JOE RANDALL LETTER RE ENGINEERED SPRINKLERS The attached report by Joe Randall, a licensed professional engineer, provides insight

into the ways to make fire sprinklers more affordable while at the same time making the protection more reliable. Joe makes several good points in this article. He confirms that I created a more practical fire sprinkler system that became the BOCA 100 Code. I can prove that my designs reduced the cost of protecting a building, vs. the NFPA system, by up to 90 percent. He also confirmed that falsified fire tests were one of the methods of preventing the modernized system from becoming the preferred system. Dishonest measures were employed to maintain the status quo, which was a rip off of all those who desired to protect property and lives. However, whereas Joe was seeking help from Harry Shaw, who was the key man within the federal government and in charge of developing a residential fire sprinkler system (after I had already created residential systems and was installing them). Strange, for more than 70 years the NFPA made no effort to create a sprinkler system to save lives until I was actually installing them. Then the NFPA and the Feds began cooperating to create (supposedly) what I had already created. But they had a different strategy in mind. Harry Shaw and the NFPA betrayed me and more importantly they betrayed the people. Tests were planned and blatantly rigged and falsified during 1979 and 1980. The testing was a carefully manipulated fraud. The phony testing and follow up performance lies were used to justify a 40 GPM water supply as the minimum water supply allowed for protecting a home with sprinklers. The whole idea was to block the further recognition of my Life Safety System because I had proven that with a small orifice sprinkler and higher pressure at the orifice a house fire could be controlled with 5 or 6 GPM, not 40 GPM. Other dishonest anti-protection findings were also justified by the rigged testing and the performance lies. So the NFPA/Federal fire bureaucrats us corrupt methods to prove that homes could not be protected with the amount of water normally available to a home. So to protect a home it became necessary to install a much larger supply line to the home which also usually meant the homeowner had to pay a far higher commercial water bill every month. An alternate was to buy and install an approved packaged secondary water supply dedicated to the sprinkler system. I worked with the California State Fire Marshal, Phil Favro, providing all of my research findings so that the state FM could create a residential sprinkle code. I was then surprised that the FM gave me no credit for providing the technical expertise behind the code other than listing me with many others who had contributed. I had more than 20 years of researching and studying fire sprinkler design at the time, and had developed valid new systems that were being approved in many jurisdictions. Marshal Favro and his staff had zero research experience in sprinkler design as far as I knew. In any event, Phil Favro was soon out of office and his successor killed the California Residential Sprinkler Code. Richard M. Patton Fire Protection Engineer February 6, 2014