FIRE FOCUS
(Photos by Bill Hartenstein.)
What is your size-up outline? What’s “real” and what isn’t? Do you trust your eyes and experience?
Usually, if you can rapidly answer these questions on the foreground, you’re in pretty good shape. However, there are problems with temporary structures. What looks like an urban street of “brick and steel” is nothing more than paper, plastic, and wood. Floor load rating according to local codes is nonexistent. Collapse indicators are useless. That’s the case with Hollywood film sets and with amusements parks, carnivals, world and state fairs, and centennial historic celebration sites.
The firefighters assigned to the New York World’s Fair learned that time and time again. “Glass” would not break, ducts led anywhere. “Bricks” burned rapidly and “steel” fire escapes were as worthless as toothpick construction. “Hydrants” and “fire department connections” could be picked up and moved by a five-year-old.
Without preplanning, your “street-experienced” mind can play tricks and certainly get you in trouble. Additional problems of helter-skelter electricity, falling objects, windows with no flooring behind them, combustible gas storage, and toxic clouds liberated from burning plastics, plastics, and more plastics make this a difficult firefight.
The strategic factor is on-site prefire planning and surveillance.
(Photos by Kevin Todd.)
Frame buildings have an added dimension to fire extension. The usual check is the floor above, then the four horizontal sides of the fire occupancy, and finally the floor below the fire. The seventh dimension added to frame building fires is the outside of the building itself—fire extending to the combustible exterior siding, as seen here.
The visible size-up here shows fire through the roof, within all floors, and into exposure #4. Collapse is a real possibility. The apparatus, as it appears in this photo, is in a corner-safe area of the fireground —an excellent position when planning for collapse.
There are classic patterns to collapse of frame structures. They either lean over and fall —usually an unattached structure —or, as is the case here, fold in an inward/ outward fashion. This building folded outward at the second-floor level, shortening the potential collapse zone to the sidewalk and the parking lane.
Keep in mind that frame structures are notorious for secondary collapses.
(Photos by Ed Heavey.)
Fires in over-the-road containers like these can begin from many sources. It always seems that there are a lot of them involved on arrival. Command problems that exist are:
- What’s in the trailers —each of them? It’s the middle of the night or early morning. Whom are you going to ask? Preplanning is the answer. What’s stored, and what’s usually shipped? What is the worst case possible with the type of business in this occupancy? Firefighters in the photo have that information.
- Has the fire extended into the commercial occupancy? How much time do you have to get in? Can you wait for keys or must you force entry now? Do you have enough logistics to defend the exposure —the building —from outside and from inside and still mount a safe and aggressive attack on the point source, the trailers? Call for help!
- Account for the sudden shifts in the container caused by collapse of aluminum or steel framing and exploding tires, collapsing forward support members under the fifth wheel as streams “push” the containers in unnatural directions.
- Gain access to the trailers for heavy-caliber stream placement. The photo here shows that the department is making use of the versatility of the aerial platform. Large
- openings are cut into the ends of the container, after which large-caiiber streams from the same devices can pound the contents from the outside, horizontally. The saw seen here is more safely operated from the platform than it would be from a ground position or from a portable ladder.
