By Daniel P. Sheridan
In the civilian world, fire showing out of a few windows would seem to shake up a lot of people. For firefighters, the reverse is true. Nothing is worse than pulling up to a scene with smoke pushing out of all the windows and cracks of a building and not seeing the actual flame. When the flames are showing out of the windows, there is a good chance that the fire has flashed and is out of the growth stage and into the fully involved stage. Thankfully, most fires these days flash very quickly. I remember many times throughout my career as a firefighter and a company officer crawling around an apartment with high heat and heavy smoke and no fire visible. It was always a sense of relief when we finally could determine a faint orange glow and realize that we had found the fire.
What I worry about in theses days of bunker gear and protective hoods is that we may be going too deep without getting a realistic picture of our environment; we are in a sense insulated from our surroundings. When I first came in the department, we didn’t have hoods or bunker gear. Most firefighters wore three-quarter boots that were never pulled all the way up most of the times. The heat dictated where we could or couldn’t go. Unless there was a known life hazard in which case we had to take an extraordinary risk to save a life, we went as far as we could and then waited for a hoseline to be put in operation.
There were two kinds of fires encountered in the first few months of my career that made a big impression on me for the rest of my life. These fires occurred within a month of each other and gave me a whole new respect for my new chosen profession. You don’t know what you don’t know, and these two fires gave me a tremendous education.
Flashover in a Brownstone
The first fire was a fire in the basement of a three-story brownstone. I had “the can,” and my fellow probie had the “irons.” He and I grabbed the captain’s coat and blindly followed him into the basement of this brownstone. At the time we entered the basement from the outside stairs leading into the front door, there was just a heavy-smoke condition with a moderate heat condition. Our job was to try to locate and confine the fire with the 2 ½-gallon extinguisher. After finding the fire, we would begin our primary search for any victims that may have been in the basement. We started making our way toward the glow in the living room in the rear of the building, trying to get close enough to get my extinguisher on the fire to try and contain it while the engine was getting the hoseline in place.
About halfway down the hallway, the captain grabbed both of us by the collar and said, “GET OUT.” I think that I must have not heard him right or responded quickly enough because he grabbed me again and repeated the same command–this time a little louder and more firmly. We both spun around and started heading out in a hurry. We were being chased by a fireball that was coming straight at us down the hallway. As we made our escape up the small staircase, the fire was right on our backs. My self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) strap caught on the banister, so I just got out of the SCBA and dropped it to the ground. Afterwards, the not-so-happy captain told me in no uncertain terms that when he says get out, he means get out. I don’t know how or what he knew, but he knew something was wrong.
I just chalked this situation up to “things happen.” This was a dangerous job and flashovers are just a part of it. At the time, I don’t think I really knew what a flashover was. I just knew that when the smoke started to get really black and the little shoots of orange started appearing in the smoke, step back because it’s going to light up. It wasn’t until many years later when I started replaying the events of that night over in my mind that what really happened that almost-fatal night occurred to me. Our outside vent firefighter was doing exactly what he was supposed to do–going to the rear and trying to vent-enter-search. Brownstones have doors in the rear, so when he forced the door to make a search, he changed the environment by introducing a blast of fresh air into the fire. The lesson learned here is that you can do the absolute right thing and still inadvertently affect the fire situation, in this case adversely. Today, we have a very strict standard operating procedure about notifying the officer of the ladder company anytime we make any openings in the fire area, and that firefighter must receive permission to do so.
Flashover in a Multifamily Dwelling
The second flashover happened a month later; it may have been on Christmas Eve. My probie partner from the previously mentioned fire and I were together again. Early Christmas morning, we received a phone alarm for a reported house fire. We were assigned second due on the box. The first units in transmitted the signal for a working structure fire, 10-75. Fire was on the first floor of a two-story, wood-frame, multifamily dwelling. That night, as at the previous fire, we had a covering captain working. Our assignment was to search the floor above the fire.
