Digital Extra: Fatal Foam

9.28.03

By G. WAYNE MILLER and PETER B. LORD
The Providence Journal

Fueled by polyurethane foam, a substance so flammable that firefighters compare it to gasoline, The Station nightclub fire spread with stunning speed. Superheated air and poison gases filled the club and combustion sucked the oxygen away. Within minutes, 100 people were dead or dying, and more than 200 were hurt.

The magnitude of that toll horrified Americans. But the material that ignited during the West Warwick disaster is behind a larger, though far less-publicized, tragedy: the deaths of hundreds of people around the country every year in home fires involving foam. Some of the victims are elderly. Some are children. Some go to sleep and never wake up.

Many would be alive now if the federal government had done its job, or if industry had done all it could.

For three decades, most upholstered furniture and mattresses sold in America have contained flexible polyurethane foam, the plastic material that was used as soundproofing around The Station nightclub stage. It's found in couches, love seats, chairs, recliners, mattresses, mattress pads and mattress toppers, pillows, carpet cushioning and many other places. More than 2 billion pounds of foam enters the U.S. market every year.

Foam is comfortable and comparatively cheap -- and once ignited, it can be lethal. Mattress, bedding and upholstered furniture fires 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.

From 1980 to 1998, mattress and bedding fires killed 12,712 Americans, according to the NFPA -- 10 times more than all those killed by tornadoes and hurricanes combined. During the period, mattress and bedding fires injured almost 56,000 people, some horribly and for life. Direct property damage (which includes damage to a building and its contents, but not such costs as medical care or relocation) totaled $5.5 billion, as a fire starting in a bed often engulfs a bedroom and then damages or destroys more rooms or an entire house.

Journal photo / Mary Murphy TORCHED: A bed in a laboratory test burn is destroyed in about three minutes .

During the same period, upholstered furniture fires killed 17,108 and injured almost 40,000 others. Direct property damage surpassed $4.3 billion.

These numbers could have been lower -- dramatically lower, advocates say.

For years, the technology has existed to make household foam harder to ignite: chemical flame retardants can be used, and fabric flame barriers can be built into beds and upholstered furniture to shield the foam within from outside ignition. England requires such protective technology, and it is credited with saving hundreds of lives since the 1988 introduction of tough flammability standards, according to a June 2000 British government study.

America has no such tough national regulations.

U.S. manufacturers of mattresses and upholstered furniture must meet only lesser national flammability standards -- and for the furniture makers, the standards are voluntary, drawn up by the makers themselves.

There is a federal agency with the power to require safer products: by law, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is charged with regulating the flammability of mattresses and furniture. But despite studies and the calls of firefighters and fire-safety advocates, the CPSC for three decades has failed to adopt stricter regulations.

"Different folks have different ideas about what to do -- and the regulatory process is, to say the least, quite burdensome," CPSC chairman Hal Stratton said in an interview this past spring.

Meanwhile, the death toll mounts.

Killer in the smoke

"I am shocked that leaders charged with our protection would allow kids to die while they dallied for three decades," said Whitney A. Davis, personal injury lawyer and director of the California-based Children's Coalition for Fire Safe Mattresses.

"I have no way to explain to the burned children in my group, whom I have flown around the country promising that what they are doing will help save others, that the U.S.A. has placed grownups in power that have proven that the kids' skin was given in vain."

IN ITS ESSENTIAL features, the fire that killed four in Westerly two summers ago is typical of what can happen at home.

In the early morning of July 17, 2002, Robert Ingram, his two young daughters, his stepson, and the stepson's girfriend were sleeping in bedrooms in their Colonial-style house; family friend Jessica Sjostedt and her 2-year-old daughter were asleep on a living room couch. A quilt for kittens was next to the couch, and a love seat was next to the quilt. The furniture contained flexible polyurethane foam, investigators believe.

Sometime in the early hours, a fire began at the base of the couch. Investigators would be unable to definitively determine the cause of the fire, but they would theorize that kittens may have chewed through an electric lamp cord, shorting it and creating the heat for ignition.

