 Hello everyone we're going to get started on this Tuesday afternoon in just a minute here on the Eastern time zone. I'm going to give it just a few minutes for us to populate the room. Just to confirm you're here for another C2C care webinar this month's topic is going to be on fire suppression for museums and cultural institutions. We're going to be running from around 1pm to 2pm Eastern, and hopefully we'll have a little bit of a Q&A period at the end of that. So everyone knows. I'm going to go ahead and start sharing my screen to get kick things off. Okay, so let me start by welcoming everyone. My name is Robin Bauer Kilgoe. I am the C2C care coordinator. And I'm coming to you right outside of Washington DC in Silver Spring, Maryland. So we're happy to have you guys with us here today. And that's my name and my contact information. If you have any questions about anything including the program please do reach out to me at C2CC at cultural heritage.org. For those of you who might be new to us. This is our home on the web www.connection connecting to collections.org on that website you will find all sorts of fun resources connected to our program, including an archive of all of our webinars we've done. The C2C care has been around for over a decade so there's quite the list of things out there or webinars for you to research. We also have a link to our courses which are a touch more deep dives into different subjects, which might be interesting for a lot of people. All of our courses starting a year ago are actually free. So I would encourage people if they want to do a deep dive on certain subjects to go log into our website. Hit the course archive button and you'll be able to see all sorts of fun courses in there. And lastly, we have a link to our community. The community is a great place to ask questions and to kind of get nice feedback from folks who are professionals within our career field. So I would encourage you to go to that at any point to ask questions about all things related to collections and they'll be a great wonderful volunteer crew to help you answer them. There are two places where you can find out news for us on social media on Facebook and the network formerly known as Twitter now called X. Our handle on both of those is at C2C care on both of those feeds you will see all sorts of information related to upcoming programming. So I would encourage you to follow us there. A couple of quick technical notes for today's program. One way that you can communicate with our presenter today one way is via the chat. I encourage you to use the chat to say hello say where you're coming from. It's a great way to just kind of say, you know, welcome to everyone and say, you know, if you want to talk about the weather that always seems to be like a fun topic to talk about so I encourage you to use that chat box for that. The other area you can talk to our presenter is via the Q&A box. That is really an area to ask questions so at any point during the webinar you have a question for our speaker. I encourage you to use that Q&A box to put it in there. A couple of other things to note we are recording today's webinar so if you happen to log out early, not a problem we'll have the recording up probably with it by the end of the week so you'll be able to view the entire thing there. The recordings get posted on our website and on the FAIC YouTube channel so you can go to either spot and you'll see them there. We are also have enabled captioning for this program. So if you hit the CC button down at the bottom you will see our captioner working hard at work actually transcribing everything that we're saying today so I encourage you to take a look at both of those things for technical assistance. A couple quick programming notes for upcoming CDC care webinars. We do produce one webinar a month a free one. So in November we're going to be doing decolonizing and collections care on November 16. Again this is a free program so I encourage you if you're interested in the subject to go take to go register for that. Our other webinar we're skipping December because of the holidays but then in January we're going to start up again with rock on storing your geological materials. I'm excited about this one in January just because a lot of folks have these geological materials in their collection. And you know you kind of think it's easy to store rocks or those kind of items but they are their own challenge I would encourage you to sign up for that webinar if you have some questions on that as well. So I'm going to go ahead and introduce our speaker now and stop sharing our screen. Today our speaker is Michael Kilby who's the associate director for fire protection at the Smithsonian Institution. This presentation is going to provide an overview of the various types of fire suppression systems appropriate for various cultural properties. So Michael feel free to take over whenever you're ready and I'll be here for the q amp a once you've concluded. Okay, thank you Robin. Good afternoon everybody or good morning if you're on the west coast. I'm going to stop sharing my video so I have full bin with share the presentation, and we'll get started. How we looking Robin looks perfect looks good. Okay, great. Well, greetings everyone. My name is Michael Kilby is Robin said I'm the associate director for fire protection at the Smithsonian. I'm also a fire protection engineer and our group of fire protection engineers service code officials and fire safety advisors for the Smithsonian. Our museums and research centers. So today we're going to talk about strategies for utilizing automatic fire suppression systems to protect your museums and other cultural institutions. You know, these systems are critical component of a comprehensive approach to safeguarding museums, including their collections and their operations. So I usually like to get started by looking at some fires. So let me pull the next slide here. There we go. Okay. So, just a few museum fires, just to make sure everyone realizes museum fires do happen. And some of them are going to be very serious. This is the be 1010 Institute in San Paulo, Brazil that had a fire in 2010. This facility had the largest snake collection in the world. It had collections representing 90 years of research. You know, over 77,000 specimens of snakes, almost half a million spiders and scorpions. You know, most of these collections were preserved in ethanol. So the building didn't have sprinklers didn't have fire alarm system. They had a fire that started in a heating stone and took in a terrarium fire spread to the collections. You know, as the, as the fire grew, more and more containers would break and collapse building more ethanol, you know, leading to a really rapid escalation in the fire. It took about 50 firefighters about 90 minutes to control the fire. After it was all over the Institute had lost 80% of their collections. This is the another fire happened in the New Delhi Museum of Natural History. 