WINDOWS: FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY
TRAINNG NOTEBOOK
EVERY FIRE SERVICE member is faced with the task of instituting the primary search and the supporting interior fire attack upon arrival at a working fire in a residential occupancy. Considerable thought must be given to the means through which personnel will gain entry into the fire building.
There’s one means of entry that should be discouraged—windows. Windows of the residential fire building should be used solely as a means of emergency egress for the occupants and the firefighters, not as the primary means of entry for the interior search and attack teams.
Using the window as a primary entry route might not turn out to be a problem for a team that operates solely within the room of entry (except for locating and exiting through a window that may be small in size and several feet above the floor). However, if the interior attack team operates beyond the room of entry’, the firefighters can easily become disoriented and lost within the structure’s interior.
In such a case, the team must attempt to find—under potentially difficult fire and smoke conditions—the doorway that will lead them to a hallway, that will in turn lead to other areas of the structure. If and when interior team members locate the hallway system, they won’t know which way to turn to advance into the structure. This is in stark contrast to the interior team that, by entering through an exterior doorway, accesses the hallway system at its beginning. That team is able to progress into the structure with the assurance that the mere reversal of its direction of travel will lead back to the point of entry.
Window entry also reduces the interior team’s ability to achieve rapid escape from inside. Windows, being much smaller than doorways, may be difficult to find; firefighters might have to feel for them on the wall several feet above the floor. Once the firefighter has found the window, he must climb out of the smaller opening, being hit by increasing heat and smoke conditions as he moves upward, and then faces a drop of several feet to the ground or an arduous climb onto a ladder.
Another serious problem is that, to achieve escape, the team must first return to the room of entry and then locate windows large enough to afford egress. Some residential occupancies, particularly multiple-family residences and remodeled single-family homes, may have rooms without windows. The interior team may have to return to the room of entry in order to find a window that will ensure escape.
Furthermore, it’s certainly possible, under difficult fire and smoke conditions and an excited emotional state, for the interior team to bypass the room of entry and proceed farther into the structure instead of out of it. Or team members may miss the window’s, think that they’re in the wrong room or a window less room, and proceed back into the hallway to continue the search for a means of egress. All the time they’re going farther into the structure rather than out of it.
While the firefighters are searching for the means of egress, they’re consuming a portion of their air supply and at the same time are dealing with deteriorating fire conditions. Interior teams that attempt to exit through the windows that they entered may not have the air supply or time to locate and effect their egress before the outset of untenable conditions.
Entering through windows can be physically difficult and potentially dangerous. First to be encountered is the climb up a ladder. The firefighter, clad in turnouts and self-contained breathing apparatus and carrying a tool or hoseline, must then negotiate the climb from the ladder into the window; he’ll then pass through what might be several windows, including the outside storm and interior sash windows, all the while being exposed to injury from broken glass.
At the same time, the firefighter endures potentially severe levels of heat and smoke caused by the elevation of the window. There’s also the hazard of the SCBA harness catching on remains of the window glass or frames. Once inside the fire building, the firefighter battles window shades and curtains, and then must endure a drop of several feet to the floor. Any of these may cause the firefighter’s SCBA facepiece or helmet to become dislodged.
All physical obstacles aside, routinely entering through windows should be discouraged because it facilitates freelancing. When an interior team enters through a window without the knowledge of the incident commander, no one on the fireground has an idea as to its location, assigned task, or the members’ personal welfare.
The incident commander, by positioning himself adjacent to the main exterior entryway of the fire building, can control the entry of firefighters. He can prevent unassigned personnel from entering the structure, and at the same time, assign tasks and areas of operations to the interior teams that are authorized to enter the fire building.
By entering through windows, interior teams may find themselves ahead of the fire and run the risk of having the fire pushed towards them by other attack teams; or a situation of opposing streams may arise if they’re an attack team assigned the task of operating a hoseline. It’s also possible that interior team members entering through a window may find themselves between the fire and other attack teams, in which case they may obstruct the movement and operation of the attack line and run the risk of being struck by the hose stream.
The small size of most windows (as compared to exterior doorways) prevents the entering firefighters from effectively evaluating interior fire and smoke conditions and interior structural stability. With window entry, the firefighter might not discover the severity of interior conditions until he’s inside.
Finally, entry through windows might not be productive from the point of view of the primary search. Fire progression, particularly the attainment of flashover conditions, reduces interior habitability for both the occupants and the operating forces. If the initial attack hasn’t succeeded in terminating or delaying the fire growth process, interior teams have a limited amount of time in which the primary search must be completed before the building becomes untenable. Interior teams must prioritize search efforts; entry through a window is unproductive in that it only facilitates searching of the immediate room of entry.
Not only can a search team that enters through a doorway move through the structure by following the hallways; it also has a better chance of finding occupants. Potential victims will attempt to escape via the route that they’re most familiar with. In most cases that’s the way they came in—through the door. The chance of a search team encountering a victim increases because both the search team and the victims are traveling the same route —the structure’s hallways—albeit in different directions; they’re moving toward each other. Hopefully, the two will meet, and then the search team, by merely retracing its steps, can achieve egress and life safety.
On the other hand, if firefighters enter through a window and encounter a victim out of the room that they have entered from, they must retrace their path back to the room, find the window, or search for a door or hallway. They must also convince the victim, without benefit of verbal communication, that they must reverse direction and head into the building rather than the direction which the victim perceives as safe. Once back at the window, the search team and the victim must now experience all the difficulties of climbing back through the window and down a ladder.
In the barest terms, even a cursory visual examination of most windows will indicate that they were never intended to serve as a means of entry. They’re small in size, elevated above the ground (as well as the floor of the structure), and cluttered with storm windows, screens, shades, and curtains. This isn’t to say that windows are without function within the primary search and fire attack effort. On the contrary, windows, if used as a means of effecting ventilation or achieving rapid emergency escape from the interior for both firefighters and occupants, can become not only an advantageous building feature, but most importantly, a lifesaver.
