I know I usually do video posts on Wednesdays, but I saw this and thought it would make a good tactical discussion. Watch the video below before moving into the rest of the piece. Pay attention to the big three of size up, Building Construction, Fire Location, Fire Development.
Given your staffing, response time, still district, etc, what mode of operations would you use to attack this fire? I bring this up because this is a fire that could go a couple of different ways.
We have four basic choices for operating modes:
Offensive (Enter the fire building)
Transitional (Blitz/Quick Water attack prior to making entry)
Defensive (Exterior attack)
Non-Intervention (No attack)
We can rule out non-intervention once we have an Engine Company apparatus on scene. So, what mode of operations would you use for this fire. I'll post my thoughts in the comments Monday, but let's get some discussion going here. You folks post your choice for a mode of operation and why in the comments.
This is a pretty good video I found. The video starts before the apparatus arrive on scene and allows us to take note of the "Big Three" of size up: Building Construction, Fire Location, and Fire Development. Watch the video and then let's discuss.
So, what's your size up?
My inital radio report would be: Two story frame garden apartment, 200x50, fire on the top floor, looks like it's getting into the attic. Now, I can't see the whole building so I am guessing more or less at the 200, but based on what I'm seeing on the right side of the frame I am expecting that there is as much building again on the left. 50 feet may be generous on the depth, but for sure I need one length to get front to back so that's one of those "close enough for government work," sort of estimates. This maybe a lightweight building. Without having seen the building built I have to assume it may be fully or partially lightweight (Fully to me mean floors and roof system, partially means likely just the roof).
This is an interesting video because it shows us what situations can be like if we have folks respond to the scene in Personal Vehicles. You have Firefighters waiting to go to work until apparatus are there. So what can you do while you are waiting to get water?
With a partner you can ascend the interior stairs and assess conditions in the stairwell. IF the involved apartment door is closed you may be able to make a quick check on the apartment across the hall to ensure it is clear. It should be noted that is a tactic that potentially may result in you being caught off by fire if the door to the involved apartment fails. If you elect to check the apartment across the hall without a line on the fire floor do it as though it was a Vent Enter Search operation: Get the door closed to the apartment as soon as you enter to give yourself an area of safe refuge. If you are going to make that search before the Engine gets there it should be done with an experienced crew who can adequately judge conditions and who have full PPE including SCBA. Tactically that is a choice that is a very high risk evolution and the risk/benefit analysis has to be in the forefront.
Evacuating the adjoining apartments that are not served by the stairwell leading to the fire floor should be a priority. While there is likely double 5/8" drywall separating the units there is a very high likelihood of a common attic here. We can see how as the fire progresses that smoke and heat push through out the attic space toward the "D" side (the right side of the frame). We need to get up to the fire floor and get the ceiling opened immediately with the advancement of the hoseline. OPEN THE HALLWAY CEILING AND MAKE SURE THE FIRE IS NOT ABOVE YOUR HEAD ALREADY.
While I am not a huge proponent of the Transitional Attack, IF I pulled up here with a three person Engine Company (or less) and IF I made sure the door to the involved apartment was closed and IF there were no reports of a victim in the involved apartment I would consider knocking this down with a 30 second deck gun/monitor stream while the nozzle team was leading out. I think one of the problems with the transitional attack is that we end up with a lot of steam conversion and expansion that reduces the survivability of victims who may be in the path of that steam. The "pushing fire" concern is less important to me because if we are limiting ourselves to a 30 second flow of water I will not entrain much air.
All in all I think this fire was handled well. Once there was an Engine on scene water was on the fire quickly, ladders were thrown, and it seems from the angle I viewed that the situational was handled with a relative calm. Yes, I noted several folks not making full use of their PPE and I assume they were counseled by their supervisors.
YouTube is an amazing resource for us. We don't get to respond to a structure fire everyday, but we sure can watch one. Look at these videos with a critical eye. Start the video and watch the first 20-30 seconds. Pause it. Close your eyes. Do a three point size-up: Building (Construction & Occupancy), Fire Location, Stage of Fire Development. I really believe that those three points can and should be accomplished by every Fire Service Warrior at every fire. Go ahead, watch the first 30 seconds and see what you come up with. No cheating. Scroll down for my size up.