Flames licked at the couch.

Shortly before 6 a.m., the fire woke Sjostedt. She grabbed her baby and began to scream.

Her panic woke Ingram's stepson, Neil Rosenberg, 23, who had been sleeping in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Rosenberg ran down and managed to get Ingram, 68, who is wheelchair-bound, safely out of his first-floor bedroom. Sjostedt found a portable phone and followed them with her baby outside.

By now, the couch was engulfed, and the love seat was catching.

Journal photo / Gretchen Ertl UNHAPPY ENDING: Charred pages of a children's book blow along the read near the house where Carol and Crystal Ingram died.

Lethal smoke filled the living room and the temperature soared past 1,000 degrees. Through an unusually cruel twist of fate, investigators theorize, the heat shorted out a thermostat, which turned on the furnace. The forced hot-air heating system began to act like a bellows.

The smoke and superheated gases poured upstairs, and the living room was just moments from flashover -- the point at which everything combustible in a room ignites. No more than about three minutes had passed since the furniture caught fire. It burned now like gasoline.

Hoping to save his girlfriend and Ingram's daughters, Rosenberg ran back into the house. Neighbors reported hearing the girls, Crystal Ingram, 10, and Carol, 9, screaming inside their second-story bedroom.

Rosenberg made it upstairs, but he was too late: carbon monoxide and other poison gases had silenced the girls, and Rosenberg's girlfriend, Tara Verrier, 21, apparently was overcome and never roused from her sleep. Rosenberg himself quickly succumbed. The living room flashed over and now the whole house was an inferno. Neighbors attempting a rescue could not get in -- and when firefighters arrived, just four minutes after the first call, the heat was too intense for them to attempt a rescue, even in their protective gear.

"We used to say you had seven minutes to get out of a burning building," says Deputy State Fire Marshal Richard U. James. "Now, with the things we have put inside, it's about three."

OTTO GEORG Wilhelm Bayer, a German chemist, invented polyurethane in 1937. The first form of this plastic material was rigid. Among its early uses was in the wings of Luftwaffe airplanes, and in the soles of Nazi soldiers' boots.

Making polyurethane foam

The foam form came when chemists figured out how to put tiny bubbles into polyurethane -- an innovation that created a product that could be easily manufactured in many sizes and shapes. Flexible polyurethane foam was comfortable, durable and relatively inexpensive -- and starting in the 1950s, it began to replace the horsehair, cotton, wool, feathers, latex rubber and other materials then used inside mattresses and upholstered furniture (and car and airplane seats and other places). By the 1970s, polyurethane foam was ubiquitous in America.

"Flexible polyurethane foam (FPF) is one of the most versatile materials ever created. We're literally surrounded by it in our lives," says industry group Alliance for Flexible Polyurethane Foam on its Web site, www.afpf.com/furnguide.html.

Dozens of companies make foam, or supply the raw materials used in its manufacture, including multinational giants Dow Chemical, BASF, Bayer and Shell. The leading manufacturer of foam in the United States is Foamex, based in Linwood, Pa., with $1.25 billion in annual revenues.

"You'll find Foamex foams inside, around and under thousands of products from hundreds of manufacturers," the company says on its home page, www.foamex.com. "They protect automobile passengers on the highway and fragile electronic components in shipment. They help consumers sleep sounder and furniture manufacturers create more comfortable products. They add to the luxury, comfort and performance of home and commercial carpeting." Foamex also makes retail products, including Eggcrate brand mattress toppers. "Sleep Better Night after Night with Foamex Pads," reads an ad.

Photo courtesy of the State Fire Marshal WESTERLY FIRE: Two adults and two children died early in the morning of July 17, 2002, in an inferno that may have been caused by kittens chewing on electrical wire.

Foam makers have long understood the dangers of their product. They know that all carbon-based products will burn -- but the open-celled structure of flexible polyurethane foam provides easy access to the oxygen that combustion requires.

