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Though the lab operates in the main agency building where some of its most valuable records are kept and the largest number of its employees work, it is seriously substandard from a firesafety standpoint. Minimum standards of the National Fire Protection Association even for a nonarchival building require that areas where hazardous jnaterial such as nitrate film is processed be equipped with a quick-acting deluge sprinkler system. The film laboratory does not have such a system. There are not the approved number of exits, doors do not open in the direction of travel, nor do they have the panic hardware that would permit rapid, unimpeded exit. Smoke detectors are lacking and there are no illuminated signs marking the exit from the laboratory.
Employees state that temperatures in the laboratory have frequently been in the mid-eighties, and some rooms have poor ventilation or no ventilat'.on whatever. No special instructions have been given to employees as to what to do in event of a nitrate film fire.
Reportedly as a result of the second film fire at the Suitland film vaults within a sixteen-month period, the Library of Congress has restricted the entry of nitrate film into its main building because of the hazard involved. Yet the National Archives is now permitting film from that agency to be processed in its lab inspite of the urgent necessity that it get its house in order and eliminate an unnecessary hazard of its own.
The agency's relative lack of attention to safety concerns may be explained in part by the statement made to the fire investigating committee by Mr. James Gear, director of the National Archives Preservation Services Division, that "self-combustion doesn't occur in nitrate film." The agency's handling and storage practices appear to be consistent with that statement.
This categorical statement is puzzling when one considers that Mr. Gear sat on the committee that investigated the August 1977 film fire at Suitland, which concluded that the fire resulted from spontaneous combustion of nitrate film stored at temperatures that were too high. There is also a substantial body of literature, some of it published and cited in a quarterly journal, American Archivist, produced at the National Archives, that addresses jhe propensity of nitrate film to ignite spontaneously.
III. Conditions that may have contributed to a fire from spontaneous combustion in the Suitland film vaults:
Aging nitrate film. The useful life of nitrate film is estimated to be fifty to sixty years under good conditions of storage. Some of the film in this collection was released in 19 30,