FIRE PREVENTION
A Dirty Chore Made a Little Easier
Determining who’s qualified to test commercial cooking appliances isn’t easy, but 1 organization can help
By Jim Crawford

How does a local fire marshal determine whether the person conducting work on fire protection systems is qualified to do the work? And how do we prevent low-bidding, incompetent contractors from duping unsuspecting business owners with an “economical solution” that’s ineffective?

The fire codes and standards related to inspection, testing and maintenance of commercial cooking appliances are full of requirements and guidelines. There’s a great deal of detail included in NFPA 96 on the topic—which is a good thing, because it stipulates how things are to be done.

But as is often the case in the fire codes, the language about who is qualified to do this type of work is left up to the local “authority having jurisdiction” (AHJ). That’s the technical way of saying that the local code-enforcement authority must determine who’s qualified to do certain work. Allowing the AHJ to determine who’s qualified isn’t limited to commercial kitchen appliances. NFPA standards list similar details and requirements in other documents (e.g., NFPA 25) that cover inspecting, testing and maintenance of fire sprinkler systems (among other things).

In each case, the type of certification or qualification of the people doing the work is left up to the local AHJ. And that presents a common problem: How does the local AHJ find someone they can trust?

Finding Someone You Can Trust
Fire sprinkler systems are so established—and the industry around them mature enough—that finding training and certification programs for their inspection, testing and maintenance is not generally a problem. Independent agencies exist, notably the National Institute for Certification in Engineering Technologies
But my department, the Vancouver (Wash.) Fire Department, ran into a challenge when we were looking for similar agencies to provide testing and certification for commercial kitchen system contractors.

A variety of programs exist, but we wanted an organization with the proper bona fides, one whose training and certification programs we could reasonably trust. Some of the more common agencies (such as NICET) don’t have a program for commercial kitchen system contractors. It took the relationships we’d built with local contractors (those whose quality of work we trust) to identify a national association that provides such training and certification.

Dave Smith and Kylie Jackson of our office have spent a great deal of time running some of these issues to ground, and in so doing, they came across the International Kitchen Exhaust and Cleaning Association (IKECA). IKECA has been around since 1989, but—perhaps like many of you—I’d never heard of them.

I hate to admit that for many years as a fire marshal I was ignoring the qualifications of the people doing such work, trusting that our regular code enforcement inspections would uncover shoddy contractors. However, as our resources became even more stretched by budget constraints—and as the job of code enforcement became even more complex—I began to pay more attention to those in our field pointing out that it could be a long time before we inspected the work of a fire protection contractor in the field. As a result, we’d better have some confidence in who we were “accepting” as qualified.

The folks at IKECA have been more than responsive to our needs for an independent training and certification program for people who test, inspect and maintain commercial kitchen equipment. And they went above and beyond reasonable efforts to include options for nonmembers, so that local contractors who don’t want to pay membership dues still have options for training and certification that meet our needs. IKECA originally developed a testing process for nonmembers specifically for the City of Boston, but expanded it to include Vancouver and any other jurisdiction needing that kind of service.

Go National
We don’t have the resources in Vancouver to develop, administer and constantly adjust a training and testing process to certify fire protection technicians so that we have confidence in their work. And even if every AHJ did, the burden on the industry to meet each AHJ’s requirements would get crazy.

I think it’s in our collective interest to identify national resources that can meet our needs. Until I find something better, I’m pleased to point out to readers that IKECA is worth checking out when it comes to commercial kitchen fire protection contractors.

I think it’s a bit ironic that one of the main locations of fires in commercial occupancies is the kitchen—and yet they’re one of the last to have certification programs for inspection, testing and maintenance contractors. It’s even more ironic that no one is requiring fire marshals to have a similar kind of certification for professional qualifications. But that’s a whole different column!

Jim Crawford is a deputy chief and fire marshal with the Vancouver (Wash.) Fire Department and is chair of the NFPA technical committee on professional qualifications for fire marshals. He has written “Fire Prevention: A Comprehensive Approach,” published by Brady, and has also written a chapter on fire prevention in “Managing Fire and Rescue Services,” published by the International City/County Managers Association. Crawford is a past president of the International Fire Marshals Association and has served on the NFPA’s Standards Council. He is a member of the IAFC.


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