Brent Ward and Ray Bizal break down NFPA standards and why they matter for facility managers. From fire safety to the latest NFPA 70B updates, learn how compliance protects people, buildings, and business continuity.
Facility managers play a crucial role in ensuring the safety of their buildings, occupants, and operations. In this episode, Brent Ward, owner of Left Coast Facilities Consulting, and Ray Bizal, Director of Regional Operations for NFPA, dive into the impact of NFPA standards on facility management. They explore essential fire, electrical, and life safety codes, along with standards for wildfire and active shooter preparedness. The discussion highlights key updates, including the mandatory inspection practices introduced in the 2023 edition of NFPA 70B, emphasizing the need for compliance to protect business continuity and brand reputation.
This episode is sponsored by Envoy.
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Ray Bizal: [00:00:00] Facility managers are often thought of taking care of the operation of their facility.
But In doing so, they do consider safety as a highest priority, because safety involves protecting their workers, their customers, their buildings, their equipment their business continuity, and their brand. And, so, complying with those requirements in the NFPA codes and standards is important.
Host: Welcome to Connected FM, a podcast connecting you to the latest insights, tools, and resources to help you succeed in facility management. This podcast is brought to you by IFMA, the leading professional association for facility managers. If you are ready to grow your network and advance in your career, go to IFMA. org to get started. In today's episode, Brent Ward, owner of Left Coast Facilities Consulting, sits down [00:01:00] with Ray Bizal, Director of Regional Operations at NFPA, to discuss the critical role NFPA standards play in facility management. Together, they emphasize the importance of safety in protecting workers, customers, buildings, equipment, business continuity, and brand reputation.
They also highlight various NFPA codes related to fire, electrical, and life safety. As well as standards for wildfire and active shooter preparedness. They also discuss the importance of education and awareness, encouraging facility managers to utilize available training resources to better understand and implement these standards.
Now, let's get into it.
Brent Ward: Today we're going to discuss NFPA standards and how they affect facilities management and facilities management programs at their places of employment. My name is Brent Ward, I'm the owner of Left Coast Facilities Consulting and I am here [00:02:00] with Ray.
Ray, do you want to introduce yourself? Sure.
Ray Bizal: My name is Ray Bizal. And I'm Director of Regional Operations for the National Fire Protection Association. And the National Fire Protection Association is a private, self sustaining, charitable, not for profit that has a mission, and that mission is that we help Save lives and property from catastrophic losses.
And we do that with information and knowledge. And so, the main point that we do in terms of information and knowledge is codes and standards. In addition to that, we have certification and training and things like that. And we are really excited that we have a new strategic partnership with IFMA.
Brent Ward: That's great. I'm looking forward to this discussion because in my travels around to various clients, I find that unfortunately, a lot of FMs are not aware of a lot of the standards that NFPA has [00:03:00] out there, and they're not doing a lot of the inspections on their facilities that they should be simply because they're not aware, not because they don't want to do it and so I try to educate them on things like fire door inspections and all of the things that are required there and FTC connection inspections fire alarm, sprinkler system the list is pretty extensive.
Do you want to add to that?
Ray Bizal: Absolutely. So, facility managers are one of the major. stakeholder groups for NFPA. As I said, our mission is that we help save lives. We don't save lives. We help save lives. The facility managers are on the front lines and what they do matters. And I'll tell you that facility managers are often thought of taking care of the operation of their facility.
But In doing so, they do consider safety as a highest priority, because safety involves protecting their workers, their customers, their buildings, [00:04:00]their equipment their business continuity, and their brand. And, so, complying with those requirements in the NFPA codes and standards is important. Some of the standards, as you pointed out are important.
We have building code. We have fire code. We have a life safety code, which is used throughout the health care industry. And we have an electrical code, which everybody has to comply with. Those reference other standards from NFPA. And some of the topics include the installation of sprinklers, the installation of other water based fire suppression systems fire alarm systems.
And so when there's a tenant improvement or construction of a facility the facility managers need to be on top of it. But once the facility is built, They have to consider inspection, testing, and maintenance of the [00:05:00] suppression systems, the fire alarm systems. We have a standard which is NFPA 70E. NFPA 70E is work it's electrical worker safety.
So when they're doing electrical work, we want the facilities folks to be safe. And by following 70E, they're complying with the OSHA requirements. We also have a standard for preparedness of active shooter hostile events. And Who knew? Who knew? Well, the first responders are there, but usually the first group to respond is the facilities folks, and they need to be a part of that preparedness.
And we also have documents for Wildfire preparedness and wildfire safety. So there's a myriad of provisions that facility managers need to know about. During construction for example. If they're doing a big renovation or they're doing new construction. [00:06:00] They need to follow NFPA 2 41, which is a safety standard for buildings under construction.
. And the first thing they need to know is somebody on site is the authority having jurisdiction, who's the fire prevention program manager. So there's a whole lot of stuff that we want to talk to facility managers about.
Brent Ward: Yeah. And the interesting thing about NFPA too is that you set standards.
And then eventually those standards get adopted by AHJs, by the Authority Having Jurisdiction, whether it be in the national code or local codes or whatever it might be. So you don't have, you don't have any authority like OSHA does to come in and shut somebody down or find them, but your job is simply to help people save lives by following these.
Standards, which you hope get adopted into national codes in the near future. So, yeah, fire is a big one. I know I used to work for a school [00:07:00] district and walking around all of these. You know, we had 42 buildings. Well, 42 schools more than that. More buildings than that. And walking around with the fire marshal when they did their inspections.
