Hi All: The attached letter to the NFPA was sent to Charles Morgan of NFPA after the Life Safety

System was developed, tested and defined by a new code. I had met with Charles Morgan and others at the Boston office after I obtained funding from the Copper Development Association to develop a fire sprinkler system for life safety. Mr. Morgan helped me create a committee consisting of representatives of virtually all the major fire safety organizations including the federal government, the insurance industry, NFPA, the sprinkler industry, building code officials and others. I cannot say for sure but I suspect that at the time those at the NFPA did not believe I could create a new system, test it, and create a code defining it, test it in full view of the fire experts and get it all done. The last test was at the Pioneer Hotel in Tucson. The hotel had suffered a major loss of life fire and the fire chief said it could not go back into service except it was sprinklered. There was no room to run large steel pipe in the corridors above the drop ceilings. But I had pioneered looped and gridded systems allowing small diameter copper pipe with two or more flow paths. Eventually I designed a system for this hotel and the largest horizontal pipe was 1-1/4 inch copper tube. The manager of the pioneer Hotel had heard about my sprinkler research and invited us to hold the testing of the new system in the hotel as no further damage would be expected. The tests came out perfect and the draft of the new code was approved as indicated in the attached report. But, Charles Morgan had already taken steps to go back on his word and set in motion ways to kill the LSS system. A sub-committee had been created within the NFPA sprinkler committee of NFPA to create a code for residential (single family) properties. The NFPA staff knew at the time that after I developed the LSS system for protecting larger Life at Risk type properties such as hospitals, schools, apartment houses, hotels, nursing homes, etc. I planned to develop a dwelling protection system. So, the NFPA created one first. But the sprinkler committee set the criteria to make it extremely costly to install the system. For one thing, the minimum water to qualify the NFPA dwelling system was four times or greater than the amount of water a home normally has. Then they promoted the idea that the new NFPA dwelling made the LSS unnecessary. But the LSS system would protect a high rise building, for example, at a fraction of a cost of the NFPA code system. It did not make sense that the NFPA (one family) dwelling system would make the high rise building system unnecessary. But the number of fire engineers who showed concern with the NFPA logic was maybe about three. The NFPA, as the saying goes, killed two birds with one stone. The dwelling system was structured to make the installation of dwelling systems extremely costly and therefore essentially kill any major, nationwide installations in homes. And, it was used as a tool to claim the LSS system was not needed. It was within this environment of anti sprinkler operations that I wrote the attached letter. It was a waste of time. Talking to the NFPA About making sprinklers more affordable and protecting lives was like talking to a mountain covered with snow. If there was any possibility that the mountain could hear, the snow would muffle the words. A lot of people have died since then in buildings devoid of sprinklers.

R. M. Patton