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Evidence-Based Medicine Restored Sanity. Fire Protection Needs the Same Breakthrough

For a long time, medicine also relied on what was “approved,” “certified,” and “commonly used.” Then evidence-based medicine emerged. The term is associated with the McMaster school and became established in the early 1990s through professional medical publications. The principle was simple and uncompromising: if a method is sold as treatment, evidence of effectiveness and safety must exist before mass use, and that evidence must be verifiable.

A patient is not expected to discover, at their own risk, whether a pill cures or kills.

Much of the fire-protection world still operates as medicine did before that turning point. We routinely confuse paper compliance with a proven outcome. Below are three examples. To keep this from becoming a book, I will not list the many others, but they exist.

1) Fuel storage tanks: “the fire ended” does not mean the fire protection system achieved its purpose

In official accounts of major incidents, one can find the phrase “the fire was extinguished” presented alongside a description of total asset loss. A telling example from a U.S. governmental investigation: a terminal fire in Texas is described as lasting several days and then being “extinguished,” while the same section records the destruction of 15 above-ground atmospheric tanks, each of 80,000 barrels, together with their contents.

To a lay reader this sounds like victory over the fire. To an engineer and an insurer it means one thing: the asset was lost.

The conclusion should be direct and free of self-deception. If the tank is destroyed and the product is lost, that outcome cannot be presented as successful suppression. It is an asset loss, after which remaining burning residues may have been suppressed.

2) Generator rooms, electrical switchrooms, server rooms: “certified” does not mean the system will actually suppress a fire

In electrical spaces, expensive “fire suppression solutions” are routinely sold. In practice, what is often installed is a set of components whose combined performance as an integrated fire suppression system has not been demonstrated under real fire conditions.

There are several straightforward reasons why a paper-compliant “system” may fail to deliver an actual outcome:

  • If the enclosure is not tight, or ventilation continues to run, the agent cannot be maintained at the required concentration.
  • If an arcing fault persists, the ignition source does not disappear on its own, and any “system” becomes an attempt to mask a symptom rather than remove the cause.
  • If automatic shutdown and interlock sequences are not tied to the physics of the hazard, activation becomes a formality.

The critical point is not negotiable: it is not the customer’s duty to “test whether it works.” In a sane system, demonstrability must be built into standards and market access from the outset. Just as a patient does not prove a drug’s efficacy, a facility owner should not be forced into real-world experimentation to learn whether a purchased suppression system can achieve its claimed purpose.

Yet too often the opposite occurs: systems are installed not because their real-world performance is known, but because, on paper, “this is what is required.”

3) Pyrotechnic aerosol systems: documented risks exist; independent public confirmation of asset preservation in real fires is not found

Here the question goes beyond “will it suppress or not.” It becomes a matter of life safety and secondary damage.

There are documented fatal incidents in which discharge of such systems was associated with loss of life:

There is also documented major property damage in the United States:

The evidence-based question is therefore unavoidable. Where a technology is associated with severe negative outcomes, the market should be able to show comparably rigorous positive outcomes—cases in which an independent source records a clear scenario and a preserved asset.

A softened but accurate formulation is this: to the best of my knowledge, based on publicly available, independent sources, I have not found confirmed cases showing preserved assets under real fires for this class of systems, in contrast to documented risks and serious adverse outcomes.

Why this is possible: responsibility is diffuse, and external intervention is structurally blocked

This is not primarily a technical failure. It is a systemic one.

An official reply from the UK Department for Business and Trade sets out a hard reality: BSI, CEN, and ISO are treated as independent, private, non-governmental membership organisations with their own governance arrangements, and the state expressly states it lacks authority to direct, control, or adjudicate the governance of those organisations or their committees. The same structural logic applies to other standards organisations, including NFPA.

The consequence is predictable: standards can shape markets, while accountability for outcomes remains blurred, and effective external intervention is practically obstructed—even when conflicts of interest and safety consequences are raised.

As a result, we now see certificates emerging with wording akin to “valid only until installation.” In practical terms, this is comparable to a medicine label stating “effective only until taken,” shifting responsibility to the user before the product has even been used.

The remedy

The only realistic way out of this model is a state-level, evidence-based standard.

Not another document produced for formality, but a change in the market-access principle:

  • success must be defined by outcome, not by phrasing in a report;
  • evidence of effectiveness must exist before mass deployment, not after tragedies;
  • harm, secondary damage, and lethal risks must be integral to assessment, just as safety is no less important than “efficacy” in medicine.

The state is the only actor for whom the life and health of citizens is not a peripheral concern but a foundation of stability. Only a state framework can initiate evidence-based fire protection in the way that evidence-based practice once reshaped medicine.

Work in this direction has already begun, because I do not see another approach that actually changes the system.

Disclaimer: The author’s opinion is based on analysis of public information and official reports. It is not an allegation against any specific manufacturers.