[DOE LETTERHEAD]
March 30, 2005
Mr. John T. Conway, Chairman
Defense Nuclear Facilities
Safety Board
625 Indiana Avenue, NW
Suite 700
Washington, D.C. 20004-2901
Dear Mr. Chairman:
The purpose of this letter is to
provide you with an update of our plans to reevaluate fire safety performance
measures and reporting methodology. This
is consistent with previous commitments delineated in my letter to you on
October 18, 2004, and in a meeting with your fire protection staff on November
10, 2004.
Since our meeting with your
staff, the subcommittee (of the Department of Energy Fire Safety Committee)
that was tasked with addressing this issue has completed an evaluation of all
fire reporting
criteria currently stipulated in Department of Energy (DOE) Manual 231.1-1A,
National Fire
Protection Association Standard 901, and the National Fire Incident Reporting System (NFIRS),
as well as
criteria used by several DOE sites. Pending is an effort to segregate the criteria into lists for various
repositories and eliminate
duplication.
In conjunction with these
actions, a pilot project was initiated to enable DOE fire departments to begin
entering emergency response data on a voluntary basis into the NFIRS system. While a significant number of sites have
expressed interest in the pilot, only one fire department has begun to
participate. Others await the resolution
of issues associated with computer software compatibility, release of sensitive
information, and obtaining appropriate approvals before data entry can begin. The subcommittee believes that it will require
at least one year to evaluate the success of the pilot, conditional upon the
participation of a representative number of
departments.
On January 31, 2005, the subcommittee sent
an interim progress report to the DOE Fire Safety Committee and
points-of-contact for the mandated annual fire protection program summary. At that same time a request was made from all
sites for additional data fields and performance elements for consideration. No additional input has been received as of this date.
In a related issue, it has been
noted through Fire Safety Committee discussions and program office oversight
activities that accurate reporting of fire and related events in the Occurrence Reporting and Processing
System and the Computerized Accident/Incident Reporting System is being
obscured by imprecise definitions. Some
sites use terms such as; “thermal excursions,” “exothermic reactions,” “rapid
deflagrations,” and other
names in lieu “fire”. The subcommittee
has developed an all-encompassing
definition of “fire” to be used in all DOE reporting systems. An effort is currently underway to revise the
DOE directives that govern these systems to include this new definition. This is being done with the expectation that
the accuracy of future fire reporting will be enhanced.
The subcommittee has completed
most of the work to identify and
evaluate fire reporting criteria. It
plans to issue
a preliminary report during the 2005 DOE Fire Safety Workshop which is
tentatively scheduled for the week of June 15th at Brookhaven National
Laboratory and a
final report shortly thereafter. A
strawman draft
of this report is enclosed for your information. Following the completion of the pilot project,
revisions to current DOE fire protection program performance measures and
incident
reporting systems, will be coordinated with the DOE Fire Safety Committee and
the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) staff.
Consistent with current
practice, the DNFSB staff will be kept informed of progress during the
periodically scheduled teleconferences of the subcommittee. (Mr. Chuck March of your staff has been a
regular
participant.)
If you have any questions,
please contact me at (202) 586-6151
or members of your staff may contact Mr. Frank Russo at (301) 903-8008.
Sincerely,
John Spitaleri Shaw
Assistant Secretary for
Environment, Safety and Health
cc w/enclosure:
Linton F. Brooks,
NA-1
Raymond L. Orbach, SC-1
James J. Mangeno, NA-3.6
Patrice Bubar, EM-3.2
Lawrence O. Bailey, EM-3