It was really mind blowing and eye opening to see what all that they inspect for that. And a lot of it is simply housekeeping, but a lot of it is proper legal inspections of equipment and things. Now, there's been some recent changes in electric standards that NFP has out there. 70B is what I'm thinking of specifically, where things have, are now become a standard, as opposed to suggested if I'm using the proper terms.
Things like inspecting panels and sub panels and bus bars and things of that nature with thermal imaging. How can you help us as FMs to understand what we're going to [00:08:00] need to do? Now obviously this has not been adopted by NEC at this point in time, but it probably will be in their next iteration.
So what do we need to know about inspecting our large scale electric devices?
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Ray Bizal: Right, you brought up the NEC, the NFPA 70, the National Electrical Code. So that is our flagship electrical document. It is used and incorporated by reference in just about every state in the United States. So it's pretty much the law of the land.
And it is for electrical installations. It also references other documents one of the documents that we also produce is NFPA 70E, which I talked about earlier. But, 70B is an interesting document. Until last year, it was a recommended practice. So it was a nice thing to follow.
This year the 2023 edition is now a standard.
It is not as far as I know incorporated by reference yet in law. But it, and I don't know that it's yet referenced in the NEC, but we [00:10:00] anticipate that it will, which means it will be required where the NEC is required. . It does require. That you look at and verify bolted bus connectors, conductor terminations, and conductor connections.
And there are four methods that you can use to verify those. And one of those is the use of infrared thermographic inspection. And this is new. It's a whole new provision in section 7.
Brent Ward: 2
Ray Bizal: And it should be part of your electrical maintenance program.
Brent Ward: Time to add things in your preventative maintenance list in your software to get this done because as I recall, not only is it required to do this thermal imaging or one of these forms.
But, it has to be done, and a lot of them are annual, some are up to five years, but you have to maintain those records, and they have to, you have to be able to provide them if the AHJ wants to see those records. So, [00:11:00] it's not just a matter of going, yeah, we did it. It's a matter of maintaining those records.
And then you can compare year to year, you know, as well, you know, so that if there's suddenly hot spots, then you need to know that and figure out why that's changed. What's caused that to change over the last year? Have you overloaded that circuit or something of that nature that you need to investigate?
And that's why. I'm assuming that this has become a standard is because it's a safety issue and you know, we don't need to burn down any more buildings and or kill any people in buildings because we have these undetected hotspots that suddenly flare up.
Ray Bizal: You're exactly right. It is a safety issue.
That's why this is now a standard rather than a recommended practice. And there is a table. It's table 9. 2. 2 that establishes what the frequency of inspection should be. And it's going to be based on product, scope of work. [00:12:00] And the equipment condition. And that might be one year, it might be six months, where you have to do this type of inspection, or one of the four methods that are outlined in the document.
Brent Ward: And then, does the standard also include the basis for pass fail? Or is like, is there a temperature ranges that are listed in there where if you're above this temperature, then you've got to immediately do it if you're in this range that needs to be addressed soon?
Ray Bizal: Exactly. There's a delta T that's identified and you will know whether or not you need to do something and it tighten the connection so it's not loose.
We don't want that to become loose and then arc and start a fire. Right.
Brent Ward: Exactly. So that's that's excellent. You mentioned a couple of other standards outside of fire, life safety, and electrical. Um, that have to do with natural disasters. What kind of standards are there? Just preparedness of our [00:13:00] buildings?
Ray Bizal: Oh, well, NFPA 1140 is our wildfire fire protection standard, and it establishes vegetation management that will help protect your facility if you're in the wildland urban interface. It establishes also building construction requirements that can help you reduce your risk from wildfire. And that isn't just the radiant heat.
But it's mostly what we talk about are embers flying and we know that homes are at risk, but also businesses that are in the wildland urban interface.
Brent Ward: Well, that's fantastic. There's just so much out there. You know, I'm familiar with the fire side and the electrical side and the life safety side.
But these other things are interesting. And now I've got to take a deeper dive into those to make sure that facilities that I'm involved with are following those because there is just way too much out there for us to [00:14:00] ignore it. Right. I want to run back to the fire safety side of things in some of the buildings that I've come across and doing inspections in especially where the tenant is in the building and it's not the building owner.
Nobody educates these people on what they have to do. You know, I go in and do an assessment and find that fire extinguishers haven't been inspected in two years, let alone any monthly inspections by the tenant. I find exit lights and emergency lights that the batteries are dead and when you push the test button, nothing happens.
And I know those are issues that we've got. So, a lot of what I do is education. Just helping people to understand these are the requirements, and this is what you need to do, when the AAHD, the fire department comes through and does their commercial building inspection. You don't want to get that fine.
Ray Bizal: No, you don't [00:15:00] want them to be telling you that you're doing something wrong. And that's why we're really proud of this strategic partnership with IFMA. If you go to their webpage, you can actually take training on a number of these topics at NFPA and become aware. You can also reach out to NFPA and our regional staff.
We would like to come to IFMA chapters and raise that awareness at the local level. So I encourage people to go to nfpa.org and find the regional staff and contact us where we can go out there and provide some awareness.
Brent Ward: Well I know that my chapter Oregon Southwest Washington is already talking to you about coming up for our symposium in April and doing a presentation on this Because we've got 125 plus facility managers that need to understand where they're at and where we're at in this situation and why it's so critical that we do these inspections.
Well Ray, thank you very much for [00:16:00] your time today. I truly appreciate it. Awareness is the issue, education is king, knowledge is power. That's right. Thank you very much.
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