What is the NFPA?

The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), celebrating its 100th anniversary, has led the way to fire safety since 1896. The mission of the international nonprofit organization is to reduce the burden of fire on the quality of life by advocating scientifically-based consensus codes and standards, research, and education for fire and related safety issues.

The Association publishes the National Fire Codes and the Learn Not to Burn Curriculum used to educate schoolchildren around the world about fire safety.

The lifeblood of NFPA is its consensus standards-making system, which produces the National Fire Codes, 275 codes and standards covering all areas of fire safety and used in nearly every country in the world. In some way, virtually every building, process, service, design, and installation in society today is affected by the codes and standards developed through this open system.

Two of the many NFPA codes that have achieved world-wide recognition, adoption, and enforcement are:

• The Life Safety Code: NFPA 101, which provides requirements for building design, construction, operation, and maintenance to protect occupants from fire, smoke, and fumes or similar emergencies, and
• The National Electrical Code: NFPA 70, which addresses proper electrical systems and equipment installation to protect people and property from hazards arising from the use of electricity in buildings and structures.

Hazardous Materials Identification System

This widely used chemical labeling system was originally intended to provide basic information to fire fighting, emergency, and other personnel, enabling them to more easily decide whether to evacuate the area or to commence emergency control procedures. It was also intended to provide them with information to assist in selecting fire fighting tactics and emergency procedures.

In addition to these original goals, this standard provides laboratory personnel with an invaluable tool to help in establishing the appropriate level of personal protection that is required for working with a material and the correct method of storage and use that should be employed. NFPA 704 provides a simple, easy to recognize and understand system of markings that provides information regarding the hazards of a material and the severity of these hazards as they relate to handling, fire prevention, exposure and control. It should be used in conjunction with other chemical labeling systems to maximize safe usage and storage of hazardous materials.

The system is based on a diamond shaped marking that is divided into 4 regions, each assigned a color, and a numerical rating in each region. The regions depict health hazard, fire hazard, reactivity hazard and a region to indicate a reactivity with water, or other specific hazards if water reactivity is not an issue. An example of the marking follows.

* Toxic materials

The health rating is intended to provide emergency response personnel with an idea of the degree of danger posed by a specific material. It addresses only issues related to acute, or short-term, exposures, and does not consider the danger posed from chronic or long-term exposures. The disadvantage of this system is that it does not address exposure to carcinogenic or mutagenic materials. The standard is concerned only with exposure as related to respiratory or contact incidents, since ingestion is an unlikely scenario for fire fighters. A 3 or a 4 will be assigned to any material that is classified as "Poison - Inhalation hazard" by the DOT.

* Flammable materials

The flammability rating is dependent upon the ease of ignition of a material. Many materials will burn under one set of conditions but will not burn under any other condition. The numeric values are assigned based on the flashpoint (the minimum temperature at which a liquid gives off vapor in sufficient concentrations to allow the substance to ignite) of the material. The flashpoint supplies useful information regarding the degree of hazard. First, if the material has no flashpoint, it is not a flammable material. Second, if it has a flashpoint, it must be considered flammable or combustible. Also, the flashpoint can be used as an indication of susceptibility of ignition - lower flashpoints indicate increased susceptibility.

* Reactive materials

The reactivity rating measures a material's susceptibility to violent reaction - detonation, polymerization, explosion, etc. The violence of the reaction may be increased by addition of heat or pressure, by mixture with other materials to form fuel-oxidizer combinations, or by contact with incompatible substances or contaminants. Because of the complexity of these types of reactions it is not straightforward to use a simple numeric scale to identify the degree of hazard. Rather these situations involving reactive materials must be evaluated individually. The numeric rating will be used to rank the ease, rate and potential quantity of energy that may be released.

* Water Reactives and Oxidizers - Special Hazards

Materials which are unusally reactive with water are denoted with a "W" with a slash through it. The number in the yellow box will then indicate the degree of reactivity.

Materials which are capable of increasing the intensity of a fire by supplying fuel during fire situations will be labeled with the legend "OX" in this section of the diamond.

Degree of Hazard

The degrees of hazard shall be ranked according to the potential severity of the exposure as shown in the following table. Keep in mind that these ratings were devised to rate the degree of hazard in a fire situation. The disadvantage of this system, obviously, is that it does not address the hazard of day-to-day benchtop exposure in the chemical laboratory.