Garden Apartments—Old Worry/New Package
DEPARTMENTS
Volunteers Corner
The condition of the country’s economy is evident in many ways. Food prices are up, unemployment rates are down, and colleges are pulling in record high tuitions.
One area particularly hard hit by the economic upswing is housing. Tremendously escalating housing costs and resulting alternatives to the modest home with the white picket fence can cause particular problems for the fire service. Many newly married couples, unable to afford a house, seek out low-income, often illegal apartments, or live in a parent’s basement until they find something affordable.
This increased demand for housing has given rise to the construction of low-rise multiple dwellings commonly known as garden apartments.
Although very modern looking, garden apartments bring back some old headaches—with a few new twists. We have a building that is occupied by both permanent and transient occupants. Transients generally do not intermingle with each other or make many friends in the complex. And the firefighter can be at a loss trying to gather information at the incident:
“How many people live in this apartment?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are they normally home at this time? Do they have children?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Transients tend to remain anonymous in their immediate surroundings. Cars are all over the parking lot, and many of our normal indications of life within the structure, such as parked automobiles and toys outside the structure, lights, window coverings, etc., become less dependable.
Another problem of garden apartments is their construction. Garden apartments are sometimes nothing more than attached wood frame units, similar to the old row frame dwellings of the past. If you have garden apartments in your district, you must find out whether or not the cockloft or attic space is common.
In my town, they built a complex in three stages, each having different construction techniques. The first group was built with open cocklofts; the second with cockloft separations that only went to the underside of the roof boards; and finally (someone began to get the message) the third set was built with fire walls extending through the roof.
Usually when garden apartments are separated by fire walls, the fire walls begin at the lowest level, rising through the building and terminating at or above the roof line. This divides the complex into sections, that is, two apartments on the ground floor with two apartments above them.
On the ground floor, you will see four doors, two for the ground floor and two for the upper floor. In this layout, the middle doors lead to the ground floor apartments and the outer door gives access to the upper floor apartments. Fire venting out a front window on the ground floor will require that you enter from one of the middle doors. This ground floor apartment wraps around the access stair to the second floor. A burnout of any room can cause the Sheetrock to fail and the fire to enter the unprotected staircase (vertical void). Fire entering this void can extend to the upper floor, possibly trapping occupants and/or firefighters. Therefore, the outer door must be forced and the staircase checked for fire extension.
Normally, the interior layouts of all apartments in each complex are the same (which is a big plus) and very seldom will the owner allow modifications. However, although the layouts are the same, they are “mirrorimaged.” Let me explain this. Take a typical interior layout where the apartments are split in half, with the living/ dining area on one side and the bedroom(s), bathroom, and kitchen on the other. The entrance puts you on the living side, with a kitchen that normally “Ls” off the dining area. Now, if you enter the left-hand apartments, your kitchen and bathroom will be on the right-hand side. If you enter the right-hand apartments, these rooms will be on the left. This might sound confusing, but think of what the builders have done. By mirror imaging, they are able to group the kitchens and baths so that the plumbing runs off one central pipe chase.
The majority of these garden apartments are wood frame (although I realize that many builders are using metal studs, the structure is primarily wood), and many are being built using truss construction for both floor beams and roof assemblies. With this newer gang nail, wood truss construction, any fire in the cockloft will always affect both upper apartments as well as those on either side of the fire walls. In the case of the trussloft (the space between floors), all four apartments in the section will be affected.
To illustrate this, put a fire in the building on the first floor and assume that it has entered the trussloft. To define the perimeter of the fire for extinguishment, you first have to pull the ceilings in both ground floor apartments. The damage done to the trusses will affect the stability of the upper floor. Therefore, four apartments have been affected.
Look at the pipe chase. A fire entering this space on the ground floor can affect all four apartments and the cockloft. If there is a trussloft associated with the pipe chase, the possibilities can rapidly grow to greater alarm proportions.
If we put the fire on the top floor and have it enter the cockloft (trussed or not), you must pull the ceilings in both top floor apartments and the apartments adjoining this section to make sure that the fire hasn’t passed the fire wall. (Remember, fire walls are a help, but are never relied upon for total fire containment. A small hole can send the fire into another section with blowtorch intensity.) Again, four apartments are affected, and if you count water damage, this number could be as high as eight.
Garden apartments, motels, condos, townhouses, etc., are just newer names for row frames. And the biggest lesson we learned in row frames is that playing catch-up is counter-productive. Regardless of the layout, the keys to a successful firefighting operation lie in the same basic concepts we teach new firefighters: locate, confine, and extinguish the fire. After defining the fire’s perimeters, beat it back to its original occupancy. If this sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same strategy used at a taxpayer.