2016. They lost thousands of specimens and and many of their exhibits were lost the fire started on the top floor and spread down four floors. Major contributors to this fire were wooden partition and specimens preserved in ethanol combustible exhibits. That just allowed the fire to spread unchecked. Also, they didn't have operable sprinklers in the building at that time. A little bit more recently, the Museum National in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This was the largest museum in South America, had over 20 million artifacts. And this fire basically destroyed the entire building and 90% of their collections. At the time of the fire, the building had fallen into disrepair. There's very low maintenance money and lack of government's government funding. The fire was believed to be caused by electrical fault with an air conditioning system. I actually had a chance to go down there and see the results of the aftermath like about a year after the fire. Let me see there's some pictures this is a sort of before, before, during and after the fire pictures. So you can see what the building looked like on the left. In the middle and then on the right, you can see pretty much it's building was totally gutted. You know, the floors are gone anything left standing or is the masonry walls. And, you know, they were able to salvage some collections off, you know, amidst the rubble but only about 10% survived. So, I think it's no easy for people to get into a mentality that fires happen but they just don't happen to you or to us. It's not something you see every day. But there are fires every all the time about 70 museum fires a year just in the US news or fires that are actually reported to the fire department. And some of the reasons why museum fires can become catastrophic are, you know, the absence of fire suppression systems. Delay in the fire discovery so if you don't have fire detection smoke detection. Or if that detection system is not monitor 24 hours a day you could have a delay in the discovery of a fire. There's a lack of fire compartmentation in the museum so having fire walls fire doors that are closed to prevent a fire from spreading from space to space. As well as the combustibility of the collections, the exhibits and and storage can definitely contribute to a fire spreading unchecked. So, to keep our efforts focused in the right direction. We definitely want to spell common myths about fires and fire protection. So some of those myths that I hear. Repeat it over time, you know that non combustible buildings are inherently fire safe. They need to be safer, but they're not fire safe because typically these buildings are filled with combustible finishes and furnishings. You know, I definitely hear. People say, well, the fire departments right next door. We got it covered. But there is a long history of major museum fires where the fire department is only minutes away. Strong fire prevention programs are enough. Well strong, you know fire prevention is certainly extremely important. It really relies on human behavior and that is not 100% reliable so it takes more than just fire prevention to prevent having catastrophic fire. And then sometimes you hear automatic sprinkler systems are just as damaging as the fire. And that's definitely a misconception sprinklers activate one at a time they put a lot less water on a one in a building than a fire department is going to use during a fire. We'll discuss some of that some more later picture here in the center is Notre Dame fire. That happened in 2019. You know the fair Paris fire department was only blocks away. Yet they weren't able to control this fire. And picture on the right is sort of a before and after pictures of the. Museum of modern art in Rio de Janeiro, they have fire back in 1978. In the building is glass concrete and steel construction. So that's not going to burn. But of course it was filled with combustible materials. And a fire gutted that building you can see in the lower right what that looks like. After the fire. So, you know before diving into fire suppression, which is what we're going to focus on today. I think it's helpful just to take a step back and look at the bigger picture of how to develop a fire protection strategy for your museum. As with many programs, it's best to approach museum fire safety by first establishing establishing your goals and objectives. So, you know, of course, protecting people is always the number one priority. So life safety is extremely important. And then you're going to look at, you know, protecting collections I would expect protecting your building. But also, you know, looking to protect your museum's mission and continuity of operations. So, you know, it's, you want to start with basic, basic objectives and then get into more specifics. So, for example, say, you know, you need to look at what your maximum acceptable loss is. And I think a lot of museums don't really think about fire protection that way. So, for example, is your, you know, can you, can your museum afford to lose one wing of the museum or one room of collections? And can you afford to be shut down for a month or a year? So once you figure out what your maximum