One Story, Wood Frame, 40x20, single family, fire throughout with heavy fire on the B side and in the attic. This is structure burning.
Now watch the rest of the video.
What is going on? What operations are going on? What needs to be accomplished yet? If you are pulling up and assigned as RIT/FAST/RIC what tools do you want staged? Where are you setting up? What are your top three concerns. For you shift commander/Battalion level Chiefs reading what are you going to start working on to make this building behave.
One year ago today the Homewood Fire Department suffered the LODD of Brian Carey in a house not much bigger than this. Consistently we see firefighters dying in 1000 square foot or less single family dwellings. IF we can't make this building behave what chance do we have in the 27,000 square foot warehouse? Take a moment today and work on those two key skills: Fire Behavior (know the enemy) and Building Construction (know the terrain). Do it for Brian.
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Interesting first arriving video.
So, what's your size-up on this one? Building Construction & Occupancy, Fire Location, Fire Development, Operating Mode.
Here's mine.
"Engine 1 is on the scene with a one story frame, 50 by 25, fire in the rear, possible exposure problem on the D side. We are going into a transitional attack."
Now, I am not always a fan of transitional attacks but if we look at this scene we have obvious structural involvement, we have a lot of heat, and the attic space is charged. IF I was told there was a victim inside I might go in a different direction (like fast attack with a primary search), but we have to consider that this building is a candidate for a ventilation controlled flashover. If we make entry through the front here we have to coordinate our ventilation and HAVE TO be able to get enough water on the seat of the fire in 60 seconds. Why 60 seconds? Look at the UL study Impact of Ventilation on Fire Behavior in Legacy and Contemporary Construction. A compartmentalized building like this can see conditions become untenable in 70 seconds and flashover within another 30 seconds.
This is why I keep coming back to our Fireground Capacity. Capacity is our ability to provide service on the fireground. Some departments have the skills, abilities, and the manpower to execute an interior attack on a fire like this, most won't. We need to understand the capacity of our department and our companies.
As a reminder the Fire Department Instructors Conference is right around the corner. I will be presenting Situational Awareness on Monday from 1300 to 1700 in Rooms 109-110 and The Ready Position on Wednesday from 1330 to 1515 in Rooms 234-235. Please come on by, check out the programs, and introduce yourself. I plan on being at the ISFSI Event on Tuesday, the FOOLS Brotherhood Bash on Wednesday evening and will be running in the Courage & Valor run on Thursday. I look forward to seeing you there.
Bold words from some random guy blogging, I know but I think I am onto something here. Francis Brannigan, a Fire Protection Engineer who many of us know from his writing on building construction and his classic text Building Construction for the Fire Service, used to say, "The Building is your enemy; know your enemy!" He was wrong. The Building is the battleground, it is the terrain in which we and the enemy do battle.
Fire is the enemy and fire behavior is a predictiable indication of how the enemy will behave. If we look at line of duty death and injury statistics we see far too many of our brothers and sisters being injured or killed because of fire development. Just last week Mark Falkenhan-FF/Medic, Lutherville Volunteer Fire Company, Baltimore County FD was killed after being trapped in what sounds like flashover conditions. On Sunday a woman and three firefighters were injured at a building fire in Springfield, Virgina.
The video below show us the progression of the fireground. Dave Statter has some good comments about this over at his blog.
We can get into a debate (I suppose) about exactly what fire behavior we are seeing. It is not a backdraft. It is not a smoke explosion. This is a rapid spread of fire because of (probably) ineffective ventilation techniques. I'm not going to launch into some Tactics diatribe here because I do not know exactly what occurred at this fire. I don't know if this was a townhouse type building where the second floor was a different occupancy. I don't know if they pulled up with a two person Engine and one person on the Truck. Something different did have to occur for that fire to be vented in a way that prevented the spread of fire over the heads of the attack team.
What we can talk about is the fire progression and why the fire spread was predicable.
