Normally you have food for thought. This one blah....got some examples? Not all examples are in fire protection, because fire disaster data includes significant outliers or the far area under small asymptotic tails... but here goes.
Bangladesh, Libya, many parts of: Africa, Pakistan, both rural India and South America. Spot-drops in maintenance and inspection for Codes and Standards exists today in the USA , though . So what is more appropriate, adoption of an expensive code that will not be fully complied with, or application of a * lighter* ** code that if complied with, would provide more risk- effective protection? One should naturally ask, 'but h ow can different clients be allowed to pursue different levels of risk tolerance? That is not fair." It is argued that different levels of risk tolerance are pursued already, with more than a few who don't clear the bar where they are less blessed with resources. Regarding lay persons ability to assess their own risk--- the most common mistake experts make is overconfidence in their personal ability to predict risk [1]. To say that lay persons/end-users are the last one's capable of assessing what risk they are and should be exposed to, sounds a bit Orwellian, might be construed as economic manipulation, and perhaps is a constriction of civil liberty. Whether a *lighter* (not Liter) version of building codes and standards ought to be drafted is certainly debatable (after all, what are performance based methods for?). But the devil is in the details, and while many jurisdictions accommodate horse-trading of building system components to achieve a *lighter *degree of protetion, many of those same jurisdictions will not compromise on the design of the components themselves... and that was why this draft about *Code/Standard Lite * was brewed . We certainly have a pool of candidates from the framing committees whom would be imminently competent to write such *lighter* documents. There is however, no debate about whether the wisdom of the crowds will be better than any random individual expert at difficult-to-forecast risk. A ccuracy using th is pluralistic method is demonstrably superior to individual assessments made most expert s . There are several reasons to include the commons in a closed vote risk acceptanc e determination : 1. it avoids the Asch effect (peer pressure) endemic to the consensus process, 2. it avoids manipulation by economic interests inherent in the current consensus process, 3. it internalizes current externalities (users of *Kiss* and *The Station* clubs were not asked whether they would accept the risk they were exposed to). 4. it avoids the problem presented by the American justice system whereby jury selection all but ensures we get a quorum chosen by face - recognition experts who prefer jurors for their pre-existing biases. Crowd sourcing, by virtue of sample size, cancels out the injustice brought on by unfounded bias found in cliques. This is off subject, but it is old information that if we are paid salary as life safety fire engineers, it is our legal duty to inform citizens of the fire hazards within buildings of our responsible charge. What is new, is a suggestion to inform the public * a t the sidewalk* of th e fire risk * in a simple format*. Then, for sure it is the user's decision as to how best to engage that structure. This is an attempt to debate ideas in preferenbce to debating people (expert people vs lay people) . The US residential sprinkler question mentioned is another example, closer to home, where the core of the debate appeared to be about he ideas of risk assessment. One could say that from the current state of Code adoption, the experts in fire protection were over confident in their risk assessment. Others might say, looking at this same elephant another way, that the risk assessment was temporarily manipulated by lobbied-for-economic-interests...and that ultimately good judgment will win the day on residential fire protection and subsequent re allocation of public resources. Better tools to implement risk assessment is one of the main points in this debate. Possibly a * lighter* version of Codes and Standards is not a sharp enough tool to be worthy of creation and consumption. That is something the consumers (i.e. the crowd out to decide). This debate is not saying, let us sprinkler the entire domain of structures so that 87% + of our built-environment fire problems are adequately taken care of, allowing us to redirect fire resources to more pressing issues (e.g. neonatal health care, child abuse, criminal - and national - election system reform, etc.) although that would be a good thing to do. This debate is saying end users should be allowed a voice in choosing which risk they will be exposed to, and tools better suited to different levels of risk assessment could be developed. To witness, i n instance A, end users will tolerate more risk-exposure-than-allowed by a fully prescriptive Code solution when they don't have enough resource if : a]. the proximity of to the failure - point is transparently shown, a llowing users a more accurate self-choice, b]. transparent risk assessments accurately identif ies mitigations (though mitigations short of fully-prescriptive solutions) bringing a known level of risk reduction (this is where *Light *Codes and Standards come in). and c]. users and owners for establishments such as in Santa Maria, Brazil or West Warwick, RI, USA don't have (or want to spend) the resources on full y prescriptive compliance. In instance B , end users will demand less risk exposure because they don't have enough resources (e.g. the citizenry of Fukushima don't have another house or place to pick up and move to ). G ranted, this is not a fire protection risk assessment, but it is a valid case where allowing lay persons a say in the risk assessment would have generated more buy-in and less litigation tensions, if not an outright decision to pay for locating the emergency generators on the hill next to the reactor. Groundwater in some places of Fukushima now presents Strontium-90 at 30 times the Japanese legal limit ; ~ 100,000 persons were displaced. It is not morally (and probably not legally) correct to inflict abitrary and capricious (as determined by a crowd source of your choice) losses on people without giving these people a say in their risk exposure. It also could result in public unrest. Thank you very much for your inciteful comments. Here is to a more accurate and appropriate allocation of resources, via engagement of improved tools and methods in risk assessment. Scot Deal Excelsior Fire/Risk Engineering [1] http://longnow.org/seminars/02007/jan/26/why-foxes-are-better-forecasters-than-hedgehogs/ _______________________________________________ Sprinklerforum mailing list [email protected] http://lists.firesprinkler.org/listinfo.cgi/sprinklerforum-firesprinkler.org