acceptable loss is, then you can look at what fire protection you need to ensure that you don't go over that acceptable loss. Say, for example, you say you can lose up to 5,000 square feet of collection storage, but no more. Then you want to, you know, take collection storage areas larger than that and divide them up into smaller spaces. So they're with fire rated walls. So if you do have a fire in your collection storage area, you're not losing more than 5,000 square feet. So sometimes, sometimes, you know, people get lulled into sort of a mindset that we comply with fire codes, so we're good. And I think you want to take a look at what is actual the goal of the fire and building codes. You know, it's not to protect your collections. They're not written to protect your collections. They're not written to ensure that you're, you can keep operating after a fire. Really building fire codes are written for life safety and firefighter safety. That's the goals of the codes. So sometimes, you know, museum needs to go above what the codes require in order to protect their collections and their mission. I'm just going to share with you sort of how we approach at Smithsonian, how we approach fire protection. You know, our strategy for reducing fire risk is to can sort of be compared to a three-legged stool. That's why I like to use. There really be one, all three of these legs to be in force to have a complete fire protection strategy. And those legs are, you know, fire prevention, you know, having things like separating combustibles from ignition sources, managing your combustibles, having dedicated spaces for hazardous operations. And second leg is fire protection systems, which is, you know, fire suppression and fire detection systems, fire alarm systems. And then third leg is fire containment and using fire rated walls, floors, fire doors, fire dampers to keep a fire and smoke from spreading from one space to another. All right, so now that's sort of the big picture. So now let's get into fire suppression systems. So when it comes to fire suppression systems, museums and cultural properties have options. You know, you can use sprinkler systems, of course, and that's definitely the most common automatic fire suppression system out there. But there's also, you know, gaseous suppression systems, hypoxic air systems, water mist systems that can be used in certain applications. So let's start with sprinkler systems since that's the most by far the most common and least expensive option, and also the most reliable. And just so you know, at the Smithsonian, about 90% of our museums and research center spaces are protected with sprinkler systems. So, you know, automatic, there's a number of benefits for when using sprinkler systems that includes, you know, an automatic response, you're not waiting for the fire department. The system responds automatically to a fire condition. You know, sprinklers are heat activated. So only sprinklers above the actual fire are going to open. So you only have as many heads open that is what the fire demands. A sprinkler discharge is a fraction of the volume of the water released by, you know, fire departments fire hose stream. And, you know, they're very low maintenance, you know, when compared to other types of fire suppression systems. Also, you know, they're just very, very simple systems and extremely reliable. So do the sprinkler systems long track record for reliability and effectiveness. They've become the fire suppression system choice. For for us at Smithsonian and for many other museums. We have been retrofitting our museums and historic buildings for about the last 40 years. And from our experience, we found that sprinklers are also economical and easy to maintain. And pretty much they think they're the optimal for protecting various types of spaces throughout our museums and research centers. So just a sprinkler system success story, I guess. We had two fires at the Smithsonian Castle. Two major fires. First one was in 1865 when the castle was still very new. And we had a fire in the attic of the castle. Of course, back then we didn't have any fire detection systems. We did no sprinkler systems. And the fire spread throughout the entire combustible attic and ended up destroying pretty much everything above the second floor of the castle. And then next one is then 2017. So maybe six years ago, I guess we had a fire in the castle library. It was an electrical fire started on the carpet at balcony. You see that when the picture on the right, that's the balcony. And the fire was actually discovered originally by a contractor working on scaffolding outside the castle. Looking through the window, you can see that picture on the that's this is the contractor's picture if you took the cell phone on the left. Flames reached about six to seven foot high. But this fire was controlled by a single sprinkler. And, you know, there's damage, you know, we had some water damage to the carpeting and other surfaces. Some files got wet. But fire didn't spread beyond the balcony. It was, it was contained. Whereas, you know, if we didn't have sprinklers, I'm fairly confident that this fire would have spread up into the attic and we will have a similar result as what we had had in 1865. So let's just take a look at different types of sprinkler systems. Pictures here is a wet pipe sprinkler system. This is certainly the most common and if you have sprinklers in your museum, it's likely to be wet pipe. With these systems, you know, the entire pipe network is filled with water system is ready to go. If you have a fire. It will heat up the sprinkler heads directly above the fire. Those heads will open and water will discharge. And that's really it. I mean, it's really is simple. Certainly because wet pipe sprinkler systems are so simple, they're the lowest maintenance and most reliable. Then there are dry pipe sprinkler systems. This is where all the piping above the dry pipe valve is filled with air. And what's holding that valve closed is air pressure. So in a fire situation, fire is going to heat up the sprinklers above it. Those