Today was the final day of the ISO Firefighters PPE meetings. The agenda covered discussions surrounding Part 1 of the ISO 11999 series of documents which have been the main topic of discussion throughout this week’s meetings. Part 1 ‘General’ is an introductory document to the following parts in the series and contains some general considerations on the ‘Design and Performance’ of firefighters PPE. Discussions were entirely editorial and included comments to include reference to new emerging threats, including from Lithium-ion batteries.
This finalised all the planned project group meetings planned for the week. The project groups now report their progress and recommended next steps into the overarching Working Group committee which was the final meeting of the week.
All documents considered during this week were ‘Committee Drafts (CD)”. The proposals from almost all project groups to the working group was to move these to ‘”Draft International Standard (DIS)” More details on stages of development can be found: ISO – Stages and resources for standards development
The only exception being ISO 11999-3; where, due to the number of comments and ongoing discussions, this document will be held at the CD stage and rediscussed at the next meeting.
A very productive week of meetings with healthy debate to ensure firefighters safety is carefully considered and maintained to the levels that end users expect.
Next step will be to report this week’s work into NFCC PPE and Clothing Committee and deal with the required comments and actions in preparation for the next round of meetings. NFCC Committee webpage can be found here: NFCC PPE & Clothing Committee | National Fire Commercial Programme (nfcc-procurementhub.org.uk)