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It's where we sleep.
9.30.03
By G. WAYNE MILLER and PETER B. LORD
The Providence Journal
The fire began in a bedroom. It was early morning on Nov. 5, 1999, and most of the 20 or so residents of the fieldstone castle at LaSalette Shrine in Attleboro, Mass., were asleep.
The Rev. Paul H. O'Brien, 43, a British priest who was staying at the shrine on a sabbatical, was in Room 330, a small third-story space furnished with a bed, a chair, a bureau, a bookstand and a lamp.
O'Brien was smoking.
Investigators believe he dropped a lit cigarette onto his comforter and then fell asleep. For an unknown period of time, the cigarette smoldered. Eventually, investigators believe, it ignited the comforter.
Owned by the Roman Catholic Missionaries of Our Lady of LaSalette, the castle had been built in 1903 as a sanitarium. It was longer than a football field and featured a stone exterior and post-and-beam wood construction inside. The interior walls were made of ash, trimmed with mahogany and oak. The castle was equipped with smoke detectors, but not sprinklers.
At about 4 a.m., the smoke detector in O'Brien's room began to sound.
Something -- perhaps the alarm, perhaps the nascent fire -- caused O'Brien to stir. He managed to get out of his bed.
By this point, the comforter, the mattress and the floor under the bed were burning.
The detector's alarm woke the priest in the bedroom next door. The Rev. Ian Robertson thought at first he was hearing an alarm clock. But when he stepped into the hall, he saw smoke pouring from a crack above the door to Room 330.
Robertson grabbed a fire extinguisher, opened the door and cried out for O'Brien. The room was black, except for the glow of a small fire by the bed. Robertson could not see O'Brien in the smoke, but he heard him coughing.
O'Brien had made it a few feet from from his bed before he collapsed and fell
unconscious.
Journal
photo / Kathy Borchers
GUTTED: The LaSallete Shrine fire in 1999 was started when a priest
dropped a lit cigarette onto his bed.
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Standing in the doorway, Robertson emptied his fire extinguisher, but it was futile: the fire was growing rapidly, its smoke and heat intensifying by the second. The priest went for another extinguisher and he began to yell "Fire!" Other priests awoke. One ran to Room 330 with an extinguisher. But by then, it was too hot to enter.
At 4:10 a.m., the heat stopped O'Brien's wristwatch.
A priest called 91l. Attleboro firefighters were on scene within five minutes. Learning that O'Brien was trapped inside, they headed for Room 330. The fire was nearing the point of flashover, when everything combustible goes up.
Chief Ronald Churchill, Deputy Chief Russell Goyette, and Capt. Scott. Jacques fought their way into the room with a 1 3/4-inch hose and found O'Brien near his bed. He was lying on the floor, his knees bent, his hands folded.
A priest later told reporters that O'Brien apparently had been kneeling in prayer before dying, but investigators believe that is simply the position in which, overcome by superheated air and gas, he collapsed.
Jacques grabbed the priest's arm, but it was burned so badly that it began to break off at the elbow. O'Brien was beyond salvation.
The fire spread into the attic, made of century-old wood posts and beams. Inside
Room 330, the temperature soared past 1,000 degrees and the aluminum window
casings began to melt and burn. Seeing the flames cascading over their
heads, Chief Churchill feared the ceiling would collapse, trapping his
men. He ordered them out.
Soon, all of the massive building was ablaze. Some 200 firefighters from three dozen departments joined the battle, but it took until 10 a.m. to get the fire under control. They could not get back into Room 330 for another hour to recover the seared remains of the priest.
"The autopsy showed O'Brien's esophagus and lungs were lined with heavy amounts of soot," an official report states. "This indicates O'Brien had inhaled smoke and superheated air while he was alive." The cause of death was determined to be "smoke inhalation and third-degree thermal burns to 95 percent of O'Brien's body." The castle was destroyed, at a loss Massachusetts State Police estimated at more than $20 million.
O'BRIEN'S DEATH was no freak occurrence. According to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), bedding and mattress fires killed 12,712 Americans and injured another 55,856 from 1980 to 1998, the latest year for which data are available. Direct property damage over the two decades totalled $5.5 billion.
During the most recent 5-year period, 1994 through 1998, an average of 508 Americans died in these fires every year, and another 2,555 were injured.
Many were children. Many were poor.
As is often the case in a fire investigation, the remnants of O'Brien's mattress were not analyzed. But it likely contained flexible polyurethane foam: foam has been used in about 90 percent of all mattresses sold in the United States over the last 30 years, according to Gordon Damant, a flammability expert with City Testing and Consulting Corp., in Sacramento, Calif.