sprinklers are going to open when they open. They release the air pressure in the system. Then the dry pipe valve opens and water is free to fill the piping network and flow out of those heads, which have been opened by the fire. With these systems, there is a little bit of a delay in terms of getting water on the fire because you're waiting for all that air to escape out of the system. The air pressure to drop before water starts filling up the piping and can get to the sprinkler heads. Another disadvantage of dry pipe systems is that you have more likely to have corrosion, interior corrosion of the piping. Because the pipe gets wet and then it's exposed to air. You can have false trips for one reason or another, like the air compressor stops working and then the air pressure drops and the pipe, you know, the valve opens and fills with water and then you drain it down. So it's this wet dry effect accelerates corrosion. Typically you'll see dry pipe systems in areas that aren't conditioned like loading or exposed to freezing temperatures like loading docks and cold storage areas. And lastly, the last type of sprinkler system I'm going to talk about are pre-action systems. So like dry pipe systems, everything above the valve, all the piping above the valve is dry, it's filled with air. But with these systems, you need two events to happen in order for water to be discharged through the sprinklers. So pre-action systems are relying on a separate fire detection or smoke detection system. That system sends a signal to the pre-action valve. So when a fire is detected or smoke is detected, it tells that valve to open. At that point the valve opens, water fills the pipe, but there's no flow of water through the sprinklers until a fire actually heats up a sprinkler head and opens it. So the advantage of these systems is, you know, if you have an area that's really sensitive to water damage, say like art on open racks. If you use pre-action and say someone in a lift knocks off a head. If they knock off a head, you're not going to immediately, you're not going to get water flowing out of that head because the pre-action valve is still waiting for a signal from your fire detection system to open it. So that's why you'll see pre-action systems in areas that are sensitive to water damage, like our storage rooms and sometimes computer server rooms. Okay, and I'm happy at the end to answer any questions you guys have on sprinkler systems or anything else. So let's go on to other types of suppression systems that could possibly be used in museums. One is water mist systems. Another are clean agent total flooding systems as pictured in the lower right. And then also a hypoxic air systems where the oxygen level is continuously kept at a lower concentration. So let's take a look at water mist systems first. Water mist systems utilize special nozzles and high pressures to atomize water into tiny droplets. Breaking the water up to millions of tiny droplets dramatically increases the amount of exposed surface area of the water, which allows the water to rapidly absorb the heat from the fire. This permits mist systems to control fire with a small fraction of the amount of water needed by sprinkler systems. So some of the advantages are reduced water damage because you're just flowing less water, smaller pipe diameters. And these systems can use a small tank for a limited water supply when they can operate with that. Disadvantages are each water mist system must be specifically engineered for each space or hazard that's being protected. So it takes more engineering in a high cost to installation and maintenance compared to sprinklers. There's certainly more complex and specialized. So they require high pressure pumps, high pressure piping and fittings. You know everything is stainless steel. All the water has to be filtered. So currently, Smithsonian doesn't have any water mist systems yet, but at some point we probably will put water mist in for something. I know National Gallery of Art, which is our neighbor across the mall. They have five, I think it's five water mist systems right now, protecting small to medium sized galleries. They've had success with them, but it does require a lot of care and maintenance. Pictured here is one of the galleries at National Gallery of Art that's protected water mist systems. On the right is their, this is their pump assembly, tank and pump assembly for their water mist systems. So as you can tell, it looks pretty complex. And okay, so let's look at how about clean agent systems, total flooding clean agent systems. Now it used to be Halon. You've probably heard of Halon systems. That's been phased out. And now there's a number of other types of agents out there that can be used. These systems basically totally flood a enclosed space, whether it's a collection of storage room or a computer room with a gas. And that gas controls the fire by one cooling effect, chemically interrupting the pyrolysis. And also somewhat reducing the oxygen concentration. Some of the agents out there are FM200, NOVAC, Energen, and a new one called Oxio. The nice thing about clean agent systems is that they're completely clean. There's no damage to the collections. There's no cleanup afterwards. And, you know, they rely on smoke detection for activation and they can respond very quickly to a fire and control that fire very quickly. Some of the disadvantages of clean agent systems is when you need a very tightly enclosed space because it has to hold that gas for the required soap time, which is typically around 10 minutes. So I can't have any openings, no penetrations in the walls, all doors and dampers have to be closed. They're expensive systems and fairly costly to maintain. They're more complex. They're dependent on your fire detection system as well as being interfaced with motorized dampers and doors and other components. They all have to work together for the system to successfully control a fire. And then, you know, there's definitely been an environmental impact on some of these agents. That's why Halon was phased out because it was