Who can be a Firestop Special Inspector?

Are you responsible for evaluating a potential Firestop Third Party Special Inspector?  If you have been following this blog series, you know why special inspection is now required.  You also know the types of buildings that are required to have a Firestop Third Party Special Inspector. (You can click the underlined sections to find the related blog sections.)

Do you know HOW to evaluate the potential individual?  We are in the middle of creating this very document.  In the meantime, we have completed a paper that combines the requirements of the IBC as well as the ASTM E2174 and ASTM E2393; which are the two standards on inspecting through penetrations and rated joints respectively.  This paper tells you WHO is allowed to be a third party special inspector.  Hang tight and we will give you another paper on how to evaluate an inspector and as a bonus we will include an evaluation of the ASTM E3038 which is the test standard for evaluating an inspector that just came out this summer.

Did you know, that just because someone is a jurisdictional inspector does not automatically mean they can be a third party special inspector?  That is because juridictional inspectors are expected to know a broad general range of things to perform their job.  The level of education they need is never ending as they can specialize in more and more things.  As a firestop inspector, I concede that they know a lot more than me about construction in general and maybe even about the building codes too. (Which is impressive from a self-professed code geek.)

Firestop third party inspectors need to know a very general range of information about the various trades, so they know the difference between a cable and an innerduct, they can identify various insulation types, understand metal gauges and a handful of things that would seem simplistic to your typical jurisdictional building inspector.  However a firestop inspector should be able to take all of these different elements and know exactly how they relate to firestop.  For example, they need to understand how sheet metal gauges relate to firestop when they are being used in sleeves (we did a whole series on sleeves) or when they are being used for angle on ducts(and, you guessed it we have another series another one on ducts).  A specialty firestop contractor would need to know all this and much, much more.  Where most jurisdictional inspectors are not expected to know how all these things relate to firestop.

So, if you want to know WHO can be a third party special inspector, click here to get the white paper.  If you have any questions feel free to contact us.  In the meantime, go out and keep your firestop installers on their toes!  Together, we will make buildings safer for the building occupants and for the first responders who would be dealing with these buildings in any emergency.