NFPA strives to develop minimum requirements for active shooter response

Last week, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) announced that it would be fast-tracking a new standard designed to better prepare first responders, private sector organizations and citizens in general on how to respond to active shooters and other hostile events. The move to process the standard, dubbed “NFPA 3000, Standard for Preparedness and Response to Active Shooter and/or Hostile Events,” as a provisional standard means that it will be available for use as early as April. This is only the second time in the NFPA’s history that provisional standard status has been authorized by the NFPA Standards Council.    

The organization says the decision to fast-track the standard was spurred by the recent string of mass casualty shootings across the U.S., beginning with the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, followed by the shootings in Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs, Texas, that took place a little more than a month apart late last year. Together, these three shootings produced more than half of all the casualties reported for active shooter incidents that took place in the U.S. from 2000 to 2013.     

Why the NFPA?

While most people associate the NFPA as an organization solely focused on the development of fire safety codes, John Montes, Emergency Services Specialist for NFPA who serves as the staff liaison for the technical committee tasked with developing the standard, says that they are actually well-positioned to develop a standard around active shooter response given  their ability to bring all of the relevant parties to the table in one place to discuss best practices and lessons learned.

“The reason we’re doing this is because we’re the best suited to do it. We have a tried and true process and we have the bandwidth to do it,” Montes explains. “We are a standards developer that develops standards that are not just for fire. For example, the National Electrical Code (NEC) and Health Care Facilities Code are non-fire documents. I know we have fire in our name but we have an interest in reducing unnecessary loss of life and injuries due to hazards. That’s really our mission and this standard is in line with that.”     

According to Montes, when the NFPA put out a notice that they had been requested to put together a standard to address this issue and sought initial public comments on whether or not they should do it, they received just over 100 comments, 97 percent of which were in favor of the idea. In addition, the NFPA also received 103 applications from people who wanted to serve on the committee.

The standard is being developed by a 46-member NFPA Technical Committee, which features representatives from all of the various disciplines involved in mitigating active shooter and other threats, including law enforcement, fire, EMS, federal agencies, healthcare professionals, universities, and private security. Montes emphasizes that the standard is written by the committee through a consensus building process and not by the NFPA itself. “A lot of people think the NFPA writes (the standard) but we don’t, we’re the shepherds of the process,” he says.

Specifically, NFPA 3000 seeks to establish a common framework around three different areas of active shooter and/or hostile event response including:

• Establishing a unified command structure;
• Planning for an integrated response with other agencies and organizations;
• And, how to prepare for an effective recovery effort.

Montes says the standard’s goal is to establish minimum requirements for everyone involved in active shooter and hostile event mitigation without  addressing local tactics which can vary greatly between agencies and organizations. “If you’ve looked at one community, you’ve seen one community. There is so much variation they could never standardize those tactics,” he says. 

Impact on Security

Jeff Sarnacki, the co-founder and principal of emergency management and security consulting firm Skylight Global, LLC, and one of four ASIS members serving on the aforementioned technical committee, believes that while the standard is more first responder-oriented in its nature, there are still many aspects of it that are relevant to security professionals. “I look at this as an opportunity to empower folks like us in security to improve life safety and this standard helps to do that,” Sarnacki explains.

Given that the standard is going to mandate some things that are not currently commonplace within many organizations – both in the public and private sectors – such as emergency actions plans for evacuations and shelter in place scenarios, Sarnacki says there will be opportunities for security practitioners to put their stamp on the security plans within the organizations where they work. “Every security director or person that works for a company is going to see opportunity in this standard,” he says. “As it is the very first standard, it is also very timely and the primary message for any and all is if you need help, get it.”     

And while it may be incredibly complicated to create a standard for responding to active shooters and hostile events from a global perspective given how different each incident can be, Sarnacki says that when you take a more myopic approach of planning internally that it is much simpler. For example, Sarnacki recently worked on a whitepaper with some colleagues about responding to an active shooter in a high-rise facility, which obviously doesn’t lend itself to the evacuation procedures followed on many K-12 and university campuses.

“When you can’t jump out of a window, it becomes a whole different game plan for you or as is often the case today, massive floor plans that are wide open because that is the new normal in the tech world, maybe 50,000 square feet and one room on that floor,” he says. “How do you protect that and what are your options for that? Creating a standard that address all of that is challenging but this one does a good job of setting a baseline for what makes sense and again, this empowers security professionals to look at their own situations and come up with unique solutions for their own problems.”

Perhaps the standard’s most immediate impact, according to Sarnacki, is controlling blood loss for victims of a shooting or other types of attack. Sarnacki, who will also soon be serving on a committee that will create supplemental guidelines for active shooter response as a part of the ASIS standard for preventing workplace violence, says that so much attention is often paid to prevention that simple mitigation steps that should be followed in the aftermath of an incident are often overlooked.     

“No matter what you do on the front-end on the prevention and preparedness side, mitigation is clearly a requirement here. Stopping blood loss and someone from needlessly dying from a gunshot wound to an extremity that wouldn’t otherwise be fatal is a primary consideration,” he explains. “In the annex there is a recommendation that blood control or some sort of trauma kits be readily available. People have to start thinking about these things and why you can’t stop everything, there are things you can do post-event to minimize its impact.”   

In addition, he says that since many fire alarm systems only have a single tone for signaling an evacuation, the new NFPA standard suggests that consideration be given to implementing mass notification solutions that can emit a variety of evacuation tones to differentiate between events.

Next Steps

The standard is currently open for input from the public until February 23. The technical committee will subsequently meet in March with the goal of having the provisional standard ready by April. As soon as it is released as a provisional standard, Montes says NFPA 3000 will then go into the organization’s typical standard cycle, being opened again to public feedback with a 24-month revision process. 

Click here for more information about the standard or to learn how you can provide comment on it.