depleting the ozone layer. FM200 is now currently being phased out for that same reason. And I just heard that 3M is not going to be making NOVAC any longer. But that's not because of ozone, but because I think in the manufacturing of NOVAC, PFAS chemicals are released, which are, I guess, a non-carcinogen. So they're not going to be making NOVAC any longer. All right, let's take a look at hypoxic air systems. You see some of these systems being used in Europe. Not so much in the US. We have one hypoxic air system that protects the star-spangled banner pictured at the bottom right. The way these systems work is basically they force air through a molecular filter, which filters out a percentage of the oxygen. And that filtered air, low oxygen air is then pumped into the space. So our system keeps the O2 level in that chamber where the star-spangled banner is held at about 14% oxygen. So at that level, combustion just doesn't occur. So this is just as much a fire prevention system as it is a fire suppression system. I mean, if you walked into that chamber there with a lit candle, as soon as you went through the doorway, it would go out. So the advantages are, you know, prevents fires from ever starting. There's no cleanup. Also, our curators like this system because the low oxygen levels actually retard the degradation of the fibers of the flag. But these are very expensive systems. They're very specialized. They require a really tightly enclosed space. When we did the Hypoxic Air System in American history for the flag, we found the original construction just was not tight enough. And we had to go back and redo that space to make it less porous. It was center block walls and they were coated several times to make them less porous and be able to hold that concentration at the level it needed to be. And they're maintenance intensive. So, you know, because our area wasn't tight enough at first are the equipment. The Hypoxic Air equipment was running a lot more than was expected, which then, you know, compressors would burn out. And we'd have other problems. So it was all, there was a lot more maintenance costs than we expected. So, you know, while extinguish extinguishers aren't a fire system per se, they do play an important role in fire suppression. As you may know, there are several types of fire extinguishers. The red dry chemical extinguishers are probably the most common you see them everywhere. But there also are carbon dioxide extinguishers, clean agent gas extinguishers, wet chemical extinguishers for for kitchens, pressurized water extinguishers. These are the silver ones and water mist extinguishers, which are typically like the one pictured here are white. Interestingly, there's research done by Colonial Williamsburg with a sport of NFPA, which examined the impact of extinguishing agents one typical collection materials. And there's a link to that report at the end of this presentation. It's pretty interesting. What they did was they looked at the effects of these agents over time on different types of materials, you know, like, I can't remember how many maybe 15 or 20 different types of collection materials. And because, you know, if someone shoots off say a dry powder chemical extinguisher in a collections room, you may have dozens or hundreds of artifacts contaminated with this dry powder. Cleaning it is going to be a long ordeal. You may not be able to get to it for weeks or months. So what Colonial Williamsburg did was look at the effects of those agents on these materials. After a certain period of time, like a day, a week, a month, three months, a year. So based on that research, our collection staff determined that probably the best option was to go with a water mist extinguisher with deionized water in it. In terms of recovering artifacts, it was more, it was easier to recover them when they're exposed to deionized water than it was a lot of these other chemical agents. Okay, just just some tips, I guess, for, you know, retrofitting your museums with sprinklers or even other automatic suppression systems. You know, there's typically concerns with compatibility of these systems with historic buildings and both and the steps of both historic and new facilities. You know, early in my career, we retrofitted sprinklers into two of the oldest Smithsonian facilities, the castle and our arts and industry building, both constructed in the in the 1800s. It took very careful planning, but we were able to minimize the impact of the sprinkler systems on these, you know, really historic and iconic buildings. You know, we worked with a Smithsonian's architectural historian to identify and protect sensitive historically important features of the building. Identifying utilizing existing building shafts, both ceilings and other features to conceal piping, installing historically appropriate crown molding in some areas to conceal piping. Also, we used copper piping in some areas where where it had to be run exposed since, you know, aesthetically copper looks a lot better than the steel piping with its bulky fittings. You know, we kept that copper piping man tight against walls and ceilings and then off, you know, painting exposed piping to match the adjacent surfaces. And also using concealed sprinklers factory code to match the ceiling, like in this lower right hand picture. And then the top right hand picture is actually our the US customs house in New York, which is where we have our American Indian Museum. And when we this is in the 90s, we renovated that building for the museum. And one of the spaces has this really beautiful historic ceiling that you want to put sprinklers in it, but we want to make sure we didn't ruin the ceiling either. And what we end up doing in this case was trenching the floors above and then drop carefully penetrating the ceiling and specific areas to drop sprinkler heads into it. It actually worked out pretty well. Of course, you know, doing these projects successfully really requires careful planning and design. Just some, some tips based on our experience here at Smithsonian. Our plan takes into account