training firegeezer on 25 Feb 2008 08:43 am
High-Rise Fire Testing Begins
AN EXTENSIVE TESTING OF VENTILATION PRACTICES IN HIGH-RISE BUILDINGS is being conducted this week in New York City.
All photos courtesy New York Times / Nicole Bengiveno
With observers from several major cities that have large numbers of extremely tall high-rise buildings, the FDNY is performing a series of test fires and recording the conditions and results from various postive-pressure methods of ventilation.
The test building is a seven-story structure on Governor’s Island that has been unused since the U. S. Coast Guard vacated the island. The entire island and all of its buildings were ceded from the Federal government over to NYC a few years ago and this building has been provided for the testing.
The tests, which began Saturday, are being paid for with a $1 million federal grant to Polytechnic University of Brooklyn, which will create computer models and study the data compiled in the week of fire demonstrations. By Friday the building will be pretty well burned out and this phase of the testing will be complete.
The rooms were wired with sensors that recorded the slightest changes in conditions as the fire burned. Six floors below, technicians with laptop computers recorded temperature and pressure changes when the heat punctured windows.
Over the years, FDNY has noticed that one of their biggest enemies in the high-rise fires has been the onrush of air through broken windows, usually accellerated by winds that are present at the higher levels. This windforce has driven the fire back over the FF’s working inside and has been a direct cause of several fire deaths to both FF’s and residents.
During yesterday’s testing a single 27-inch gasoline-powered fan placed at the base of a seven-story stairwell kept the stairwell free of smoke and at temperatures of about 50 degrees, even when its door was opened to a seventh-floor corridor that was heated by fire to 1,700 degrees.
Today’s New York Times has good coverage of the testing project HERE.
Steve Kerber, with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, watched the monitors and helped direct the various experiments.
