NFPA Journal - Spring 2021 - 51
STA N DA R D S D E V E LO P M E N T
HOW THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC
SPARKED A HOST OF INNOVATIONS IN THE NFPA CODES
AND STANDARDS DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
GETT Y IMAGES
BY JESSE ROMAN
FOR TWO WEEKS IN OCTOBER 2018, several hundred experts from across the electrical industry gathered at a hotel in San Diego to complete the second draft of the 2020
edition of the National Electrical Code®.
For more than eight hours a day, the hotel's large conference center buzzed with activity as each of the NEC's 18 code-making panels met to debate requirements, draft code
language, and sift through hundreds of public inputs seeking to revise the 900-plus-page
codebook. " For as much work as these meetings are, they are also a lot of fun, " said Barry
Chase, a standards lead at NFPA who has attended numerous NEC draft sessions. " A lot
of the panel members know each other, and there are receptions and dinners. It's a great
atmosphere. "
By late 2020, however, all of that felt like a distant memory. This winter, as the code-making panels began work on the 2023 NEC, there were no bustling hotel lobbies, festive
receptions, or buffet lunches-just hours and hours spent staring at computer screens as
part of virtual meetings. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, for the first time in its
history the NEC draft meeting took place entirely remotely, a process that took nearly 900
hours to complete, stretching from late November to the middle of January.
Since the coronavirus pandemic arrived last winter, NFPA, like organizations across the
world, has been forced to rethink its usual practices, often in ways that would have been
hard to imagine just months earlier. That has meant temporarily transitioning the development of nearly 300 codes and standards to a fully remote process, including the annual
NFPA technical meeting, where standards are debated and voted on. It has also meant finding a way to safely continue NFPA's popular live classroom training, which hosts thousands
of professionals annually on topics ranging from the NEC to sprinkler systems to wildfire
mitigation (see " Training Up, " page 53).
N F PA . O R G / J O U R N A L * NFPA JOURNAL
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NFPA Journal - Spring 2021
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NFPA Journal - Spring 2021
Contents
NFPA Journal - Spring 2021 - Cover1
NFPA Journal - Spring 2021 - Cover2
NFPA Journal - Spring 2021 - 1
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NFPA Journal - Spring 2021 - Contents
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NFPA Journal - Spring 2021 - Cover3
NFPA Journal - Spring 2021 - Cover4
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