LA County to follow NAFAA regs

Okay so, anyone who's tried to get a permit or two in LA County knows you run into one of two problems: LA City and their antiquated codes or you roll the dice on whatever the local LA County FM decides to shove on you. One guy says you can't wear paper clothing, but lets you spin with broken equipment. Another guy wants an asbestos blanket on the stage, a $1000 jobber box to hold the fuel, and limits you to tools that can be spun out without the fuel hitting the ground. *sigh*

At least in LA City, the worst thing you have to deal with is the written codes, but most of the time, dropping the NAFAA regs on them seals the deal. This is very root of the problem with fire codes: if they don't have them, you never know what kind of treatment you'll get. One day, the fire chief, or lieutenant on duty says "yeah, fine whatever you want" and the next day they threaten to put you in jail for fire eating. At least with some kind of code, the worst you have to deal with is some weird quirk in the code put in for reasons nobody knows.

For example LA City regs state that you can't spin with a fuel that has a flash point below 50 degrees, but when you ask for their preferred fuels, they tell you alcohol or white gas (both well below 50). Or how about the Seattle C7? for years they had a rider stating that a 5 gallon bucket of open water was necessary for fire safety. Well, as many of us know, water is counterproductive to putting out petrol fires:
www.youtube.com/watch

So, you can see how exciting it was to me to be invited to talk with Captain Penn in the West Hollywood branch of LA County. He took a copy of our fresh, new, bullet point checklist from NAFAA, a copy of the LA City codes, the NFPA 160s and the NAFAA regs 2.1. After a long talk about the city codes, and a quick review of the rest, we went down the bullet points line by line. It took hours, but in the end it looks like we have an agreeable list without silly things like a 12" flame size limitation, or the 50 degree flash point crap. He was actually particular about changing the more open-ended wording to keep untrained marshals from going too far with regulation.

The next step is the November training seminar. Well, hopefully November. They'll gather the LA county training marshals together (about 80 of them), who are in charge of disseminating new material and training local departments. We (NAFAA) will be present to give a powerpoint presentation and a live demonstration of fire performance to help lock down the deal. They'll take it to their own departments and we may have a uniform code as soon as the end of the year.