Mattresses and bedding sold in America could be safer, but the government so far has not required tougher national flammability standards.
"Meanwhile our kids die," says Whitney A. Davis, director of the California-based Children's Coalition for Fire Safe Mattresses.
IN DOLLAR VOLUME, California, Florida and Texas lead the way in U.S. mattress
manufacturing, according to the Census Bureau's 1997 Economic Census;
Ohio, North Carolina and New Jersey follow behind. Mattresses are made
in at least 35 states, according to the report, including Connecticut
and Massachusetts, which together reported 25 factories.
AP photo
IN FLAMES: The fire at LaSalette Shrine castle took off from the
bed where it started and spread fast, causing $20 million in damage.
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American makers shipped almost 39 million mattresses and box springs last year, at a wholesale value of $4.76 billion, according to the International Sleep Products Association, the industry group based in Alexandria, Va. Mattresses are big business. Dozens of companies make them, but a few giants account for more than half of wholesale revenues.
As did their counterparts in the upholstered furniture industry, mattress makers more than three decades ago understood the danger of the polyurethane foam they increasingly favored in their products. So did the federal government and the state of California. The California legislature voted in 1970 to require all mattresses sold there to be resistant to ignition by lit cigarettes, which experts had concluded was the biggest fire threat. The next year, the U.S. Commerce Department approved a similar standard for all mattresses sold throughout the country beginning in 1974.
The standard did not address another common means by which mattresses can ignite: small open flame, such as a candle or a cigarette lighter, or when smoldering bedding catches fire. According to Davis, some small manufacturers in the 1970s called for an open-flame standard, which they said would add only pennies to the cost of a mattress -- but the CPSC, which administered the lesser federal standard, declined to adopt one.
There the matter stood until the 1990s. While England mandated tough standards, and U.S. manufacturers produced open-flame resistant mattresses for use in hospitals, hotels and prisons, the American consumer continued to sleep on a product that could have been safer.
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Mattress and bedding fires in U.S. homes
SOURCE: National Fire Protection Assoc. |
THE LIT-CIGARETTE standard in place now for almost 30 years has in fact
helped to significantly reduce the toll from mattress and bedding fires.
According to the NFPA, 61,100 such fires with 937 deaths and almost 3,000 injuries were reported in 1980, a toll that had fallen to 21,400 fires with 398 deaths and 2,309 injuries in 1998. Fires directly caused by cigarettes declined dramatically.
Another factor in the decline, the mattress industry maintains, has been the safety-awareness campaign sponsored by the Sleep Products Safety Council, founded in 1986 by the International Sleep Products Association. The council urges families to draft escape plans and install smoke detectors, among other measures.
Like its upholstered furniture counterpart, the council sponsors a Web site, www.safesleep.org. The site offers fire-safety tips for adults, teachers and children, who can play an online game called Safe Passage. "High atop Hazard Peak sits your bedroom!" one step of the game declares. "Find the eight fire hazards by clicking on them." Among the hazards are a sock draped over a lamp, an iron, a book of matches and a candle.
The council also provides safety tags to manufacturers; similar to those available to makers of upholstered furniture, they warn in English and in Spanish of the dangers of candles, space heaters and smoking in bed. "Check under beds and in closets for burnt matches, evidence your child may be playing with fire," the tag advises. The tag also warns of the danger of storing old mattresses in the home or garage: "They are a fire hazard." And it warns consumers to keep lit candles away from bedding, curtains and sleepwear.
But like furniture tags, these mattress warnings are not always seen by consumers. In a spot survey of a handful of Rhode Island stores, most mattresses did not have warning tags. The tags say, "when ignited, some mattress filling materials can burn rapidly and emit hazardous gases." But fire experts say many people can't appreciate the ferocity of a mattress fire until they actually see one burn.
ROBERT M. DeRENSIS, 38, kept an electric lamp on a plastic milk crate next to his bed in the house he shared with his elderly great-aunt at 8 Peirce St., East Greenwich. He liked to read, and magazines and books filled his bedroom.
As best investigators could later determine, DeRensis fell asleep with the lamp on, and he knocked it over in his slumber. "The lamp, which was in the 'on' position, [became] wedged between the mattress, box spring, and blankets, and heated these combustibles to the point of ignition," the state Fire Marshal's Office report states. Investigators believe the mattress contained polyurethane foam.
