You arrive as the first officer on-scene and find heavy fire venting out the front living room window in a raised ranch private home. You survey the rear and find it perfect-no fencing, a raised deck for access, and an unlocked door. Great, you think, and you order the first line to the rear to attack the fire from the unburned side. Except, when you use this strategy, you have failed to protect the primary means of egress, and you are playing Russian roulette with people’s lives.
Many articles on fireground operations sound great until they start to mention taking the hoseline directly to the unburned side of a home for a fire that doesn’t require alternate tactics for extinguishment. If you have been trained or are training firefighters to fight fires from the unburned side as a first-line fire attack strategy, your hoseline is in the wrong place. Simple as that! The attack line should be stretched through the front door-not as a matter of convenience, but to protect life.
Several theories have advocated the tactic of fighting fires from the unburned side. One is that by choosing the unburned side, you will limit property damage. Damage? All fires cause damage! If you have a one-room fire in any home, you’ll have plenty of damage, no matter how you attack it. If you mount your fire attack from the unburned rear side, it will take longer to get water on the fire. While you’re stretching the line to the rear, the fire has more time to extend, cutting off egress routes such as hallways and stairway. Stretching through the front door increases occupant and firefighter safety and decreases damage as a result of getting water on the fire more quickly.
Another theory is by approaching the fire from the unburned side, you won’t push fire into uninvolved areas. Although pushing fire can happen when rooms have multiple entrances, the last place you want to push fire is toward the hallway or stairway. This is a real possibility when the line comes in from the opposite direction. Controlling fire extension that would compromise the primary means of egress should be one of your top priorities and is best accomplished by taking the line through the front. If the fire room is self-contained (one entrance), pushing fire shouldn’t occur. If it is occurring, then your troops need a class in basic hoseline operations.
If positive-pressure ventilation (PPV) is starting to push the smoke and heat out of the fire room window and the hoseline is brought in from the rear, your hoseline is still not covering the home’s primary egress. What happens when the fan breaks?
PROTECTING THE PRIMARY EGRESS
The primary means of egress is the home’s main entrance. The entrance door is typically located in the front, and fleeing occupants will use it as their first choice for escape because of habit and location. In multistoried homes, fleeing occupants will use the interior stairs to the ground floor. The interior stairway is usually located in proximity to the main entrance. The interior stairs must be protected from fire extension for occupant escape and to protect firefighters who are going above to conduct search and rescue. If you start hoseline operations from the rear of the home, not only can you have trouble locating the interior stairs, but fire may already be blocking that escape route. By coming through the front entrance, your hoseline will quickly cover this critical escape/access route.
In some homes, the main entrance and stairway may be at the rear or side doorway; deploying the attack line through these points is justified because you are still covering the stairway and the primary point of egress.
FIRE SIZE-UP
Your engine pulls up to and spots just past the house. You’ve just sized up three of the four sides of the fire building on arrival. The front of the house is where you confirm the address to dispatch. From the front side, you can usually count the mailboxes and doorbells to determine how many apartments may be in the home. This feature should be tracked down.
Occupants who have self-evacuated will generally make contact with you at the front of the house. They can often direct you to the fire or trapped occupants. Their reference point will be from the front door. If you go around back to start operations, you will have to reprocess that information as it relates to the rear of the home. To ignore the front entrance and take your line and all your personnel to the (unknown) rear exposure and set up your attack from this location opens a Pandora’s box of future problems.
Longer stretches. Many departments use preconnected hosebeds for residential house fires. By stretching your hoseline to the rear, you could stretch short on the fire. Even if your hosebed is sufficient to reach the rear, you are stretching more hose and involving more turns and potential kinking spots than necessary. More hose and more turns mean more time and a delayed fire attack. The front of the home allows easier access as well as shorter stretches and fewer turns. If you attack from the unburned side, where does the backup line come from? If the backup line is taken through the front and operated, you are now dealing with opposing streams.
Rear and side entrances. Taking your line to a rear entrance of the home may put you some distance from the fire and away from the interior stairs and main hallway. Many rear entrances are not centered on the home as are most front entrances. Rear entrances are often located at the extreme corners of the home. Some rear entrances contain excess storage and are nothing more than large closets. Fighting to take the line in through a tightly packed mudroom is not a good start. If the fire is on the opposite end of the home, you have just doubled the length of your interior stretch (rear vs. front) to make the fire room. By increasing the length of the interior portion of your stretch, you also endanger escaping firefighters who will have to follow an excess amount of hose to reach a safe exit.
