Chris, I realize the response to this question sounds like I have a broken record playing. My intention is not on upsetting any "apple carts", the intention here is just to offer a tool / method for discussion. The question in this thread sounds a little bit like:
1. we have a used fire pump 2. resources are limited and there is not deep motivation to buy a new, listed/approved fire pump if the existing fire pump can be demonstrated to meet acceptable performance criteria, 3. the fire pump may not have been tested to NFPA Standards for the duration of its life But, my ear could be wrong as to the tenor of this question... 1. Perhaps the user should first determine what is to them, an acceptable performance critera, and publish this a priori. If this acceptance criteria is Lighter or lesser than an NFPA prescription, then I don't have a problem with that, as long as the acceptance critiria is plainly and publicly stated before the risk assessment is conducuted. Determining acceptance criteria before the risk assessment makes the process more transparent and honest, and shifting of acceptance criteria during discussion of mitigations will be more obvious. I believe something to this extent may have already been accomplished. Examples of acceptance criteria are: 1. "We accept a 1 in 2,500 chance that the fire pump will not perform as needed during a fire event in the next 7 years." 2. "We accept a 1 in 1,500 chance that the fire pump will not perform as needed during a fire event in the next 10 years." 2. Second, a risk assessment should determine what is the likelihood of an acceptable performance from the fire pump. This is where crowd sourcing, and not individual expert judgment can provide an unequivocally more accurate answer. Witness this is a difficult-to-predict question. Realize that NFPA is drawing up *lighter/more appropriate* testing/inspection schedules now, but that does not specifically answer our difficult-to-predict question, which roughly is, "How many more years of acceptable service can we expect from this particular diesel-engine driven fire pump?. The prediction of the likelihood that the fire pump will provide x years (7,10, 15, etc) years of acceptable performance is a difficult risk assessment. But good information is available, if not readily obtainable. My risk assessment would include a crowd using much more than experts. My risk assessment would include lay people, who arguably know more than we, and possess more experience than us, about diesel engines and pumps. These lay people can be asked in such a way that their answers will not be motivated to appease a corporation whose increased profits are directly related to getting favorable testing intervals and acceptance criteria adopted in NFPA prescriptions. My crowdsource would include the following persons: 1. NFPA 24 and 25 committee members, if we could get them to volunteer a prediction, 2. mechanics with more than 20 years of experience working on road and rail diesel engines 3. trucking companies with large inventories of diesel-engine trucks and good records of engine performance 4. military quartermaster corps who arguably have the largest inventory of trucks, (and perhaps pumps) 5. diesel truck drivers 6. old farmers .."why not in Minot?" as many farmers use diesel tractors 7. old fire pump inspectors 7. average, common people who use diesel engines For fire pumps, there also is a large pool of risk assessment forecasters with excellent skills as well, but again we can take advantage of analogous experience. While fire pumps may go an entire life without working a live job, many other disciplines have the experience and knowledge from working their pumps to the point of failure. For risk assessment on fire pumps, we could include in our crowdsource: 1. centrifugal pump (if that is the pump we are focussed on) mechanics with more than 20 years experience. These do not have to be *ONLY *fire pump mechanics... take advantage of other centrifugal pump experience as well. 2. fire department pumper maintenance and repair shops with more than 40 years experience, 3. fire departments (those that keep good records on fire pump performance throughout their county's fleet) 4. fire department engineers/drivers >From this example, perhaps we can see that people who frame these Standards are engaged in answering difficult questions, i.e. "what is an appropriate ITM schedule?", but these people have some powerful resources. If these Standards start prescribing that performance of systems be recorded in public records, in 50 years time we may have a database that will readily answer these difficult questions without guessing. Maybe the militaries already have these databases. There will always be an need for guessing. I am hoping, in 50 years time, we won't need to be guessing about these same fire questions, but instead our children will be asked to volunteer forecasts on crowdsourced questions focussed on much more socially significant issues. Scot Deal Excelsior Fire/Risk Engineering _______________________________________________ Sprinklerforum mailing list [email protected] http://lists.firesprinkler.org/listinfo.cgi/sprinklerforum-firesprinkler.org
