Records under fire: a look at the pros and cons of compartmentalizing records centers and why this issue is so hotly debated.

• Author: Groves, Shanna

At the Core

This article:

* Defines the concept of records center compartmentalization

* Examines the supporting and opposing views about compartmentalization

* Explains what to expect in the soon-to-be-revised NFPA 232 standard

Over the past few years, the discussion about how to best protect records from fire has fueled a heated debate that shows no sign of burning out anytime soon. In fact, the battle over compartmentalization was born in flames and looks as though it will go out the same way when the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) votes in November on the revision of NFPA 232 Standard for the Protection of Records.

The concept of compartmentalization garnered serious attention after a massive fire in St. Louis's National Personnel Records Center (NPRC) in 1973. With no automatic sprinkler system or partitions to keep the fire from spreading, the building's entire sixth floor--and 18.5 million files--were destroyed.

"The St. Louis fire was probably one of the most investigated, lessons-learned, research fires that has occurred in federal government for many years," says Stephen E. Hannestad, director of the Safe Security Management Division of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and chairman of the NFPA 232 Technical Committee. "If the fire had happened on the top floor, it would have brought down the entire building. When you lack compartmentalization and a fire gets out of control, it consumes everything until it hits a barrier. In this case the barrier was the floor."

The St. Louis NPRC experience prompted NARA to more closely examine single-incident and catastrophic fires. "In all of the incidences where there have been engineered and maintained sprinkler systems and compartmentalization, fire losses have been cut back. In instances where fires did not have the best designed sprinkler systems and compartmentalization, you had more significant loss," Hannestad explains.

However, some professionals who serve with Hannestad on the NFPA 232 Technical Committee strongly disagree with the position that records center fires can be best contained by installing compartments.

Compartmentalization, also known as compartmentation, is defined by NFPA 232 as "the subdivision of a building into relatively small areas so that fire or smoke can be confined to the room or section originates." The 2000 edition goes further by requiring that fire walls separate storage compartments and that in records centers, the maximum storage volume of records should not exceed 250,000 cubic feet in a single compartment.

Opponents of compartmentalization attest that records center fires can be adequately contained by a large, well-maintained sprinkler system alone, and they are skeptical about why compartmentalization was included in the NFPA 232 2000 Edition.

"The requirement for four-hour rated fire wall compartmentation of records centers storing ordinary business records that are not of vital or archival character that appeared in the 2000 edition of the standard was ill-conceived," says Jim Booth, NFPA 232 Technical Committee member and executive director of Garner, N.C.-based PRISM International, a not-for-profit trade association representing the commercial information management industry. "There are numerous examples in which modern sprinkler technology, in the records environment and elsewhere, has worked to protect both life and property from fire."

How Compartmentalization Evolved

The NFPA 232 standard can be traced back to 1947 when it was introduced as a result of the 1922 Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railway office building fire in Chicago. The fire destroyed "every record of the physical valuation of the railroad's properties, a loss reported to have cost the company $7.5 million in 1922 dollars," notes David R. Hague, NFPA senior fire protection engineer and staff liaison to the NFPA 232 Technical Committee, in his article "How NFPA 232 Can Help You Protect Your Records" in the March/April 2002 issue of NFPA Journal. "This fire showed that valuable and irreplaceable records, even when stored in a so-called fire-resistant building, could be lost forever unless properly protected."

NFPA 232 outlines fire safety requirements for records centers, file rooms, vaults, and archival records storage. Some of the issues...