Look at the smoke conditions at the start of the video. This entire building is heavily charged. The structure of the building is involved. The fire is deep seated. Based on info from http://www.wunderground.com the temperature was in the low 20's(F). The somewhat "lazy" nature of the smoke once it is outside the building is due to the temperature. The key factors though should be the volume of dense smoke we see and the color. We have to recognize that if it was 65 degrees outside this smoke would push away from the building with great velocity. In this case it is "pushing" out pretty hard but then hanging more than we would normally expect from a hot fire. WHY? Because the "fluid" that is unburned products of combustion carried by heat contracts and slows when it hits that cold air.
Something worth considering is the inherent relationship between temperature and pressure.
How well do your firefighters understand Boyle's Law and Charles's law of fluid dynamics? I know, I know, that's HazMat... right? Maybe I'm biased to looking at this through a lens of Chemical and Physical properties because I just got back from a validating committee for a HazMat Technician Text Book.
Charles's Law simple says that as temperature increases so does pressure in a closed container. Boyle's Law tells us that if you keep temperatue constant as pressure doubles volume halves/ as volume doubles pressure is halved. In other words if you give a fluid more space the pressure is lessened, if you give it less space pressure increases. Here is where they come together. As temperature is building because of unrestrained fire the pressure in the building begins to increase. If the building was perfectly sealed that increase in pressure would eventually smother the fire by consuming oxygen. If it cools off the fire goes out and all the unburnned products of combustion just congeal on surfaces.
However, once we allow the building to ventilate (in any manner) we create a place for that "fluid" to go. However because it is a small opening relative to the amount of product temperature and pressure continue to build. The exiting "fluid" is heated but to rich to burn (I know, more HazMat).
At the 1:45 mark you can see flame in the C/D corner window on the D side (if you call the front door side of the building where the truck is parked A). In 15 seconds heavy fire is venting out the window. 30 seconds after the flame is viable we can see through the A/D corner window the fire is extending. Three seconds later (2:14) the unburned fuel that is exiting the front lights up. Once it lights up you will notice that the smoke is moving a lot faster up and away. That's because the heat is now outside and overcoming the slowing/contracting effect of the ambient temperature.
We MUST study these fires and understand what is happening in the building. I was in Tulsa over the weekend and spent a few minutes talking with Ed Hartin who teaches extensively about Compartment Fire Behavior Training Ed is a Fire Behavior guy. We talked about how it is the lack of knowledge about Fire Behavior that is getting us hurt and killed on the fireground. While fire behavior may not be predictable with 100% accuracy I venture to say if you are a student of this trade we can get close to 95%. We don't know until we are inside the compartment what effect the layout may have on fire growth and spread. However we should understand intuitively what the smoke conditions are telling us about the growth, stage, and location of the fire.
The building is the battleground, and warriors going back as far as Sun Tzu have taught us how important it is to understand the terrain. The ENEMY though is the fire. You can know all you want about the terrain but if you do not know what the ENEMY is going to do you will still end up killed. The Fire is Your Enemy, Know You Enemy; The Building is the Battleground, Know the Terrain.
I think there are days that as firefighters we end up succeeding in spite of our best efforts to get killed. There are folks who drive too fast, refuse to wear seat belts, think a healthy lunch is ordered off the McDonald's Value Menu, and whose exercise regime consists of shuffling to the pop machine on the apparatus floor during commercials. I'm pretty sure at this point anyone who is regularly reading this blog knows that that kind of behavior will cause you to meet an early death.
What scares me are tactical errors that we make that by shear luck work out okay. There is a maxim I've read from the fine folks over at Magpul Industries (click on their Mindset tab for some great quotes), "Familiarity and prolonged exposure without incident leads to a loss of appreciation of risk."
Watch this video to see what I'm talking about. It's a fire from the 13th of January, 2011. By all rights it could have become a NIOSH report in my opinion.
I dislike being a "Monday Morning Quarterback" of a fire department's actions if I wasn't at the fire, but this video scares me. There are issues with opposing lines, a PPV operation that I think spreads the fire, and committing to an interior operation with what looks like too few resources.
Look at the smoke conditions on the "A" side. That front eve is highly pressurized, and that was before the PPV went into operation. That is a sure sign that the attic is well involved. Fire burning above me concerns me. If you go to the YouTube video and read the comments the video's author says they had problems with water supply.
