ICC Pulse Podcast

ICC Pulse Podcast is the International Code Council's interview program on building safety. It is most useful when it makes a piece of regulatory process concrete. Different hosts lead different episodes. Beau Hanson, Liz McDonald, Judy Zekreski and Carl Fippenger all take the host's chair, and Zekreski and Fippenger are introduced by their Code Council vice-president titles. The pattern holds from episode to episode: the host sets out the stakes, repeats back what a guest has just said and lets the guest give long explanatory answers. That patience pays off in the episode on code development. A guest walks through the committee action hearings and the public comment hearings. The guest stresses balance on the committees that vote and notes that you don't need ICC membership to take part. At the public comment stage, the votes belong to governmental members. The guests had so much to say that one planned episode became two, and Beau Hanson sends listeners to CDP access to click around the material already there. Builders get their say too. On a trip to Austin, Hanson asks Matt Reisinger, a Texas home builder and the creator of The Build Show, whether contractors treat code as a floor or a ceiling. Most see it as a floor, Reisinger says, but he warns that any rule misses the heart of understanding unless someone explains why details like a blower door matter. Wildfire is a subject the show keeps coming back to. Carl Fippenger talks with Kevin Scott, president of K.H. Scott & Associates, about the 2018 Wildland-Urban Interface Code and Commentary and how a jurisdiction decides which of its areas count as interface. Scott gives a simple example: a steep hillside with no vegetation may be no problem, while a gentler slope with sagebrush on it can be a significant one. Liz McDonald's episode on these fires starts from a voice saying that the first thing communities often say is that they had no idea. She then asks why the fires don't get the attention that earthquakes and tornadoes do. The Lahaina episode marks two years since the fire, and it is the gravest of the set. Hanson first acknowledges a recent tragedy in Texas. A guest then describes working with fire departments, large ranches and smaller farms on mitigation plans, and tying that work to ten priorities that an FSRI analysis gave the governor. The conversation also turns to landowners who are unwilling or can't be tracked down. On the global side, Judy Zekreski hosts professors Kim Lovegrove and Alfred Omenya, both IBQC board members, to discuss guidelines for building regulation in low-income countries that ask what needs regulating and why. Hanson ends his episodes with the same line: people don't care how much we know until they know how much we care, so be quick to listen and slow to speak. For a first listen, the code development episode gives the clearest picture of how the process works.