the infrastructure needed to support the fire suppression. So you're putting in a sprinkler system, you need a certain amount of water, a certain amount of pressure for that system to operate properly. So, you know, it could require increasing the size of the water main coming into your building or it could require a fire pump to be installed somewhere in like in the basement of the building. You know, in heritage buildings, retrofitting sprinklers takes careful design. Sprinklers, sprinkler designers need to work with experienced architects to really look at the pipe routing as well as sprinkler placement and valve placement. You know, designs have to be detailed and count for both historic building features and aesthetics. Emphasize system quality and take proper cautions to prevent failures. Like for us, you know, we're expecting our systems to last 50 plus years. So we use thicker wall piping to, so the piping lasts longer. We require threaded fittings for all piping under four inches in diameter, because you're less likely to have a catastrophic leak with a threaded fitting than a mechanical fitting. You know, we avoid running mains through collection storage areas. Just, you know, we only put what piping has to be in collection storage area to support the sprinklers. We don't allow pipe lubricants on threaded fittings because those lubricants over time that oil can separate out of them and drip from them. So instead we require our contractors to use Teflon tape on all threaded fittings. You know, this is really important in areas where you have exposed collections. Just some construction tips. Be selective in hiring a sprinkler contractor, just like you're selective and when you're hiring staff. Really do your research when you're hiring a contractor, whether it's sprinklers or some other type of suppression system. You know, you want to see if they have, make sure they have experience with, you know, if your building is historic, they have experience working in historic buildings. Even better is if they have experience working in museums and make sure that technicians that are designing and installing the system have their certifications. Nice set is the organization that certifies sprinkler designers and installers. So, you know, try to incorporate precautions into the contract. You know, if you need physical protection to protect certain building features or collections, make sure you have that in the contract ahead of time. In really vulnerable areas where collections are going to remain in place. I recommend that you. If the system is finished, you do an air to air pressure test first. And then do your water if you're required. Hydro static test with water. So construction oversight certainly is very important. You want to make sure the project engineer is reviewing and improving all sprinkler system products and middles, the shop drawings, the hydro calculations before any site work is allowed to start. You know, the engineer inspector should be conducting periodic inspections during the installation to ensure the contractors using the approved materials. Ensuring that they're installed correctly, making sure they're not damaging historic fabric. And just making sure that overall workmanship is at the desired level. And then also, you know, ensure sprinklers are protected during installation. There have been times when I caught contractors with a whole bucket full of sprinkler heads they're about to install. And none of them had the protective shield on them like you've seen the lower right hand corner. So this this shield is made to protect the fusible element, which is typically a glass bulb. You know, if one of those glass bulbs gets cracked prior to installation. You know they may pass the hydrostatic test and then fail later, and you don't want that to happen so these it's really important that these heads are treated carefully, they're fairly robust but if you just thrown them around or dropping them. You could crack that fusible element. And then just, you know, final acceptance. You want to make sure some know someone knowledgeable and sprinkler systems is examining all the piping fittings heads, make sure it's installed as designed. Make sure you get accurate as built drawings afterwards. You know all systems are required to be tested for two hours at 200 psi. So that's to make sure that there's no weeks. And then you also make sure they give you the required spare sprinklers in case you do have some incident down the road. And like anything else, you know, once you install a system it has to be maintained. NFPA 25 is the standard for no maintaining inspecting maintaining all types of fire water based fire suppression systems, including sprinklers. And there are other codes for the other types of suppression systems we talked about today. So, you know, whether it's your in-house staff doing it or it's a contractor make sure they're following the standard, you know, like one or two more slides. So, you know, if you are, you know, if your museum is not currently protected and you want to talk to your management or others about putting in suppression systems. You know, we've gone through this at Smithsonian for years and it's not easy to change attitude sometimes. A lot of it is just educating people. You know, helping them see fire risk versus risk of water damage. Everyone sees risk differently and you just want to make sure they're really looking at it from an informed perspective. I always like to make it real. It's people that fires do happen in museums. Help them understand or have them someone come and talk to them to explain, you know, how sprinkler systems work or how these other suppression systems work. You know, look at the statistics for reliability of sprinklers or other suppression systems. And, you know, compare, I always like to compare how much water a sprinkler discharge is compared to how much the fire department is going to be discharging water with their fire hoses. So just to wrap it up, I do have some resources here and I think Robin sent this out separately also. The first is our Smithsonian's