ASME A17 Code Week in Florida

Business was conducted in preparation of the new standard to be published this year, and a special event was held.

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) held its Code Week in Clearwater, Florida, on January 11-14. The Sheraton Sand Key Resort again played host to the large group of professionals, both ASME members and guests. Here, the ASME A17 Standards Committee and associated code committees held their meetings and honored longtime Inclined Elevator Committee member Al Verschell at a special dinner at the nearby Columbia restaurant. 

The big meeting of the week was the general A17 Standards Committee, where individual committee reports were given and many inquiries were efficiently addressed. Lasting most of the day, the session was moderated by Chairman Hank E. Peelle, III and covered requests for code interpretations and other questions. These included Public Reviews, in which many members had procedural questions on the revision processes. All these were taken care of in anticipation of the new 2016 edition of the ASME A17.1/CSA B44.1 Safety Code for Elevators and Escalators. Geraldine Burdeshaw of ASME then announced that the American National Standards Institute had recently approved and the Canadian Standards Association had signed an agreement to make the upcoming A17.8 Standard for Wind Turbine Elevators a binational publication, to which there was a round of applause.

Various committee reports  followed this segment in the general meeting. Louis Bialy reported on behalf of the U.S. Technical Advisory Group (TAG) to ISO TC 178. He said Working Groups (WGs) 4 and 6 met in Tel Aviv to review progress on prescriptive- and performance-based standards and the updating of Risk Assessment Methodology with additional examples. Additionally, the ISO 4190-6 international standard is being updated to include destination dispatch, and the Seismic Report is being updated. Vincent Robibero reported that WG 8 updated the ISO 22201 series with references. 

Peelle explained a proposal (still to be voted upon) that, if approved, would try to share knowledge and expertise related to safety codes with the European Committee for Standardization (CEN). ASME may request that a liaison committee of A17 Standards Committee and CEN TC 10 Technical Committee members is formed for cooperation. Bialy, chair of the U.S. TAG to ISO TC 178 and who works closely with European experts, said that while CEN has not been approached, European experts agree there is a lot that can be done. He reported that they feel they can learn a lot from the committee and give a lot to it, also.

The committee then took time to recognize Verschell for his long service and expertise. He gave a brief history of inclined elevators, with which he has been involved since 1966. He stated he could not express how fun they are, because they have so many different uses, limited only by the imagination. He explained that the segment was small in the U.S. until the early 1980s, when breakthroughs in accessibility uses for them emerged. 

The week of May 2 will mark the next Code Week, this time in Palm Springs, California. Following that will be another the week of September 26 in Atlanta, with a return to Clearwater Beach the week of January 9, 2017. 🌐