The Marryatt Award is an award created in 2002 by the International Fire Suppression Alliance (IFSA) and named to honor the memory of Harry W. Marryatt. Marryatt was a longtime employee of Wormald Sprinkler and a founder of the Australian Fire Protection Association who did much to advance the worldwide use of automatic sprinklers through his compilation and publication of a century of sprinkler performance statistics in Australia and New Zealand. It is given in recognition of extraordinary efforts in the international advancement of the fire sprinkler concept.
The award has been given to the following individuals:
Kevin Fee, who recently stepped down from the IFSA Board of Governors, was a founder and first chairman of the organization, meaning that his service on the board essentially tracked that of the IFSA itself. Throughout the decades, he has been an ardent supporter of the IFSA and its mission.
Kevin is president and chairman of The Reliable Automatic Sprinkler Co., Inc., and is a third-generation owner and operator of the company. He holds a BS degree in business management from Boston College and an MBA degree from Columbia University, and started his full-time career with Reliable in 1973 as Sales Manager after receiving his MBA. He moved up through various sales and executive positions to become President and CEO in 2015.
An industry legend for his strong support of industry associations, Kevin is the longest tenured board member in the history of the National Fire Sprinkler Association (NFSA) in the U.S., having served on that board for more than 40 years. He is a past board chair and treasurer of that organization, and in 2008 was recognized with its highest honor, the Golden Sprinkler Award. He was also honored by the American Fire Sprinkler Association (AFSA) in 2022 with its Henry S. Parmelee Award, recognizing his dedication to the fire sprinkler industry.
A member of the National Fire Protection Association since 1974, he has served for many years on the FM Approvals Advisory Council and the AFSA Manufacturer and Suppliers Council, and was elected chairman of the latter group in 1986. In 2019 he was elected to the board of Common Voices, an organization of fire-impacted individuals who share tragic stories that highlight the fire problem in a way that promotes advocacy and proactive policy decisions. He was recently elected chairman of the Common Voices Board of Directors.
Kevin is strongly committed to the continued promotion of the fire sprinkler concept, protection of the integrity of fire sprinkler systems, and protection of the identity of the fire sprinkler industry.Your Content Goes Here
Mr. Moncada-Pérez is considered a pioneer in the fire protection industry in Latin America, with more than forty years of wide-ranging experience in the design, installation, and testing of water-based fire protection systems. He was a chemical engineer from the University of Antioquia (Colombia), who also held a master’s degree in industrial hygiene from Harvard University (USA). In the early 1980’s, with NFPA sponsorship, he started the Iberoamerican Fire Protection Organization, known as OPCI, an organization that translated into Spanish hundreds of different editions of NFPA codes and standards, and that offered thousands of fire protection seminars, mostly in Colombia. He served as the longtime president of OPCI, continued to review code translations, and developed and taught fire protection seminars. He was the first Latin American to serve on NFPA’s Board of Directors, and was the founding chair of the Colombian NFPA Chapter. His impact in the fire protection industry in Latin America can be seen in the wide use and acceptance of NFPA codes and standards, in the implementation of newer fire codes that require sprinkler protection and other life safety systems, and in the careers of thousands of fire protection professionals in Latin America that either were taught by, worked for, or were clients of Mr. Moncada.
After receiving an undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins University and a law degree from the George Washington Law School, Jim Shannon was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and served three terms as a congressman, from 1979 through 1984. From 1987 to 1991 he served as the elected Attorney General of Massachusetts, where he was known as a consumer and civil rights advocate. He was named President of the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) in 2002.
As President of NFPA, Jim Shannon launched several key initiatives, including a successful coalition for Fire-Safe Cigarettes. Following the February 2003 Station Nightclub Fire in Rhode Island, he convened emergency hearings and technical committee meetings that led to important amendments to NFPA’s model codes, increasing requirements for fire sprinkler protection. Perhaps his most visionary action was the establishment of NFPA’s Fire Sprinkler Initiative, providing resources for the fire service and other sprinkler advocates to demonstrate the need for home sprinklers in their communities. By taking a public stand in favor of home fire sprinklers, Jim Shannon demonstrated a willingness to address the major fire problem remaining in the United States, with an advocacy for fire sprinklers far beyond that of his predecessors.
