Hello Aine and Shige,

It looks like Dick Doyle circulated the link last Friday for the updated VI fire paper. I am attached a pdf version of the paper in case you were not able to download it. Per our discussion, this is a modern version of the latest fire technology thinking and was prepared by VI’s long time fire scientist consultant, Dr. Marcelo Hirschler. Please feel free to contact me with any questions. Thanks,

Rich

Rich, Here is the e-mail I sent to the GVC

Dick

Dear GVC Members, I am looking forward to seeing you at our upcoming meeting in Berlin, Germany on Monday, May 8th. Our agenda will be sent to you shortly. In the meantime, I believe you will find this recently released publication on the fire properties of PVC to be of interest. It was developed by Marcelo Hirschler, a consultant to the Vinyl Institute here in the U.S. who is with GBI International. We will be adding this paper to the protected section of the GVC Website so you can reference it when you need it in the future.

http://www.vinylinfo.org/sites/default/files/Fire%20Properties%20of%20Polyvinyl%20Chloride.pdf

Interestingly, while I am sure most of you did not see it, there was a huge fire in Atlanta, Georgia under a major highway a few weeks ago. The highway collapsed and it is going to take the State about 5 months to replace several hundred meters of overhead highway sections in both directions impacting some 175,000 people a day. Obviously, a very serious and extremely unfortunate situation.

All of the initial media reports stated that the materials being stored under the highway were PVC pipes. Even the Mayor of Atlanta and the Governor of the State of Georgia pointed to PVC pipe that first day. Within twelve hours, with the assistance of our fire consultant Marcelo Hirschler and with our assessment of the google earth photos and media video coverage, we came to the conclusion that the material could not be PVC pipe. It burned uncontrollably and the density of the thick black smoke was not consistent with PVC pipe. Our conclusions were validated a couple of hours later when the Transportation Commissioner finally reported that the stored materials were coils of HDPE telecommunications conduit. We issued the following statement and posted it on one of our websites titled Vinyl Verified http://vinylverified.com/blog/ . It took us then several days to correct the misinformation carried in both traditional and social media, including the Washington Post and the New York Times.

I hope you find the Fire Properties of PVC publication to be a useful resource.

Best Regards, Dick

Additional Resources

Coming soon.