Insurers also have long understood how foam burns. In 1968, Factory Mutual Research Corp. (now FM Global, headquartered in Johnston) issued a report warning its industrial clients about the dangers of warehoused foam. "Foamed Polyurethane: the Solid That Burns Like a Flammable Liquid," the report was titled.

Today, foam manufacturers go to lengths to keep flexible polyurethane foam (FPF) from burning during production, storage and shipment to consumer-product manufacturers. "FPF should not be exposed to open flames or other direct or indirect high-temperature ignition sources such as burning cigarettes, matches, fireplaces, space heaters, forklifts, welding sparks or bare light bulbs," the alliance declares at www.afpf.com/furnguide.html. "As an added precaution, it is recommended that all areas where FPF is stored or handled need to be protected by automatic sprinkler systems."

But consumers do not always understand the perils of foam.

THE DANGERS of polyurethane generated headlines -- and government concern -- after a series of deadly fires involving the plastic material in the United States and abroad during the late '60s and early '70s.

The most catastrophic was on Nov. 1, 1970, in a French nightclub whose interior had been sprayed with foam to create the illusion of a cave. The foam ignited, unleashing a vortex of fire, superheated air and poison gas that killed 146 people, including many teenagers. "A huge flame leaped into the air and suddenly plunged down to the main floor like a whirlwind," a survivor told the United Press International. "Everybody was screaming, screaming, and suddenly nothing more except the sounds of the sirens. . . ."

Photo courtesy of family Neil Rosenberg

Even before the French fire, Congress established the National Commission on Fire Prevention and Control, a panel that issued a 177-page report in 1973. The panel warned that the increasing use of flammable plastics in homes and in businesses had created hazards rarely seen before: synthetic materials such as polyurethane burned extremely hot and fast, producing toxic gases and byproducts that could quickly kill even at a distance from flames. In essence, a plastic-fueled fire could transform a house into a gas chamber.

"What makes plastics relevant to our discussion of materials is not only that many of them have introduced hazards previously uncommon," the commission wrote, "but that they are sold and used without adequate attention to the special fire hazards they present."

The commission urged safer products and safety education -- and warned of a potential conflict of interest: "The economic interests of manufacturers, installers, vendors and others often run counter to stringent fire safety requirements."

Clearly, government had a role to play if lives were to be saved and injuries prevented.

Photo courtesy of family Carol and Crystal Ingram.

FOAM CAN BURN inside a bed or a chair, but government regulators and firefighters' associations have traditionally drawn distinctions between the makers of mattresses and the makers of upholstered furniture: a person sleeping faces a different sort of hazard than someone sitting. The manufacturers of mattresses and upholstered furniture have separate trade associations and lobbies.

Starting in 1974, the U.S. Commerce Dept. required that all mattresses sold in the United States be resistant to smoldering cigarettes, considered by experts then to be the paramount household ignition threat. But the federal government passed no such requirement for another type of ignition: so-called small open-flame sources such as candles, matches or lighters.

Some states, however, did adopt the tougher open-flame standard -- for prison mattresses. In the United States today, incarcerated criminals sleep more safely than children.

Nor did the federal government require upholstered furniture to be safer. The industry adopted its own, voluntary standard -- compliance is optional -- in the late 1970s. But like the mattress standard, the upholstered furniture standard addresses ignition only by smoldering cigarettes, not small open flame.

Three decades later, nothing has changed.

Journal photo / Gretchen Ertl ANIMAL RESCUE: Lisa Manor, who lives next door to the house in Westerly, found a burned kitten in the woods nearby.

THOUSANDS DIE or are injured every year in home fires involving mattresses, bedding and upholstered furniture, but the casualties mount in small numbers: one dead here, another somewhere else. The incremental and localized nature of these tragedies means they fail to achieve critical mass in a society where news of 100 dead in West Warwick goes global -- but four dead in Westerly doesn't warrant a sentence of national coverage.

