January 2008
Pricing Of New SCBA Units Is Up – Up In The Air
By Lyn Bixby
More than four months after revised National Fire Protection Association standards took effect for self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA), nobody is sure what the nation’s fire departments are going to have to pay for new NFPA-compliant SCBA units.
Less than half of the SCBA manufacturers were certified under the new standards as of mid-December, and the only certainty is that the price will be significantly higher than it was before Sept. 1, 2007, the date the revised standards became effective.
SCBA manufacturers are reluctant to give average list prices because the cost of SCBA units varies widely depending on the types of cylinders and options that are selected. Mine Safety Appliances (MSA) puts the list price for a “more common configuration” of its 2007 NFPA-certified SCBA at just over $7,000. Sperian Fire, formerly Survivair, says the list price of a new unit ranges from $6,000 to $11,000, depending on options and cylinders.
Steve Weinstein, the senior SCBA product manager at Sperian Fire, refers to list prices as fantasy prices because SCBA are usually purchased by fire departments through competitive bidding.
“The list price goes out the window,” he said. “It’s a matter of what price is necessary to win the bid. It depends on what kind of special pricing we feel is necessary and on how much profit our distributors are willing to make.”
Many SCBA purchases are funded in whole or in part by federal Fire Act grants, and Brian Cowan, who directs the Assistance to Firefighters Grant (AFG) program for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said his staff has had difficulty determining what the market price will be for a unit.
“We were getting a lot of information from a variety of people, $8,500, $7,500, $6,500, $5,500,” he said. “It was all over the place.”
So, he said his agency settled on a “placeholder” figure of $5,000 for 2007 NFPA-certified units – about $1,000 over the price approved for grants to buy 2002 NFPA-certified SCBA. That represents an increase of about 25 percent.
Amending AFG Grants
Because of the uncertainty, he said, fire departments applying for SCBA grants were being told: “We’re putting $5,000 into the award. We’re going to ask you, as usual, to do competitive bidding, select the lowest price as per usual, and if that’s more than $5,000 we will amend your grant to bring you up to the amount of funds you need.”
As more information became available, Cowan said, “It looks like the $5,000 estimate may not be that far off.”
One pricing milestone is likely in March, when bids are scheduled to be opened for one of the largest fire department SCBA purchases ever. The City of Los Angeles Fire Department and 30 other departments in that region have formed a consortium to buy about 5,000 SCBA units. At $5,000 a unit, the contract would be in the neighborhood of $25 million.
“The manufacturers are lining up to bid, and we know that it will be very competitive as a result,” said LAFD Assistant Chief Don Frazeur. “I think we’ll be able to get the best price available.”
He declined to say what he thinks that price might be because he said that might affect the competition.
Bidding For 5,000 SCBA
He said he expects six of the seven manufacturers of SCBA will submit bids, but as of mid-December, only three companies – Scott Health & Safety, MSA and Avon-ISI – had been certified under the two pertinent NFPA 2007 edition standards – NFPA 1981, which governs SCBA, and NFPA 1982, which deals with personal alert safety system (PASS) devices.
The competition, Frazeur said, will be limited to companies that have 2007 NFPA-certified units. “By the time the bid opens, we have to have a compliant product to evaluate,” he said. “So if they haven’t received compliance, they would not be able to compete.”
The process leading to the Los Angeles-area consortium SCBA purchase began two years ago with an unusual offer.
“We had a manufacturer come to me and say, ‘We’ll give you our SCBA, just give us what you pay for repairs and we’ll give you our SCBA,” Frazeur recalled. “I thought, well that’s a pretty interesting offer, but for me to actually consider that, I’d still have to bid it because there may be somebody else who’ll give me a better offer.”
So his department began to develop specifications, but while doing that, it became clear that the NFPA standards were going to undergo major revisions that would lead to significantly improved SCBA. So department leaders decided to wait for the new standards.
“Our approach to this whole project was to build the absolute best SCBA, not to find a manufacturer that we wanted,” he said. “We’re going to evaluate function versus price, and we’ll put performance into our evaluation.”
Survivair, which is based in nearby Santa Ana and changed its name to Sperian Fire last year, is the dominant manufacturer of SCBA used by fire departments in the Los Angeles area. But Frazeur said, “There’s an opportunity for anybody to come in right now.”
As the SCBA purchasing process moved forward, a consortium of departments was put together. “It became easier to secure the grant money when they looked and saw all the fire departments were in agreement,” he said. “This truly improves interoperability across the board.”
Small Departments Benefit
Smaller departments in the Los Angeles area are benefiting by being a part of the SCBA consortium, he said, because alone “they would not be competitive in a grant process.”
The rapidly increasing cost of SCBA hits the budgets of small volunteer departments particularly hard. Frazeur said his department last purchased SCBA about seven years ago, when the cost was about $1,200 a unit.
The new NFPA standards – the toughest in the world – were driven by doubts about the reliability of SCBA arising from investigations of firefighter fatalities. The revisions forced SCBA manufacturers to embark on expensive research and development programs to pass the rigorous new tests.
Consideration Of Cost
Frazeur, who is the chairman of the NFPA committee responsible for the NFPA 1901 standard for automotive fire apparatus, said cost is a consideration that is built into the NFPA revision process.
“You have to look at the way the committees are structured,” he said. “They really try to achieve a balance between the users, the manufacturers and special interests, special interests being experts. There’s an element of users that are interested in cost because they are living within budgets, and there’s an element of users that will trade cost for safety.”
Weinstein, the SCBA product manager at Sperian Fire, said smaller fire departments will still be able to buy SCBA despite the price increases.
“It may not be as many as they wanted unless it’s spread over a period of time,” he said. “I’ve been in the SCBA business for 31 years, and 31 years ago people were complaining that they were too expensive when the list price was $500.”
While prices have increased, replacement schedules for new SCBA have also been shortened by technological advances driven by NFPA standards, which are revised every five years.
While the expected life of composite cylinders is 15 years, Mike Rupert, the first responder products group manager at MSA, said, “A lot of fire departments are replacing their SCBA in time frames that are less than 10 years.”
MSA just won a huge contract from the U.S. Air Force for 9,500 SCBA, but Rupert said the Los Angeles consortium purchase of 5,000 units is among the largest he has seen by fire departments.
He said he does not know how the coming year will turn out for SCBA manufacturers because of uncertainty over how the price increases will affect sales. Many fire departments, like LAFD, delayed purchases while waiting for the new NFPA standards to take effect, he said.
“We don’t know what the total demand will be,” Rupert said. “We do have fire departments waiting, but the new product is more expensive. It’s just difficult to judge at this point what the overall impact will be.”