THE PATTON REVOLUTION IN FIRE SCIENCE

For more than a half century I have suffered the slings and the arrows from a disgruntled and often corrupt fire protection establishment. The reason is because I have defined new and far better ways to protect human life from fire. I have produced and proven the solutions to the deadly fires that have plagued this nation for more than a hundred years. But, those who were comfortable with the status quo and content to take a paycheck or a profit to the bank each week did not want any changes that might disrupt the status quo. So long as money went into the bank each month, seemingly no one cared whether or not the kids were burning. So rather than being rewarded for my lifes work, I suffered the nastiest of returns for my contributions to society. Well, I have finally decided that if others within the fire field will do that they can to diminish my contributions to society; I will take the lead in claiming what should have been my reputation decades ago. I will, beginning now and into the future, claim the credits denied me by those who prefer to burn the kids instead of accepting the real solutions. The attached Patton Plan for Fire Safety was written and published in Buildings magazine during 1973. It defines the contrast between what could be termed the NFPA plan for exploiting the fire problem, and my plan for solving the fire problem. Within this report I explain why the NFPAs plan for fire safety caused perhaps a million fire deaths and injuries over its 70 plus years of existence (at that time). I proposed solutions that would allow fire deaths within buildings to be near completely eliminated. One of the many new concepts that I brought forth was to take a phenomenon that was known only to a handful of researchers, called flashover, and put the phenomenon into mainstream of fire science as a real and often deadly threat to human life in homes. My proposed changes included substituting real fire science to replace fire solutions by biased code writers. A fundamental privilege given to private businesses by the NFPA was the right to write their own fire codes to be able to force sell their own products. Obviously, granted this right, businesses wrote codes to defraud the public offering inadequate and often dangerous products at excessive prices. As an example, the business men selling the phony so-called ionization smoke detectors help revise an honest fire code (with falsified fire testing) so that their phony device would become the code complying ones. Those who would put phony smoke detectors into 90 million U.S. homes typify the NFPA mentality of fire safety for the people. Of course, when I created a fire sprinkler system called the Life Safety System that could be installed in buildings at a small fraction in cost as compared to the NFPA code mandated sprinklers, those who profited from fire were outraged. Many fire officials believed it to be most unfair to allow water, already available within a home or office, to douse a small fire before it got large, and (horrors) even before the remote fire department would have a fair opportunity to put it out. Just think how unfair that was, one tiny little two dollar sprinkler head could terminate the tiny fire whereas the local fire department would be able to show the public what their monster trucks and millions of gallons of water could accomplish. Granted, putting a fire out before the firefighters arrived was not sportsmanlike, but after all, the whole idea was to stop the children burning.

So I will take credit for what I did and let the fire experts cry in their beers; knowing full well that those who are ridiculed by their peers when they do more than their peers allow, will be better served by history. Richard M. Patton Fire Research Engineer Rmpatton7@gmal.com July 29, 2013