Ithaca College addresses classroom capacities almost eight years after state fire codes change.
By Katie Bataille
ITHACA — The office of Environmental Health and Safety at Ithaca College recently reassessed the fire caps of all of its classrooms after it was brought to the attention of the school by the local codes official that they were not up to date.
According to Tim Ryan, the assistant director at the Office of Public Safety and Emergency Management, the college maintained that they were grandfathered under older codes.
The maximum number of people allowed in a classroom at one time is dependent on the amount of space each person needs to have, and by the size of the room by law. Under previous state laws, each occupant required 15 square feet of space, however, when the state switched to international fire code standards in 2001, that number jumped to 20 square feet.
“It’s in the code and it just had to be addressed,” said Ryan, who specializes in Environmental Health and Safety. “It’s an on-going issue right now. We have re-measured all the classrooms, and we’ve recalculated. We have a spreadsheet for every building and every classroom.”
The college began to address the issue toward the end of last year, Ryan said. Capacity changes, coupled with the arrival of the larger-than-usual class, made reassigning classrooms harder than in the past, a challenge that fell into the hands of Brian Scholten, the college’s registrar.
Approximately 2050 new students enrolled at Ithaca for the 2009-2010 academic school year, 300 more than the college anticipated. The code changes reduced the number of occupants allowed in some rooms by as much as 25 percent. To make up for these discrepancies, Scholten and his staff focused on lowering the number of students allowed to register for each class where it was appropriate to do so, on creating new sections, and on finding faculty to teach those classes, he said.
“In a regular semester, a large part of that work is done far in advance of students registering for classes,” Scholten said, “but we just had to do much more of that for this incoming class.”
Fire and Building Safety Coordinator Ron Clark, who has been at Ithaca College for 23 years, said the change in 2001 was prompted by the New York state codes themselves.
“It was all related to the fact that trying to understand the code was very difficult,” Clark said. “Three different people could have three different interpretations of it.”
“[The change] was also to make New York more competitive,” said Ryan Quigley, a fire protection specialist for the New York State Office of Fire Prevention and Control. “An architect can easily design a building for any other state that uses the international code but in New York there [were] more strict things.”
Clark and Quigley spend several weeks together every year inspecting every room and building on the campus to ensure that no codes are being broken. Quigley records their findings for the state and issues notices of code violations until each problem is resolved. This year’s rounds began on Wednesday.
To watch a video of a routine codes inspection, and to view a list of tasks to be completed by the college each year, click here.
To watch a photo slide show of a routine house inspection by Novarr-Mackesey Property Management, click here.