fire protection life safety design manual. So basically this manual captures where we go above and beyond code to make sure our collections are properly protected. Make sure we know our operations can continue. So it includes things like fire protection system design criteria guidelines for a collection storage spaces. Guidelines for exhibit construction. And that's available at that length there also below that is that test report on impact of portable extinguishing agents. One museum materials that I mentioned before. And then some other sources not coming from the Smithsonian but from NFPA. There is a code for the protection of museums libraries and places of worship that's NFP 909 and there's also a code. For protection of historic buildings 914. These are great resources to have a lot of appendix materials to. And then of course life safety code for protecting your occupants is there's also there's actually a chapter in life safety code just for historic buildings, which is really helpful. And that is it I want to make sure we have some time for questions. So thank you everybody. Thank you, Michael. Okay, I'm going to put in the chat again. A link to the resources. We created a resource sheet yesterday plus a copy of this presentation. And also a link to our survey because I will always talk to the survey when it comes to program so please click on those and you can. We have had some pictures or pictures some questions come in. Before we do this, I wanted to mention two quick things. One is it still like fascinates me that you said 90% of the systems are sprinklers within the Smithsonian because like I, it's just one of those things that you know when I was starting out. It was always like yes, speakers are okay but you really want these big high powered systems and it's really interesting that you know it's like a lot of them are people want the sprinklers, you know what I mean or that seems to be prevalent amongst so that's really interesting. And then the other question was is that if you want to see some posters or some videos some fun videos of the systems going off they're all over the place like you go online type and like if I'm 200 then you'll see like all these videos of the systems going off which is quite fun. Yeah, there's actually some videos like where these the fire department will set up two rooms one with sprinklers and one without. And they'll do a comparison and what happens in the room without compared to the one with sprinklers and it's amazing just how you know how much damage how little damage there is on the sprinklers room versus the sprinkler. Yeah, exactly. And someone pointed out that it looks like the resource link was broken on the page so I'll fix that as soon as we're done so just people just heads up on that. Okay, so questions. One of the questions we have is how long is the lifespan on average for water filled sprinkler pipes what maintenance do they need and how often. Okay, that's a really great question. And it varies. I'm sorry I have to say that but and we've had varied results at the Smithsonian to it I think it depends on a lot of factors depends on your the quality of your water depends on the quality of the steel the pipe depends on how often you drain and refill your systems. Because what happens is, you know, every time you drain and refill system, you're introducing new water and more oxygen into the piping, which then promotes interior corrosion of the piping. So, we've had really mixed results and we had some buildings where we've had sprinklers in them for 50 to 70 years. Without corrosion issues at all. And then we've had other buildings, wherever you had corrosion issues after 15 years. Now, with that said, there are systems to prevent corrosion in sprinkler piping. There's nitrogen and nerding systems, which actually basically pushed in, how to say, basically inject nitrogen into the water in the sprinkler system and push out the oxygen. So, the key is getting the oxygen out of the systems in terms of maintenance. These systems require there's quarterly semi annual and annual inspections. But it's fairly simple maintenance. And it's certainly the least intensive maintenance of all automatic suppression systems. Keeping on the subject of sprinklers because there's a lot of questions about sprinklers. Is a regular sprinkler system smoke activated as well as heat activated, or how do they actually, okay, that's good question. So what pipe sprinkler systems are only heat activated it's just when the fire heats up the element in that sprinkler head is a fusible element, whether it's a glass bulb or it's a piece of metal. It gets up to about 165. The element is going to fail and allow that head to open up. So what pipe sprinkler systems and dry pipe systems are just heat activated. Now the pre action systems I talked about earlier. They rely on a fire detection system, whether it's heat separate heat detectors or smoke detectors to open that valve that's holding back the water. So when smoke detector activates it sends a signal to that valve allows about to open water fills the piping, but still being held back by the closed heads sprinkler heads. Once the fire opens that head, then what is going to flow out the out of that sprinkler. Someone refers to they said black water in the sprinklers causes fear. Can you talk about this. I know that when I worked in institutions and they would bleed them every year it would smell really bad, but I'm not really sure what outside of that like what I would just think of order that I will never forget and if you know that you probably won't forget it. And I understand that is, you know, the water is just unlike plumbing domestic plumbing where water is always flowing through the piping and getting flushed with sprinkler systems, the water is just sitting there. And there is corrosion happening inside the piping, which then, you know, gives it that softer type smell. So it's not the cleanest water in that sense. You know the earlier the philosophy was what will flush our systems. Once a year, or twice a year. But that is definitely not recommended