Even when a home fire makes headlines, the materials that burned are not always mentioned. A typical first-day news account notes that a fire "is under investigation," and sometimes that is the last published word. Even in follow-up stories, investigators may identify only the point of origin of the fire -- bed, sofa, chair -- but not the material commonly found within.

Because foam burns so ferociously, destroying potential evidence, lawyers have difficulty mounting the sort of high-profile court cases that have focused public attention on tobacco, asbestos and other potentially dangerous substances.

"One of the problems with litigating in the area is that the stuff burns so good that when you're looking at the remains of it, a lot of times you're not able to identify who made it, and then you've got no case," says Robin P. Foster, a lawyer in Greenville, S.C., who has represented victims of upholstered furniture fires in claims against manufacturers.

"You're relying on physical evidence, you're relying on the information from the clients or from the occupants, and a lot of times these fires occur in areas of low socio-economic housing where the family -- you know, they get their furniture from Uncle Joe who got it from a yard sale 10 years ago, and it was handed down two generations. . . . It gets handed down a lot and you get where you can't identify it and you're stuck."

STILL, ADVOCATES occasionally break through.

Whitney Davis did on Feb. 7, 2000, when he urged the CPSC to adopt tougher flammability standards for mattresses. Davis brought three young boys badly injured in mattress fires to a hearing in Bethesda, Md., and when it was over, one of them, 10-year-old Damon Bihl, spoke at a press conference that made national news.

Dressed in a suit and tie -- but with a bandage covering most of his head -- the boy said he had come to Maryland from his home in California "so that other kids don't get burned like me." Damon lost his left hand, left ear and portions of his face when he played with matches on his mother's bed and the mattress caught fire. At the time, Damon was 3.

Seven years later, his wounds had still not healed.

"It hurts a lot," the boy told the reporters. "Most of all I want the doctors to give me a new hand. Then I could play baseball."

Fox News, MSNBC, ABC News and other national outlets carried the dramatic story, as did many local TV stations. One, Boston Channel 7 (WHDH), later aired a report called "Burning Beds" about the dangers of foam in mattresses. The report was presented by then-reporter Jeffrey A. Derderian, co-owner of The Station nightclub.

But the publicity faded. The issue of household foam returned to the shadows, to a small government agency headquartered in Bethesda.

ESTABLISHED BY Congress with the 1972 Consumer Product Safety Act, the CPSC has the power to set standards and rules, initiate recalls and ban dangerous products. More than 15,000 products fall under the agency's jurisdiction, including toys, children's clothing, home appliances, batteries, extension cords, even noncommercial fireworks.

No items under CPSC jurisdiction play a deadlier role in home fires than products that usually contain foam, a fact the commission acknowledges. On the very first page of an October 2001 report on the flammability of upholstered furniture, the CPSC stated:

"Upholstered furniture-related fires account for more residential fire deaths than any other category of consumer products under the commission's jurisdiction. A disproportionate number of these fire losses, including one-third of the deaths, were to children under 15."

According to the NFPA, 543 people died in 11,600 fires involving just upholstered furniture in 1998, the last year for which data are available; another 1,425 were injured and direct property damage totaled $224.5 million. The CPSC assessed the total "societal cost" in that one year at $2.4 billion. (Most upholstered furniture sold today contains some polyurethane foam, according to the CPSC.)

And these numbers do not include the toll from mattress and bedding fires in 1998: 398 deaths, 2,309 injuries and $292 million in direct property damage.

The October 2001 furniture report is called a "briefing package," a document produced by the CPSC staff for the agency's three commissioners, who today continue to consider a tougher, open-flame resistance standard. With appendices, the report ran to 922 pages and was years in the making.

It was just one of many reports, studies, hearings and tests involving the flammability of foam over the last three decades.

Industry and the federal government have excelled at identifying the problem. But they have not solved it.

"People are sleeping and sitting on pieces of furniture filled with solid gasoline," says Davis. "For a few bucks, we could eliminate the risk."