PGC Spring Meeting Finishes Strong, Avoids Snow

The Protective Glazing Council's (PGC) Spring Meeting wrapped up yesterday, hours ahead of schedule and beating the snow forecasted for that afternoon.

After a panel discussion with Darrell Barker, Joseph Smith and Mike Lowak and a brief coffee break, Dr. Amy Bednar of Applied Research Associates, made a presentation about emergency ingress and egress.

Bednar, whose voice is used on the General ServicesAdministration (GSA) website created to educate fire fighters on emergency ingress/egress into buildings with protective glazing, detailed the website, which has been available since the summer of 2005. The website was first introduced to the PGC at the Fall Symposium in November of 2005. Since that introduction, more than 2,300 fire fighters have been certified, passing the final test at the end of the session with a score of 80 percent or more.

After Bednar's presentation, Darrell Barker with ABS Consulting returned to the podium with his discussion of choosing the right technology for the project.

"You need to know the protection requirement. Are we trying to protect everybody? Is it acceptable to have injuries? Is it acceptable to have fatalities? They're not going to want to answer these questions, but as a blast consultant, I'm not the one who should be making the decision about who is expendable," he said.

Already ahead of schedule, the decision was made to go ahead with planned seminars and Julie Schimmelpenningh with Solutia moved her presentation ahead several hours to discuss blast mitigation. She began her presentation discussing a Ducker study Solutia commissioned on the use of protective glazing and consumer awareness.

"If you go and look for a definition of protective glazing, you won't find one. We had to create one: Glass set or made to be set in frames serving to keep the body or materials from being damaged, attacked, stolen or injured," she said, describing the breakdown of the protective glazing market and the priority list of what building owners and managers are seeking when they decide to implement protective glazing.

Schimmelpenningh then segued into a look at standards used to determine the capability of products used in protective glazing, comparing the ASTM and GSA requirements with which many in the protective glazing industry are familiar, as well as other standards and specifications that are in the works.

With the close of Schimmelpenningh's presentation, the spring general session ended and attendees were invited to the reception and booth exhibits time.

The PGC spring session concludes today. The Fall Symposium is scheduled for October 17-18, 2006 at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington D.C., and is expected to be the largest staging of the symposium by the PGC. For more information about the Fall Symposium, visit the PGC website, www.protectiveglazing.org.

Stay tuned to USGNN for a recap of this afternoon's activities and look for a full conference recap in the next issue of USGlass magazine.