It was nearing dawn on Sept. 27, 2001.
The house lacked smoke detectors. Apparently the fire woke DeRensis, who made it safely downstairs and outside. His great-aunt, Cecilia DeRensis, 85, also escaped unharmed.
But her sister, Adeline DeRensis, 90, did not. As a neighbor placed an emergency call, DeRensis ran back into the house to try to save his other great-aunt.
The first two firefighters to arrive reached the second floor, but they were driven back by the fire's intensity.
"They were confronted by heavy smoke; there was zero visibility and high heat," East Greenwich Fire Chief Thomas Rowan said. Staffing shortages delayed the arrival of more firefighters.
DeRensis died face-down on the floor of his great-aunt's bedroom, holding her hands.
Firefighters brought Adeline DeRensis alive from the building, but she had to wait several minutes for an ambulance to arrive. She died two days later at Our Lady of Fatima Hospital, where she had been placed in a hyperbaric chamber for treatment of smoke inhalation and carbon monoxide poisoning.
AS MATTRESS FIRES ignited directly by cigarettes declined, those caused by open-flame sources began to rise slightly in the early '90s.
The CPSC detected this trend and brought it to the attention of the mattress industry at the 1993 "Combustibility Conference," sponsored by the Sleep Products Safety Council. The council and the CPSC agreed to study the trend -- and consider adopting the kind of tougher standard that had not been adopted two decades before.
Another round of studies had begun.
One study, begun by the CPSC in 1996, sent investigators to the scenes of fires, where knowledge that could not be divined from statistics alone could be learned.
A second study, by the Sleep Council in collaboration with the National Association of State Fire Marshals, investigated in depth some 220 bedroom fires in New York, Chicago, Seattle and Houston.
Those two studies confirmed what many firefighters already knew: children playing with fire started many mattress fires; poor people were more likely to be victims; and in almost two-thirds of the cases, comforters, pillows, mattress pads and the like (bedding, or "bedclothing" in industry parlance) were the first to ignite, often by careless use of matches, lighters or candles.
A third, unrelated study by the U.S. Fire Administration, showed a strong correlation between drinking and bedding/mattress and upholstered furniture fires.
A fourth study, by the NFPA, showed that home fires caused by candles rose from 8,240 in 1980 to 15,040 in 1999. Almost 2,000 mattress and bedding fires were started by candles in 1999, killing 30, injuring 363, and causing almost $50 million in direct property damage. (Another 850 fires in 1999 started by candles igniting upholstered furniture killed 12, injured 151, and caused $27.6 million in direct property damage.)
With new information, the Sleep Products Safety Council and its parent group decided to underwrite another study.
This one, conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and endorsed by the CPSC, examined the relationship of bedding fires to mattress fires and suggested test methods that manufacturers might use in an open-flame standard. The first phase of the study was concluded in June of 2000 (and the second in August 2002 and the third in February).
In October 2001, eight years after the "Combustibility Conference," the CPSC finally published an advance notice of proposed rule-making, signalling its intention to begin considering a tougher, nationwide standard.
Two years later, the CPSC continues to study.
DAVIS HAPPENED onto the dangers of burning mattresses and bedding as a young lawyer assigned the case of a 7-year-old boy badly burned when a malfunctioning vaporizer ignited a mattress. "I first saw the boy's picture taken a month before the fire," Davis said. "Then I met him. . . . No face, no hand. He was eight by then. He looked 80 after his 25 surgeries." Davis had found a cause.
When he brought three children who were horribly scarred in mattress and bedding fires to a CPSC hearing on Feb. 7, 2000, he hoped that their stories of suffering would move the commission to quick action. Every passing month meant more dead and injured children and adults.
Davis was wrong.
Frustrated by federal inertia, Davis turned to his home state of California, the largest consumer market in the land. At least California's nearly 35 million residents could start sleeping more safely, Davis reasoned -- and given the size of the market, perhaps California could influence the rest of the nation.
Prodded by Davis, the California General Assembly in July 2001 passed Assembly Bill 603. The law required all mattresses sold in California to meet a small-open-flame mattress standard, incorporated in Technical Bulletin 603, by Jan. 1, 2004. Two and a half years, lawmakers reasoned, would be enough time for mattress manufacturers and suppliers of flame-resistance technology to gear up production.
Recognizing that burning bedding is often the source of ignition for a mattress fire, the lawmakers also authorized the California Bureau of Home Furnishings and Thermal Insulation to require a separate standard for comforters, pillows and other such "filled" bedding -- some of which contains polyurethane foam -- if the bureau determined them to be a significant hazard.