I think if we want to be serious about reducing firefighter injuries and LODDs we have to acknowledge that our ability to operate in a relatively safe way on the fireground has a direct coloration to our staffing. That was the key point in my article "Why We Need Firefighters" that Fire Engineering featured on their website.
I know there are people who see my writing and my ideas as advocating an overly-aggressive mindset. I really don't think that is the case. This is one of those fires where I think we needed more people on scene to make the building behave. Again, I was not there, and I can only judge based upon what the video shows. I have to say that I spent the six minutes and forty odd seconds waiting for a collapse.
Consider the last fire you had where Everyone Went Home but it was only because of the grace of whatever divine creator is looking down on you that you did. We all have those stories where things could have broken bad at any moment. Learn from the fires where things "went right" as well as the one's where things went wrong. My buddy Dave LeBlanc talks about this some in his post "From Sir Lancelot To Wyatt Earp to Dick Winters, Putting Others Ahead Of Ourselves".
I'm glad everyone from the Lafayette County Fire Department went home. Believe me I'm not criticizing the guys and gals who put the fire out. I think this is one that needs to be learned from and not repeated with that "loss of appreciation of risk." This is a fire where something could have broken bad. While I think we sometimes have to place our toes over the edge to fulfill out duty it cannot be allowed to happen without careful thought, discussion, and post fire analysis.
On another note, take some time to look into what's happening in Camden New Jersey today, too. Tomorrow, January 18th, 1/3 of their Firefighters are due to be laid off. Thoughts are with the Brothers and Sisters there.
Well we have a new title for the book. In March at FDIC you will be able to buy your copy of The Combat Position: Achieving Firefighter Readiness. The new title will hopefully give people a better sense of what the book is before they pick it up. It's not surprising, but people do judge a book by it's cover.
I came across the video below today. This is a pretty good first line attack.
My only major complaint might be the Driver speeding up with the two vehicles in the way. I like the officer (I assume) telling the driver to pull forward to leave room for the Truck. It takes about 2 minutes from arrival before we start to see some steam conversion. All in all a good attack. Not knowing the still area my only concern based on the three sided view we see on arrival is IF this is a lightweight roof assembly we may have rapid truss failure... there is fire in the attack. We get a ladder thrown for secondary egress (the angle is a little steep but at least it's there). All in all this is a good fire attack.
I have said and written here that you should not vent behind the Engine, because you will pull the fire on top of them. That rule is 99.9% effective in preventing injuries to our Brother and Sister Fire Service Warriors. Of course every rule has it's exceptions. Take the video below.
November 17, 2010 Newark, NJ
So the front door is open, the line is ready to enter and then some Truck guy pops the front window. Come on man! Right?
If you notice the picture window was already open, the Truck popped the side window which gives the Brother with the nozzle a chance to darken down the fire venting from the window reducing the chance of it wrapping around behind them. Then the Engine makes their push into the building. At the :17second mark we can see into the fire room, which is the living room just to the left of the front door. Dollars to doughnuts the stairs are right in front of the Engine as the lead in. I'm going to assume that when the Team gained entry to the front door they saw the fire was in the living room. Rather than lead out to the rear (which would take time to go down and back) they quickly enter the front, get the line between the fire and and potential victims on the second floor and have a vent opening (the front window) to get the bulk of the products of combustion out. Outstanding Job!
The only complaint I have is the Engine position right in front restricting the options for the Truck. Remember Hose Stretches, Ladders Don't!
Take this one and sit down with your crew for a quick drill one day. What are do your SOG's say about making this attack?
Here's a good YouTube video for illustrating fire behavior principals.
We all know that in order for a fire to burn you must have fuel, heat, and oxygen. Solids and liquids don't burn, only gases. As the solids and liquids heat up they decompose and release combustible gases that will burn. At the 12second mark of the video look at what happens to the smoke.
The smoke venting from the doorway starts to light up because it was too rich to burn until it got into the atmosphere. It's way hot (look at the push behind it and how it is flowing straight up), and obviously from the dark color we know that it is chock full of unburned material. All it needs is that breath.
I'm not sure when this video started in relation to crews arriving, but it seems like their is some kind of water supply issue. The stream is weak once it starts and the pipeman was standing there waiting to open up. This is a situation where you might want to start a little further back from the door as well. Just a few thoughts and some things to look for.
