§7301 National Construction Safety Teams

Summary

The Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology may create National Construction Safety Teams after a building failure that causes many deaths or could have caused many deaths. The Director must try to form and send a team as quickly as possible, and, when possible, within 48 hours. The Director must also quickly publish a notice in the Federal Register when a team is formed. The team’s job is to make buildings and evacuations safer by finding the likely technical cause(s) of the failure, checking how evacuation and emergency response worked, recommending improvements to building codes and practices, and suggesting research or other steps to improve safety. Not later than 3 months after October 1, 2002, the Director had to work with the U.S. Fire Administration and other federal agencies to create procedures for forming and sending teams. Those procedures must be updated as needed and published in the Federal Register. They must cover conflicts of interest, when teams will be used, team size, rules for sharing information, how investigations are run (including providing written notice of inspection authority and following other laws), providing extra resources, coordinating with search and rescue, briefing the public, moving and preserving evidence, and coordinating with federal, state, and local research or investigations.