National Archives and Records Service film-vault fire at Suitland, Md. : hearings before a subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives, Ninety-sixth Congress, first session, June 19 and 21, 1979 (1979)

20 Although the most recent revision of the standard is dated 1974, and is not specifically promulgated as being retroactive, I feel it would be beneficial to examine Building A in light of NFPA 40, to see just what sort of building we were dealing with. One of the primary items in NFPA 40 is the installation of approved fire doors at the entrances to every film vault, and at key separations within the building. To qualify as an approved fire door, an assembly must meet certain design criteria, including self -closures and positive latches. This means that the doors must close and latch without manual action whenever they are opened. According to Mrs. Annie Ward, the supervisor of operations at the film bunkers, many of the doors in this building required an excessive degree of force to latch. In fact, she had to occasionally get help to close a vault door. This is not acceptable according to NFPA 40. [See app. 13 for chart.] Mr. EsTEPP. You can notice by this diagram there are three points where the door has to be plumb with the door jamb and they have to line up at all three points in order for the door to close. The doors, according to the GSA report, were homemade, using "C" channel and %-inch sheet metal and were fitted with a latching mechanism that required a handle to be turned about 30 degrees to either open or close it. NFPA 40 also recommends that these doors be insulated to retard the transmission of heat through the door. The doors were not insulated and, being metal, probably aided in the transmission of radiant heat. Further, the propping open of fire doors, as was apparently the practice in the building, negates the value of fire doors, which only do their job when closed and latched. We are very interested in determining what standards GSA applies to the construction of these buildings, if there are any. Other deficiencies noted in the building, when compared to NFPA 40, included the lack of plaster coating on interior walls of vaults to prevent the instrusion of flammable vapors, and film stacked on shelves too high to be within the effective protection of the sprinkler system. However, the most devastating building condition was the woeful inadequacy of the sprinkler system as it existed at the time of the fire. This system, which should have had sprinkler heads installed in a deluge design for optimum effectiveness, was installed with six conventional wet-pipe heads per vault, and two of those had been removed 3 months earlier, apparently by the contractor. Not only did the wet-pipe heads respond much slower to the fire than deluge-type heads would, since each head has to be heated to 165 degrees before opening ; but, even when all heads in a vault were flowing, the amount of water being applied to the fire was probably incapable of controlling itvS spread. If we look at the nearly explosive speed with which a cellulose nitrate film fire spreads, and add the time delay that is inherent in any wet pipe svstem to react to the fire, it is quite reasonable to anticipate a vault fully involved in fire by the time all sprinker heads are activated. Using the data in the GSA report., we have calculated that, with a