anymore because what happens is what I just said which is, you know, we're introducing new oxygen into the piping every time you do that. I think the way to look at it is. Yes, there is not cleanest water. And you're going to have a decent cleanup after a sprinkler head operates. But sprinklers typically are only going to operate when there's a fire. So if you didn't have a sprinkler head is there above that fire. You're going to lose everything where the fire is versus having wet somewhat dirty collections after a fire. So that's a good answer to that for sure. That's a good point. We have a couple questions about people just asking about the like the cost difference or how to get prices for these kind of installation do you do you recommend like where people should go just to if like let's say you're in the great spot of looking at grants or looking at constructing a new facility where would you go to kind of get that information for comparables. Yeah, and that's a tough question for me because I'm not on the sort of estimating side of things. You know, in general, they would say there was always a comparison to installing sprinkler systems about the same prices and installing wall to wall carpet. Now, for a museum, especially a historic building that's not going to hold true. It's definitely going to be, you know, two or three times by as expensive as that. But you probably could go there's probably some tools online that you could find for coming up with, you know, service just ballpark estimates of what sprinkler system is going to cost to install. But there are a lot of factors, you know, it really depends on like, if you're dealing with historic fabric and that type of thing. Yeah, I think for a lot of those you're going to be also working with who operates within your community. Right. Like who's actually as the provided people so unfortunately it's out getting a lot of estimates, you know what I mean and just trying to figure out who to work with and then who's a good who's a good person to work with as well. Make sure, especially if you have a store building that your work with someone who's going to be sensitive to that kind of environment. Exactly. Exactly. Moving away from sprinklers. We have someone says we have to older FM 200 clean agent systems. It looks like we need to upgrade them and I was told FM 200 gas is no longer produced or used. What is the most current clean agent gas used. Oh, that's a tough one, because we're running to the same problem we have FM 200 systems and we have no vex systems. And both of those are being phased out. The good news is I guess it's going to take many, many years for them to totally phase out FM 200. So, you know, you, this is not something you need to replace right away. Right now, I'd say that only agents I see that are a little promising for a long term or like in a gym, the ones that aren't ozone depleters at all. And they're basically inner gases and like like energy and a new system called new agent called oxio. They're both, you know, inner gas systems. The disadvantage with those systems is it requires a lot more gas. So it's a lot more cylinders. And none of these systems are like drop in replacement so when you change it you can't just change out your gas and put in new cylinders. You got to replace the whole network of piping. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's interesting. They mentioned halitron in their question. I don't know if you've heard of that system. I'm not that familiar. I've heard a halitron to I'm not that familiar with it. Yeah, I'm just guessing if I say so. That's totally fine. I know you're totally fine. I just wanted to mention it because they had mentioned that in the question. Okay, so it's 158 so I'm going to hit this one just because I'm curious. It says can a human enter the space of the star spangled banner safely. And if according to OSHA, OSHA would say no. But what happens in those systems is that the is a low oxygen environment. And I think I see if I get this right I think the CO2 levels higher. It just it just causes a increase in your respiration rate, which does allow you to be in the space. And I'm not a medical professional, but actually before we ever install the system and start spangled banner I met with the scientist slash engineer who is developing hypostatic air systems. And we had about an hour long conversation in his conference room, which was hypoxic. And I never even felt an effect of it. Now, certainly if you have a heart condition or respiratory condition, you shouldn't be in that space. I mean, I guess it would be the same as a hypoxic chamber right like people use those. These hypoxic systems for conditioning themselves. It's definitely interesting. It definitely puts it. It's an interesting addition to wherever you go visit the star spangled banner just to think about as you're doing it kind of like okay. We have no idea just look through the glass that. Yeah, exactly. Well it's two o'clock Eastern so I'm going to go ahead and wrap up for today. Thank you so much this was a great presentation it's fun to see the chat conversations there's still some questions floating around in the q amp a but I'll grab those and send those to you. If you just take a look at them. Yeah, some are asking for that kind of those cost type things and so some of those you know if you don't know pressure but I think it'd be interesting. Anyway, I went ahead and again put the link to the resources which I will check that link when I get off of this and the survey link. So everyone to see a recording for this webinar should be up by the end of the week so please pay attention to that on our website or on the FAIC YouTube channel. Finally, I just want to say huge thanks to you Michael for taking some taking some time today. Thanks to FAIC thanks to IMLS for supporting this program will be back in mid November with decolonizing your collection so please register for that on our website. I hope everyone stays safe has a great Halloween and we will see you in November. So thanks again Michael see you all thanks for having me.