In October the International Code Council will meet for its annual meeting in Baltimore, MD. At the meeting, the ICC board will hear comments on a set of amendments sponsored by Carl Wren with the City of Austin Fire Department. The Congress for New Urbanism has proposed these changes and Carl Wren has been nice enough to endorse them. These amendments are intended to allow for narrower streets common to new-urbanist development, which are often viewed as an obstacle in the fire code. When the fire code official approves increased fire wall and sprinkler standards, the ICC will allow for “a decrease in the minimum access width”. This will help remove a great barrier to creating denser communities.
As a former firefighter, yep that’s me in the picture, I can say that the ICC and other fire codes cause wide streets and fire lanes everywhere and it is often overkill. I was a firefighter in an older suburban community in New Jersey. The roads weren’t all 26′ wide, some were one-way, and others hadn’t been repaved in decades. Yet, we were able to get where we had to go, in acceptable time. Sometimes you had to get a little creative, but that’s what firefighters do best, improvise. Narrow gridded streets offer many options for fire crews arriving and fighting the fire. In fact, cul-de-sacs and dead ends offer the biggest obstacle. Firefighters in cities such as New York, Chicago, and Boston have been dealing with narrow streets since the 1800′s and get the job done, there is no reason we cannot build streets today that mimic their predecessors and still have effective fire departments.
I encourage anyone with a vote in the ICC to vote yes on the amendments to sections 503 & 705. Pass this info along to your fire marshals and fire code officials as well.
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