Working for the public good

For the 25 years he's worked for the Consumer Product Safety Commission, James F. Hoebel has made everyday products fire safe.

When he recounts a quarter-century-plus career devoted to safer consumer products, James F. Hoebel never mentions market share. Yet his "products" are big sellers like cigarette lighters, upholstery, children's sleepwear, and mattresses. And for Hoebel, they yield the hottest profits imaginable: lives saved. As chief engineer for fire hazards at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), Hoebel is the agency's expert, advisor, and consultant on fire safety associated with consumer products. Because his work affects the design behind the design, he takes tremendous care and uses a systematic approach.

What are the dividends of your work at the CPSC? Our efforts to improve products by issuing mandatory regulations and stimulating voluntary standards helped reduce residential fire deaths by 37 percent between 1980 and 1994. Deaths associated with cigarette ignitions of mattresses have dropped by 61 percent and of upholstered furniture by 64 percent. And wood-heating-related deaths are just 20 percent of what they used to be, although part of that is probably due to reduced use. Studies I've seen show that our efforts have been extremely effective at stopping fires and saving lives.

What single thing could be done to make residences significantly safer from fire? Install residential sprinkler systems.

What's the greatest consumer fire hazard you're studying today?

While furniture and mattress fires still cause hundreds of fire deaths, almost 100,000 fires a year--most of them cooking fires-begin with kitchen ranges. We'd like to be able to equip ranges with some kind of sensor that could provide early warning of fire. Something to either give an audible signal, like a smoke detector, or, even better, shut the burner off automatically We've sponsored research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and at our own laboratory, and the concept is promising. In our experiments, we create cooking fires on a real range and evaluate sensing systems.

What's the biggest challenge in working for a public agency?

We must make sure that what we do is in the public interest. We're very serious about balancing both the predicted benefits of what we do and the costs to the public of doing it. We have to justify our actions and avoid creating arbitrary regulations. In the past, we learned this lesson the hard way. So the bottom line is this: We've got to do our job right the first time. This may take a little longer, but it's well worth it.

Copyright National Fire Protection Association Mar/Apr 1997
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