En route to the building from the truck, we encountered a civilian in the street screaming that there still were people inside. Something about the way the person was carrying on gave me that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that made me believe her. We now had to get to the second floor. When we arrived at the front door, the first-in engine was already operating a hoseline on the first floor. They were in the rear of the first floor, which is the normal main entrance to an apartment, making a push into the apartment. The first floor apartment had a second door that was at the base of the stairs, at the front of the house. The fire had burned through this front door near the base of the stairs and wrapped around back onto the first-due engine. Our way up to the second floor was now blocked; we needed to find an alternate way upstairs. We ran out to the truck and grabbed a 20-foot straight ladder.
We made our way up the ladder and entered the bedroom on the second-floor front. As I entered the room, I was crushed by the heat. I had never felt anything like this before. It felt like someone was squeezing my ears with a vise grip. I may not have known much at the time, but I knew that something was definitely wrong. I did a quick search of the bedroom and realized that I could not take the heat anymore. I was on my belly on the floor and now was thinking only about survival. I made my way back to the window–I was getting out of there no matter what! I could not stay where I was any longer. I somehow made it onto the ladder and got out of there as fast as I could. The way I felt at that time was that I would have gone out the window regardless of what floor I was on or whether there was a ladder there or not. (Someone had videotaped the fire, and it appeared on the local news. In the video, you can see a firefighter in the window (me) and fire coming out the upper part of the window). After I had made it to the ladder, the room completely lit up and the whole window was full of fire.
Unfortunately, that woman was right. There were two victims in a bathroom at the rear of the second floor. Had we been able to make it up the stairs, we may have gotten to them, but there was a tremendous amount of fire on the first floor. Reflecting on this event years later when I had more knowledge of how fire behaves, I realized that what happened was a straightforward flashover, caused by the contents on the floor above reaching their respective ignition temperatures. That is the reason it is so dangerous to operate on the floor above the fire. In this instance, we were under the impression that we were going for a known life hazard and our actions were justified. That is also the reason it is so important to get that first line operating on the fire floor, to protect the members who will be searching on the floor above. Unfortunately, we did everything we were supposed to at this fire, but the fire was just too far advanced when we got to it.
One night while I was still a lieutenant, we responded to a fire in a five-story tenement. I decided to try a little experiment. We had just gotten issued our bunker gear, so it was still new to our department. I was going to wear my full personal protective equipment (PPE) for the whole fire, from start to finish. I was completely “turtled up”; not an inch of skin was exposed. After the fire was out and we finished overhaul, I went down to the street. I went off air and took off my PPE. I was amazed because I hadn’t felt any heat, and it was as if I had not even worked at the fire. The only thing that was the same was that my clothes were soaking wet under my gear. Consider that I had just operated in an apartment fire that was out four windows and involved three rooms and never felt any heat. In the days when we didn’t have the bunker gear, my ears would have been blistered, my knees would have been sore, and I would have really felt as if I had been through the wringer.
We have a whole new generation of firefighters today who are being taught from the very first day to wear all their gear and SCBA all the time. This is a great thing, but I worry that we may also be losing our respect for how bad fire can be. Over the years, I developed a sense of my surroundings at a fire by using all my senses. When we can’t see, like the blind man, our hearing becomes more acute. I find that when I can’t see, I pay better attention to what I am doing. If it is too hot, we need to be on our bellies. These days I have seen firefighters entering a burning structure standing up. Why? Because we are losing our sense of heat. Firefighters think that because you can stand up that everything is okay, but this is not necessarily true. The temperature at six feet is a lot hotter than at the floor.
I am not sure that the thermal imaging camera (TIC) is the answer, either. I am still from the old school–the TIC is a great tool, but it is still a tool, and it can fail. I am not sure what the answer is. When I enter a burning structure and the fire is not yet located, I keep a glove off and monitor the heat with my bare hand. When the fire is there in front of you and it is obvious, then by all means every firefighter should keep his PPE on from start to finish, and that means during overhaul, too.
DANIEL SHERIDAN is a 24-year veteran of the Fire Department of New York and a covering battalion chief in the First Division. He is a national instructor II and a member of the FDNY IMT. Sheridan founded Mutual Aid Americas, which works with fire departments in Latin America.
