NFPA Presents Top 2019 Awards
The 2019 recipient of the Standards Medal, the top award given by the NFPA Standards Council, is Stephen J. King, III, whose 30-year career began with the Fire Department of New York, where he rose through the ranks to become commander for Battalion 54. King was the city-wide safety chief on September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center buildings were struck by hijacked airplanes.
The National fire Protection Association presented its top 2019 awards recognizing outstanding achievements in fire and life safety on June 16 during its Conference & Expo in San Antonio. The awards included:
- Harry C. Bigglestone Award, given annually to a paper appearing in Fire Technology that best represents excellence in the communication of fire protection concepts. This award honors the memory of Harry C. Bigglestone, who served as a trustee of the Fire Protection Research Foundation, and was a fellow and past president of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers. The award is accompanied by a $5,000 cash prize from NFPA. The 2019 Harry C. Bigglestone winning paper is "Wind and Fire Coupled Modelling," by Dr. Wojciech Wegrzyński, assistant professor and deputy head of the Fire Research Department of the Polish Building Research Institute in Warsaw and Tomasz Lipecki, a head of the Smoke Control, Detection and Fire Automation, Fire Research department of the institute.
- Fire Protection Research Foundation Medal, which recognizes the Fire Protection Research Foundation project completed in the previous year that best exemplifies the foundation's fire safety mission, technical challenges that have been overcome, and a collaborative approach to execution. The Fire Safety Challenges of Tall Wood Buildings (Phase 2) project was selected as the winner of the 2019 Research Foundation Medal. The project aimed to quantify the contribution of cross laminated timber building elements (wall and/or floor-ceiling assemblies) in compartment fires and evaluate the relative performance of those elements compared to other building systems commonly used in tall buildings. The Foundation Medal will be presented to Daniel Brandon, a researcher within the fire research division at the Research Institutes of Sweden; Matthew Hoehler, a research structural engineer at NIST; Birgit A.-L. Östman, affiliated with Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden; and Joseph Su, a principal research officer at the National Research Council of Canada, Fire Safety Unit.
- The Industrial Fire Protection Section Fire Prevention Week Award recipient is Robbie Stone. Prior to becoming fire chief in 2006 of Atkinson County (Ga.) Fire Department, Stone was the director of the Emergency Management Agency. He is also a Georgia Certified Volunteer Fire Chief through the Georgia Chiefs Association. He served as a volunteer in the fire service for more than 15 years. Stone was instrumental in creating a new fire safety program, resulting in a 30 percent drop in fire calls, when two towns consolidated their fire services.
- The 2019 recipient of the Standards Medal, the top award given by the NFPA Standards Council, is Stephen J. King, III, whose 30-year career began with the Fire Department of New York, where he rose through the ranks to become commander for Battalion 54. King was the city-wide safety chief on September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center buildings were struck by hijacked airplanes. He suffered injuries from the incident and subsequently retired but has remained actively involved in the fire service, serving as chairman of the NFPA Technical Committee on Structural and Proximity Fire Fighting Protective Clothing and Equipment.