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A five-year effort has resulted in the new NFPA 400, Hazardous Materials Code, which promises help for anyone responsible for the safe storage of hazardous materials.
IN MAY OF 1995, almost within sight of NFPA's Massachusetts headquarters, a four-alarm fire broke out in a big-box retail store. Investigators determined that the probable culprit was a confluence of leaking swimming pool chemicals along with leaking motor oil that had been stored with new lawnmowers.
The following year, another large retailer, this time a home improvement store in Albany, Georgia, experienced a similar conflagration. The fire grew so rapidly that fire personnel were unable to contain it, resulting in the complete loss of the building and its contents. While no specific cause was ever established, the store did handle large quantities of pool chemicals, and the way they were stored and handled, along with their proximity to other materials, was thought to have contributed to the severity of the fire.
These two events underscore part of the motivation behind development of the new NFPA 400, Hazardous Materials Code - namely, the challenges posed by the volume and variety of hazardous materials that have become part of everyday commerce. Indeed, in the trucking industry, the largest single section in the Commercial Drivers License (CDL) handbook - the document that is the basis for licensing truck drivers in the U.S. - has to do with safely handling hazardous materials. For building code enforcers, businesses, and others responsible for safely storing the wide range of increasingly common hazardous materials, the challenge has been just as great. However, with no equivalent of the CDL, guidance has been hard to get and, when available, incomplete and confusing.
Now, after a five-year effort by the NFPA Committee on Hazardous Chemicals, a solution is finally emerging. According to Guy Colonna, NFPA division manager, the Committee on Hazardous Chemicals is formally proposing NFPA 400, which incorporates four preexisting documents: NFPA 430, Code for the Storage of Liquid and Solid Oxidizers; NFPA 432, Code For the Storage of Organic Peroxide Formulations; NFPA 434, Code for the Storage of Pesticides; and NFPA 490, Code for the Storage of Ammonium Nitrate.
"This is evolution, not revolution," says Colonna. "It combines existing documents without changing the specifics,...