Fire Protection Research Foundation report: "Pilot Demonstration of an Impact Evaluation Protocol: NIST NCST Recommendations Arising from The Station Nightclub Fire" (PDF, 2 MB)
Author: John R. Hall, Jr., PhD, Michael Karter, National Fire Protection Association, and Amanda Kimball, P.E. and Minchao Yin, Fire Protection Research Foundation
Date of issue: October 2014
Introduction
Under the authority of the National Construction Safety Team (NCST) Act, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) establishes a National Construction Safety Team to determine the likely technical cause(s) of building failures. These reports include recommendations, but there has been no systematic method available to evaluate the impact of these recommendations.
A general protocol for conducting such evaluations cannot be created from scratch and still be detailed and validated enough to be useful for NIST’s purposes. Therefore, the Fire Protection Research Foundation and the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) conducted this project with the goal to develop a systematic method to evaluate the impact of NCST recommendations by focusing on a single incident as an example. This specific evaluation also serves as the basis for a general protocol.
The incident chosen for the example to demonstrate the protocol was The Station Nightclub Fire, which occurred on the night of 20 February 2003 in West Warwick, Rhode Island, and resulted in 100 fatalities.