INDIVIDUALS DRIVE CHANGE IN FIRE SUPPRESSION PRACTICES. FDNY Battalion Chief Jerry Tracy described his frustration after a wind-driven multiple-family dwelling fire singed some of his members a little over a year ago.
He was frustrated because FDNY just completed wind-driven research with NIST at Governor’s Island. The results, when combined with the Columbus and Chicago experiments, showed new methods in controlling fire development.
Since then, the department implemented a change in strategy and tactics, demonstrated at this June 17 Manhattan highrise fire covered by Firefighter Spot (HERE).
EXAMPLES OF FIREFIGHTING LEAPS
The science of fire suppression is advanced in leaps. It was at the 1950 Fire Department Instructor’s Conference when Lloyd Layman’s presentation, Little Drops of Water, electrified the audience. The indirect method of fire attack was developed when Layman was commanding the Coast Guard Fire Fighting School during World War II. This presentation changed the design of automatic fire sprinklers. Once confirmed by Miami and other fire departments, there was a decade of using high pressure fog for indirect structural fire attack.
Purple-K, an effective potassium bicarbonate powder for extinguishing flammable liquid fires, was developed by the U. S. Naval Research Laboratory. Walter M. Haessler was a fire protection engineer who researched the effectiveness of Purple-K while certifying portable fire extinguisher performance. His 1962 NFPA-published monograph on Uninhibited Chain Reactions established the tetrahedron of fire concept.
“The Seattle Guys” started about a decade ago after a couple of air management close calls. Recognized with the 2008 Tom Brennan Training Achievement Award, their activity within the NFPA 1404, seminars and textbook have moved fireground practice forward. This link covers an earlier blog item about them (HERE ).
ENGINEERING ANALYSIS OF LINE OF DUTY FIREGROUND DEATHS
Since the 1999 line-of-duty death of District of Columbia fire fighters Anthony Phillips and Louis Matthews, staff from the Building and Fire Research Laboratory (BFRL) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Fire Safety Engineering Division work to identify fire fighter survival factors. Starting with the Fire Dynamics Simulator, NIST has steadily increased the quality of fire development simulation with each analysis of a significant fire or full-size test burns.
Dan Madrzykowski and Steven Kerber shared results of the Building and Fire Research Laboratory experiments with wind-driven fires at the 2008 Fire Department Instructor’s Conference. NIST Technical Note 1629, Fire Fighting Tactics Under Wind Driven Fire Conditions: 7-Story Building Experiments was published in April 2009. The 593-page report summarizes earlier laboratory research, incident analysis, and field experiments on fire development, ventilation, and wind-control devices. The report also provides fire dynamic analysis from line-of-duty death investigations.
ENGINEERING ANALYSIS OF FIRE SUPPRESSION OPERATIONS
The NIST observation on TIC performance was confirmed by research conducted by Underwriters Laboratories with the Chicago Fire Department. Supported by the IAFC and funded by a grant from the Department of Homeland Security, the online course “Fire Behavior in a Single Family Occupancy” included research that confirmed the inability of a TIC to detect a fire below a floor, such as a fire in a basement. The components of the floor are slow to heat up. When the TIC identified hot spots, the floor components already were failing. Get to the online course HERE.
Former Fire Commissioner Raymond E. Orozco used the phrase “When Science Meets the Street” to describe the impact of the research conducted by the Underwriters Laboratories Inc. with the Chicago Fire Department.
Your summer school assignment includes reading the NIST technical note (HERE) and completing the UL course (HERE). Overachievers need to purchase and read The Seattle Fire Guys Air Management for the Fire Service textbook (HERE)
Mike “FossilMedic” Ward
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