Standard for Wildland Firefighting

April 1, 2021

University of California Davis | Fire Halted Outside Primate Center’s Fence Line

As “cities-within-cities” college and universities present a risk aggregation that cannot be de-coupled from the host municipality. Most large universities depend upon municipal fire safety infrastructure — i.e. the local “water grid”. For physical assets that are located far off-campus, however; the university either has a safety infrastructure relationship with another unit of government — a township or a village — or the educational institution must build its own on-site fire protection system.

As with fire safety practice on the central campus; fire prevention in off campus facilities is the first step. The backdrop of chronic, seasonal wildfires in north and southern hemisphere inspire a revisit of NFPA 1143 Standard for Wildland Fire Management, a consensus document that has evolved from leading practice discovery dating back to 1934. It is a management document and, as such, expectations for technical specifics regarding planning, design, construction, operations and maintenance should be limited. The substance of legacy NFPA consensus products — Standard for Wildfire Control and Standard for Protection of Life and Property from Wildfire — have been conveyed into a configured product NFPA 1140 Standards for Wildland Firefighting.

Public input for the next edition is linked below:

2022 Public Input NFPA 1140

There are no user interests in any of the technical panels affiliated with education communities. Some of the concepts in play:

Substantial expansion of definitions

Updated reference material

Auxiliary fire mains

Qualifications and Management

Building separation

Sprinkler systems

…And so on…Fairly canonical stuff in the fire protection domain though concern for animals in husbandry and agricultural programs keeps this title on our radar.

Comments are due October 9th.

We keep the entire NFPA catalog on the agenda of our Prometheus and Disaster colloquia. See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting; open to everyone.