The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently awarded CFAI-Risk a grant in the amount of $999,721 under the FY2010 Assistance to Firefighters Grant Program–Fire Prevention and Safety.
The project aims to improve firefighter safety and effectiveness during resource deployment to high-rise structure fires. The goal is to quantify effects of crew size, effective firefighting force assembly time, vertical-response time, and fire service access elevators on the intervention capability, effectiveness, and safety of firefighters during a working high-rise building fire.
Experiments will be conducted using on-duty fire service personnel to simulate a response to a high-rise fire incident on an upper floor of the building. All provisions of NFPA 1403: Standard on Live Fire Training Evolutions and the training protocols of the participating department will be observed. The effectiveness of fire department response configuration will be assessed using state-of-the-art computer fire modeling. Similar to methods used in the Residential Fireground Report (NIST Technical Note 1661), fire size, and interior tenability conditions will be assessed as a function of firefighter interventions for each unique configuration. This will ensure that the effectiveness of configurations can be assessed over a range of fire sizes.
This project is being conducted in partnership with the International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC), International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI).
To track progress of this project or view reports on previous studies, visit www.firereporting.org.