Gunnar Heskestad left his native Norway for the U.S. in 1952 after high school and received a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of New Hampshire, a master’s degree from Purdue University, and a Ph.D. in mechanics from Johns Hopkins. His doctoral work was in fluid mechanics with a dissertation in fluid turbulence.
Following six years of fluid mechanics research at the American Standard Research and Development Center, Dr. Heskestad joined the Factory Mutual Research Corporation, now FM Global, where he worked on fire problems for 35 years until his retirement in 2004. He conducted extensive research at FM in the application of fluid mechanics and heat transfer to fire protection applications. His special interests included fire plumes, fire convective motions in enclosures, response of fire detectors and fire sprinklers, and the scaling of fire measurements to arbitrary fire size and physical size, and made substantial contributions to the science behind the development of residential and other fast response sprinklers.
Following studies in mechanical engineering in Hamburg, and after receiving a master’s degree at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Ed Job began his professional career as a development engineer at SFH Sprinklers in Hamburg. He gained further experience in carbon dioxide and foam systems from 1962 to 1964 at Cardox International in Chicago.
His career continued in the business management of SFH Sprinklers and later as Technical Director and member of the Board at Minimax AG. During these early years he developed numerous new products in the fields of fire sprinklers, CO2, foam, and portable extinguishers, and was granted more than a dozen international patents.
In 1971 he started his own business in the manufacture of glass bulbs for automatic fire sprinklers, JOB GmbH, which became the world’s leading producer of thermally activated bulbs. He was an early critic of O-ring seals in fire sprinklers, issuing a warning about potential long-term problems that proved prescient. He provided a solution with the use of Bellville springs, leading to additional international patents.
Active in many industry associations as well as international technical committees, Ed Job was a founding member of the IFSA in 1999. In 2002 he established the Eduard Job Foundation for Thermodynamics and Matter Dynamics, aimed at better explaining the science behind many of his products (https://www.job-stiftung.de). By employing a modified approach and mathematical procedure introduced by his brother Dr. Georg Job, the computational complexity of thermodynamics could be reduced, leading to a practical tool for teaching and everyday applications.
Roy Young studied applied physics at the Brunel College of Advanced Technology while working at the Tin Research Institute, and then in 1961 joined the staff of the Joint Fire Research Organization. He went to work in the Extinguishing Materials and Equipment Section, where he investigated the performance of automatic sprinkler systems in conjunction with the UK sprinkler industry and the Fire Offices’ Committee.
In 1976 he joined the staff of the Fire Insurers Research and Testing Organization (FIRTO) as Deputy Head of the Appliances Division, with special responsibility for the development of test standards for sprinklers and associated systems. He became active in national and international standards committees, including the ISO/TC21/SC5 group on sprinkler products. Probably his best-known contribution to the fire sprinkler industry is the text he coauthored with Philip Nash in 1978 entitled Automatic Sprinkler Systems for Fire Protection.
At the time he received the Marryatt Award he was serving as the Technical Director for the Fire Sprinkler Association (FSA) in the UK, overseeing the development and administration of training courses and representing the FSA on various outside technical committees.
After completing studies in 1971 at the technical universities in Karlsruhe and Aachen with a degree in civil engineering, Michael Schnell worked as a scientific collaborator in a university research group dealing with test methods for automatic detection systems, and in 1975 began his career at VdS, the German Fire insurers Testing, Certification and Loss Prevention Institute, responsible for VdS technical rules. Beginning in 1977 he became involved in European (CEN) and International Standards Organization (ISO) technical committees, and in 1978 was appointed the chair of the ISO working group on water extinguishing systems.
This group later became ISO/TC21/SC5 and developed a reputation as the most active group within all of Technical Committee 21 on fire protection equipment. In 1979, in recognition of his work, he received the German National Standardization (DIN) Award in gold. At the time of receiving the Marryatt Award he was still serving as chair of ISO/TC21/SC5, responsible for the development of a large number of international product performance standards relating to fire sprinkler and water spray equipment.