Many side entrances are constructed similarly to rear entrances. Side entrances may also contain stairs to the basement and a tight entrance hallway. Entering through the rear or side can throw off your sense of direction when you are trying to figure out the home’s floor plan. Remember, these are secondary entrances for the home and should be treated as such for line placement as well.
Forcible entry. Sliding glass doors are common rear entrances. These doors may not withstand forcible entry without shattering, leaving you unable to control the door. Some rear entrances have become more fortified, which can cause delays in gaining entry. Homeowners are using more and more bars to cover doors and windows, especially in the rear because of fear of crime. If you encounter a multilocked door or bars in the rear, the apparatus that holds your special tools is now located around the building. Even if the front entrance is similarly fortified, by forcing entry at the front, you’ll have quicker access to your apparatus if additional tools are needed, saving time on gaining entry.
HOME DESIGN
Although homes vary in style, the front entrance is typically designed to take you to the main hallway. This hallway provides direct access to the majority of the home’s rooms as well as to the upper-floor staircase. Let’s look at a few building styles and why your first approach to the fire shouldn’t be from the unburned side.
Apartment houses. The design of apartment buildings usually precludes any other approach except through the apartment door. Apartments usually have only one entrance door. There are exceptions, such as ground-level apartments and apartments that span a firewall. However, because of limited space and security concerns, these secondary doors may be blocked by furniture, or the occupants, who solely use the front door, don’t know that they exist. At these types of dwellings, there is no attack path choice; you take the line through the main apartment door and deal with the fire from wherever it’s located within the apartment. Taking the primary attack line from a fire escape is an urban version of the unburned side. Again, this tactic should not be used for the first line in occupied buildings, because now you don’t have a line protecting the interior stairs or hallway.
Garden apartments. Avoid the rear entrance of a ground-level garden apartment for the same reasons you would avoid it at private homes: possibly longer stretches, additional forcible entry problems, and lack of hoseline protection of the primary means of egress. If the engine company starts operations from the rear, then everyone must follow if you plan on protecting your firefighters. If a search team enters from the front, it will not be protected by the hoseline and may in fact be endangered by it.
Two-story homes. The biggest question in taking the line to the rear or side entrance is, What line is protecting the interior stairs? The interior stairs are usually near the front door. Many interior stairs are an open pathway for fire extension. The fire may not have to breach a wall or any other obstacle to extend vertically. The people who are coming down from above will attempt to use the interior stairs. It’s human nature. Not having the line in place to protect this stairway will hamper interior fire and rescue operations above the fire floor, possibly trapping firefighters and civilians alike above the fire. We must cover the primary means of egress with the attack line if we are to fulfill our mission.
Single-story homes. In single-story homes, protecting the main hallway with the line as you advance on the fire room should be your objective. If the fire is in a bedroom off the interior hallway, the shortest path will be through the front door and down the hallway to the bedroom; in many homes, this can be as little as two turns. From the rear, not only may your number of turns increase, but you’ve also taken the longest path. If the fire is in an open or semi-open area (e.g., living room, dining room, or kitchen), and your line enters from the rear, you are not covering the hallway, which is the main exit path of the home.
If the fire is lapping out the front door and you attack it from the rear, what about possible extension to the attic through the eaves of the roof line? If the front porch is heavily involved, you must quickly knock the fire down before making entry through the front door. If you come in from the unburned side, the front will be the last thing you attack, increasing the odds of porch collapse and entrapment. If the first line enters from the rear and the porch is hit by another line or large-caliber streams from the front, you have just increased the chance of injury from opposing streams.
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Barring any unusual circumstances, attack the fire head-on from the front entrance to protect the interior hallway and stairs, to support your search, and to protect the home’s occupants. By bringing your line to the rear and starting your attack, you are endangering not only the home’s occupants but your firefighters as well. Fighting residential fires from the unburned side is a tactical mistake, and you should avoid it. ■
RAY McCORMACK is a 23-year veteran of the Fire Department of New York, serving as a lieutenant on Engine 69 in Harlem. He is a New York state-certified fire instructor, is a H.O.T. instructor in live fire attack at FDIC, and has lectured on engine company operations at FDIC. McCormack has a B.A. from New York Institute of Technology.
