Fire Protection Engineers Meet, Discuss Problems of Fire in the City
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A precautionary request to note each location of the meeting room’s exits was the appropriate beginning to a recent seminar on “Fire in the City.” Conducted by the New York Metropolitan and New Jersey chapters of Society of Fire Protection Engineers, the seminar looked into several aspects of New York’s fire problem.
By its size alone, New York is guaranteed to have a serious fire problem. The city has 7.5 million persons—20,000 per square mile—in 822,000 buildings, with 300 million square feet of high-rise floor space. Some of the high-risers were built five building codes ago.
New York also has 40,000 wood frame, fully attached residential buildings.
“This type of construction probably represents the highest fire risk of all residential structures in the city and elsewhere,” said Paul R. DeCicco, professor of civil engineering and director of the Center for Urban Environmental Studies at Polytechnic Institute of New York.
Trying a technological fix
DeCicco is especially concerned about Fires in high-risk neighborhoods because of the serious but seldom acknowledged indirect costs to the individual involved and to the city. Many of the Fire-damaged units are not repaired.
“Failure to replace housing lost to fire hastens the demise of stable neighborhoods, which Finally succumb to the blight of derelict buildings and vacant lots,” he warned.
Although socio-economic conditions and behavior patterns contribute to the problem, “technological fixes” are also important to a multidimensional approach, DeCicco said.
As part of one lengthy study, he conducted fire tests in typical structures before and after installing protective devices. Then he selected 75 occupied buildings and installed cockloft Fire barriers, smoke and Fire detectors, and a low-cost limited sprinkler system for the public hall and stair area. These areas were especially vulnerable to set fires and are critical as an escape path.
Other occupied but unprotected buildings became a control group for study and comparison.
Protection pays
The results showed that the incidence of fire was not affected. But in the protected buildings, there were no casualties and no serious fires that damaged the building structure. In the control group, fires and losses were larger and there were 20 injuries (mostly to Fire Fighters). In addition, these large fires damaged nine exposed buildings. No protected buildings were lost, while in one year 7 percent of the unprotected ones were vacated or later demolished.
DeCicco also urged “greater recognition of the need to accept partial solutions” when the issues have the scale and complexity of those he described for high-risk neighborhoods.
The fire problems of Japan and Europe were briefly compared to New York’s by Augustus Beekman, the former Fire commissioner. In Tokyo, a city of similar population, there are about 8000 fire calls per year compared to 100,000 in New York. Europe’s problem is different because their wood structures were eliminated long ago.
While the Japanese obviously work hard to prevent fires, attitudes are different here, where we “have the fire, then have plenty of suppression resources to throw against it,” Beekman said.
But a Fire prevention effort alone does not work wonders unless it causes a deeper change in attitude. Beekman described his best attempt to commit more resources to Fire prevention. Everyone became involved. There were many more inspections than before, but the fire incidence still increased.
Now he believes the most successful programs isolate a speciFic fire problem that can be measured, focused upon and hit hard.
Cutting safety corners
The public wants fire and life safety, said J. Armand Burgun, “but they do not want to pay for it.” Burgun is chairman of the NFPA board of directors.
The specter of budget hangs menacingly over the building designer’s head. With interest rates and inflation so high, the designer must make available funds go farther and take less time. The result: shortcuts in the design and construction process, more plastics, fewer smoke stop barriers, large open spaces, and smaller tolerances.
Burgun said that when all of these are combined, “we will be constructing a potential disaster.” Many building codes are not reviewed for many years, allowing obsolete provisions to remain while improvements are not recognized. He called for mandatory review of the entire code at least every three years.
“I believe that a building code and a fire prevention code should he companion documents,” Burgun continued, “and should be written, reviewed and amended at the same time.”
Existing construction must be covered in the code, too, according to Burgun. Many are obsolete or at least deficient. Yet of the buildings expected to be in use in New York State by the year 2000,90 percent are already built. Code enforcement by education was said to be the best method of gaining acceptance and compliance with a code.
Fighting insurance fraud
We don’t have to lose the war against arsonists, insisted Elliott R. Berrin, a consult ing engineer, who suggested that arson laws should be tougher. He focused on arson for profit by insurance fraud.
One problem is that insurance contracts give first call to insurance proceeds to the named mortgagee. Berrin described elaborate schemes to watch for, whereby the person who supplied the mortgage money is really a partner in crime and the legal owner is a dummy corporation. The connections are hard to trace because the official incorporation records show only the lawyer’s name as an officer. He cannot be made to reveal confidential information about his clients.
To open up such schemes, Berrin wants legislation requiring lists of all stockholders of small nonpublic corporations. He also proposed to require that delinquent property taxes be the first payoff from insurance proceeds, then utilities. Now it’s too easy for landlords to avoid back taxes and back utility bills, then burn the building and collect in full. We must do what we can, he said, to reduce the profit to arsonists.
Compare files
Use of computerized records of the Property Insurance Loss Register of the American Insurance Association would give a better picture of repeat arsonists and multiple claim collection. Berrin would make the use of these files mandatory so that different insurance companies could investigate the repeat cases more carefully.
“The public sector has to respond also with more, well-trained arson investigators,” Berrin said. It may cost money, but he maintained it will cost less in the long run because we all pay the arsonist who gets away with it.
Berrin then called on insurance companies to get tough with fraud cases and use the contract protection. If an attempt at insurance fraud can be proved, the policy is void.
“Remember that in civil court only a preponderance of evidence is required for a jury verdict, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt that is required in a criminal proceeding,” he added.
Cooperation was also the request of Thomas W. Jaeger, who discussed the conflict between security and fire protection.
“If the two disciplines fail to voluntarily cooperate,” he said, “unnecessary deaths, injuries and property loss will continue because of inadequate security or chained exit doors.”
Jaeger, an engineer from Gage-Babcock and Associates, described recent court rulings indicating that “although security is a legitimate consideration, the fire protection requirements prevail” because they are codified. He complained that few laws require the incorporation of security protection equipment and said the security community should learn from the fire protection community.
“Where is it written,” he asked, “that fire safety has a greater priority than security?”
Beware of BLEVE
The dangers of fighting hazardous materials fires, especially in liquefied flammable gases, was discussed by Bruce Teele, from the public protection division of NFPA. He said there has been a rapid escalation of injuries and fatalities among fire fighters at these incidents.
Traditionally, the code of fire fighting has been to attack and extinguish. But the danger of BLEVEs forces a change in this posture.
“If there are no persons or property in the danger area,” Teele said, “the decision should be relatively simple and a no-attack policy adopted.”
When there is a life hazard, the difficulty is much greater and action must be taken to “buy time.” The absence of any predictable time before possible explosion compounds the decision process, Teele continued. When removing the public, the evacuation zone should usually be 3000 feet in all directions.