The bureau did.
"Our tests showed that filled bedding products alone can get a room close to flashover," said bureau spokesman Miles Bristow. "There can be a lot of heat energy in just your comforter, pillows and mattress pads."
So the bureau decided to write Technical Bulletin 604, which will require manufacturers of comforters, mattress pads and pillows to meet an open-flame standard. No date of implementation has been set.
THE CALIFORNIA Bureau held public hearings on TB 603, the proposed mattress standard, on April 22 in San Francisco and on April 24 in Diamond Bar, Calif. (Hearings have yet to be held on TB 604.)
Makers of fire-barrier materials testified they were ready to supply the mattress industry with what it needed to meet TB 603. ElkCorp of Ennis, Texas, noted that it already supplied a mattress maker with the life-saving technology -- and the maker, Carolina Mattress Guild, already marketed "Safe Dreams," a line of mattresses that passes TB 603. Another company, McKinnon-Land-Moran, of Charlotte, N.C., sells Basofil, a heat- and flame-resistant fiber than allows a mattress to resist open-flame ignition.
But armed with economic-impact studies and lawyers' briefs, representatives of the mattress industry, organized labor and the retail sector challenged the new California standard and its proposed Jan. 1 implementation.
Representatives maintained that mattress makers would not have enough time to retool production. They maintained the 60-minute open-flame resistance test specified in TB-603 was too long. They maintained that increased costs would dampen consumer demand, which would lead to job losses -- and "exacerbate California's budget deficit" by reducing tax revenues.
As proposed, the International Sleep Products Association and the Sleep Products Safety Council maintained in a joint 36-page commentary, TB-603 "will also likely discourage non-California producers from shipping mattresses into the state, thereby harming California consumers by limiting competition and product choice."
Fire officials at the hearing pushed the safety issue.
"Is an effective date of Jan. 1, 2004, too soon?" asked the president of the California Fire Chiefs Association, which supported TB-603. "This is a matter for the bureau and mattress producers to decide. But keep in mind that fires don't consult calendars."
The special interests won: in July, the bureau announced that it would delay implementation of TB-603 until Jan. 1, 2005, and it reduced the open-flame test from 60 to 30 minutes.
But one of the nation's mattress manufacturing giants, Serta Inc., has just announced that it will break ranks with the industry and immediately begin to produce mattresses that meet the California standard. Up to now, only one small company, Carolina Mattress Guild, has been making such mattresses.
Meanwhile, the mattress industry's trade association hailed California's decision.
"Throughout the development of these regulations, we never lost sight of our mutual goal -- to reduce or prevent residential bedding fire deaths. California should be commended for its leadership in this area," said Patricia Martin, executive director of the Sleep Council, in a press release.
Davis saw it differently. "The governor, the bureau, labor and those few industry members without conscience, seek to sacrifice the lives of our children," he wrote in a letter to California officials.
And he told The Providence Journal: "I am tired of picking up the pieces of a disfigured child or the incinerated elderly. Their images live with me every night."
A NATIONAL open-flame standard would supersede any state's standard, and bring the entire country to a new era of fire safety. The International Sleep Products Association and its Sleep Council are on record as favoring such a national standard -- both for competitive and safety reasons.
"A federal standard will create a level playing field for all mattress producers and is likely to achieve the highest compliance and the greatest impact on consumer safety," said executive director Martin in a press release posted on safesleep.org.
But the CPSC has not adopted a national standard, nor would chairman Hal Stratton predict when it might. "It's very process-intensive," Stratton said in an interview. Complicating the issue, Stratton said, is that the CPSC -- like California with its proposed TB 604 -- is considering including bedding in an open-flame standard. Like California, the CPSC recognizes the role that comforters, pillows and pads can play in igniting mattresses.
Regardless of what happens on the national level, the CPSC may further delay implementation of California's standard.
That's because federal law states that a federal standard protecting against the same risk preempts any state rule. Since the CPSC already has a national mattress flammability standard -- albeit for resistance to cigarettes, not small open flame -- California will have to apply to the CPSC for a so-called "exemption from preemption" before it can implement TB 603.
"It's in the statute," Stratton said. "It's not something we have any control over."
Once California applies, the CPSC would study its request. A hearing would be held. And at some point, the three CPSC commissioners would have to vote.
Asked about reports in the trade press that the process could take up to two years after application, Stratton said:
"I probably shouldn't say because when we get timelines, they just don't work."
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