According to a recent article in FIRE ENGINEERING magazine, fire-rated doors and walls are considered passive fire protection and often get little publicity. When fire-rated doors do receive publicity, it is often because of a failure resulting from poor maintenance or from having been blocked open before the fire. Fortunately, these incidents are rare due to conscientious building and fire inspectors and the building owners and managers who maintain them as required by the building and fire codes, and by National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) Standard 80, Fire Doors and Other Opening Protectives.

Most building and fire codes require testing and listing of fire-rated doors by Underwriters Laboratories (UL) or another independent testing agency, according to NFPA Standard 252, Standard Methods of Fire Tests of Door Assemblies. This standard is also listed as UL 10B Fire Tests of Door Assemblies. Older fire door assemblies may have been tested to ASTM E-2074 Standard Test Method for Fire Tests of Door Assemblies, which was identical to the NFPA and UL standards at the time; and which was withdrawn by ASTM in 2007.

Fire-rated doors can provide a valuable line of defense for firefighters by separating:

• parts of a building that house hazardous processes or hazardous material storage from ordinary hazards;
• an older section of a building complex from a newer section;
• processing areas from warehousing;
• or a part of the building with automatic fire sprinklers from a part that has none

To read the entire article, click here