Page 24 - Campus Security & Life Safety, May/June 2019

fire/life safety
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campuslifesecurity.com | MAY/JUNE 2019
"Failure to develop a plan for integration of these two vitally important systems opens the door
Ifor intolerable risks."
ntegration of security and fire alarms in facility design and emergency response planning is vitally important in today’s threat environment. In the Parkland high school shooting, a fire
alarm was activated during the attack (it is not known if the fire alarm was activated by the shooter or was automatically triggered by smoke from the firearm used in the attack) and briefly funneled students and teachers toward the danger before they became aware of the security threat. As a result, questions have been raised about how we can ensure that our fire protection systems, such as fire alarms, are not used for malicious intent.
When the fire alarm activated, those unaware of the danger began the required emergency evacuation procedure which was drilled regularly throughout the school year. Shortly thereafter, the principal issued a Code Red (the school’s code for an active shooter), but those already in the process of evacuating in response to the fire alarm found themselves stranded in hallways, as teachers began locking down classrooms. In the confusion, some students made the deci- sion to flea for their lives instead of shelter- ing in the locked classrooms they’d already evacuated. The fact is that the creators of the Code Red drills had likely not anticipated a fire alarm evacuation occurring during an active shooter scenario.
Historically, fire and life safety features and security features tended to be at odds in facility design and emergency response plan- ning. Huge efforts have been undertaken to dictate how facility fire alarm and life safety features should operate in the presence of physical security controls in order to ensure occupant life safety for egress. However, these efforts focused primarily on ensuring security controls didn’t block egress or ham- per fire response.
In today’s environment, the threats are changing, and integration of security and
By April Musser
Integrating Fire Safety
and Security Solutions in
the Campus Environment
Navigating the line between fire safety and security to create a safer learning environment
fire/life safety features must go far deeper than relays to release door locks and permit egress. In today’s world of active shooters and terrorist threats, the integration between security and fire/life safety has to begin at facility concept design, and extend through the life of the facility, to incident response and pre-planning at all phases of facility life- cycle. In this article, we will seek to identify the conflicts and opportunities that exist to integrate security and fire and life safety planning, as well as the conflicts that we must overcome. And, we will lay out a step- by-step strategy to accomplish these goals within the campus environment.
Parkland is a prime example of why pre- planning cannot presume that fire and secu- rity threats will happen independently of one another and offers a terrifying real life view of how emergency response planning must be inclusive of both. The fact is that fire safe- ty and security share one common objective: to keep people, property, and assets safe and secure. However, there is a growing potential for code compliance conflict between these two critical disciplines. This conflict grows from the fundamentally different approach each takes to this common objective. Among these differences is the codification of design, construction and maintenance standards for fire safety. Alternately, security design, con- struction, and maintenance is largely unreg- ulated and are generally not enforceable by authorities having jurisdiction. In an attempt to overcome this challenge, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) has under- taken the development of a new standard, NFPA 3000, Standard for an Active Shooter/
Hostile Event Response Program. The goal of this provisional standard is to establish a unified planning, response, and recovery program for shooter/hostile events to reduce confusion and make better use of resources to save time and ultimately to save lives.
Another fundamental difference between security planning and fire and life safety planning is that security planning is based in behavioral sciences, while fire and life safety are based in physical sciences. Security plan- ning seeks to detect, deter, assess, delay, and limit damage through operational, architec- tural, and technical design elements. Fire safety seeks to control the fire through active and passive systems, such as sprinklers and compartmentation, with the goal of allowing occupants adequate egress time before an environment becomes untenable. Secondary and tertiary goals are to limit damage to buildings and assets and to provide protec- tion for first responders. However, despite the differences, fire safety approaches and security approaches often utilize the same types of systems to suppress, compartmen- talize, and support response operations, so there is crossover that often goes unexploited in the facility planning phase.
One of the most powerful opportunities to maximize this crossover is through campus- wide notification. Many campus environ- ments have been slow to upgrade older emergency reporting systems making them fully compatible with campus notification, forgoing both the benefit for potential fire and life safety, as well as for security and threat response. One of the most important aspects of fire or threat response is commu-