with a living room couch. Perhaps, investigators theorized, they dropped into a crevice or fell between a cushion and the couch back, where, unnoticed, they continued to smolder.
As the two University of Rhode Island students who had rented the cottage for the summer slept in their first-floor bedrooms, the couch ignited. Investigators believe the couch contained polyurethane foam.
Soon, it was ablaze.
The fire woke Sarah L. Aldridge, 22, of Wethersfield, Conn., shortly before 4:30 a.m. She tried to escape through the front door, but the smoke and heat in the living room were impenetrable. She got out through a window.
Aldridge ran next door and roused James A. Siligato, who owned the cottage. Aldridge told him that her best friend and summer roommate, Jennifer L. Kane, 21, of Brielle, N.J., was still inside. Siligato called 911 and rushed to the cottage with a garden hose.
By now, the heat that had spread to Kane's bedroom was too intense for Siligato to enter. He sprayed water through the window, but a garden hose against flashover conditions was futile. Siligato could hear Kane, speaking incoherently. He yelled at her to escape through the window, but soon she was still.
The firefighters who arrived moments later had to battle the blaze for almost five minutes before they could enter Kane's bedroom.
They found the young woman, a textile merchandising and design senior at URI, on her back between her bed and a dresser. She was not burned: like many victims of home fires, superheated air, smoke and poison gas had killed her.
"The arrival of the state Medical Examiner's investigator necessitated the use of the Narragansett Fire personnel to recover the deceased Ms. Kane from the water-puddled floor and to gently raise her to the top of the bed, where she was placed into the body bag, for removal by the undertaker's personnel," state Fire Marshal Office investigator Arthur Solvang wrote in his report.
"This task is not the most desirable one and was made more onerous by the conditions, such as trying to lift and straddle the bed, to place Ms. Kane into the body bag. This was done with full professionalism and tact."
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Burning bed test video
