Roll-up Doors Create Entry Problem At Fire In Storage Building Cubicles
Seventy-five units of a public storage building in San Jose, Calif., became involved in a three-alarm fire that proved especially difficult to fight because of the variety of materials in storage.
“These buildings are inexpensive to construct, they provide a good income for their investors, and later, when the value of the land increases, they can easily be torn down to make way for a more profitable development,” explained Deputy Chief John Felde of the San Jose Fire Department about the fire service’s latest headache in many parts of the country.
Structures for public storage are typically nothing but a series of flimsily partitioned stalls or storage units that are rented by individuals for either short or long-term storage of household goods or other personal possessions. Though normally “unoccupied,” they can be a serious fire hazard, as San Jose fire fighters learned.
At 10:48 p.m. Sunday, April 27, 1980, the fire department received an alarm from a department store in the large, three-level Eastridge Shopping Mall, in what only a few years ago was open country on this fast-growing city’s southeastern outskirts. Engines 16 and 24, Truck and Light Unit 16, and Acting Battalion Chief Barry Matteson of District 2 responded.
Incorrect address given
After vainly searching the store where smoke had been reported, companies were about to return to quarters when Captain Pennington of Engine 16, on the mall roof, spotted flames across the street beyond the shopping center’s large parking lot, at the Hillview Public Storage complex. All units then rolled to that location, but 14 minutes had passed since the alarm was received.
The complex includes three separate but connecting two-story frame buildings nearly 1000 feet long altogether. They lie between a small private airport on the east, a mobile home park on the west, residential housing on the north and the shopping mall across Tully Road to the south. The buildings and their fronting yard area are enclosed by a cyclone fence having only two entrances, both locked at night and one of them during the day as well. There is one fire hydrant within the fenced property. Others are located on Tully Road and inside the park.
Except for end walls and the completely blank rear wall of concrete, unprotected frame construction is used throughout. The fronts and secondfloor structure are plywood, supporting a tar and gravel roof.
In the south building, which is typical, the lower level contains 35 individual storage units about 8 feet wide—much like a single garage—and about 30 feet deep, where renters can drive up to the door to load or unload their property. The second floor must be entered from stairways at either end leading to a full-length central corridor. Along one side of this corridor is a row of 31 storage compartments 10 feet wide, 12 feet deep, and 8 feet high, separated by partitions of 1-inch particleboard. Across the corridor is a second row of 62 similar units only 5 feet wide. Every unit, upstairs or down, is accessible only through a padlocked, spring-loaded, roll-up steel door.
The only other openings into the 305-foot-long building are four upstairs forklift access doors, also of the roll-up steel type, plus plastic skylights every 10 feet along the corridor ceiling. There are no interior fire walls, separations, sprinklers, nor fire detection system.
Fire through the roof
Matteson determined in his initial sizeup that only this south building was involved in fire. Flames were spreading rapidly among a number of the locked storage units upstairs and had broken through the roof near the building’s north end. Engine 24 took the nearest hydrant just north of the fire building. After directing Engines 16 and 24 in laying 2 1/2 and 3-inch attack lines to both floors at the north end, plus two 3-inch lines to supply Truck 16’s ladder pipe at the south end, Matteson requested a second alarm at 11:08 p.m.
The additional companies took these steps:
Engine 2, taking the nearest hydrant outside the complex entrance, stretched a 3-inch hand line (later broken down into two 1 1/2-inch lines) into the upstairs corridor from the south stairway. A second such line was operated at ground level.
Tanker 2, a 2500-gallon rig with a small pump, laid out two 1 1/2-inch to protect Truck 16, which was endangered by radiant heat as the fire intensified.
Although the blank rear wall minimized exposure of the adjoining mobile homes, Engine 26 was sent to cover that area with 1 1/2 and 2 1/2-inch hand lines supplied to the apparatus by 400 feet of 3-inch hose from a hydrant inside the park.
Truck 18 helped ventilate, force doors into the storage units and operate hand lines at the south end of the fire building. Cascade 20, an air supply unit, replaced SCBA bottles being used up during forcible entry operations in the corridor. Felde and the battalion chief of District 4 also responded.
At 11:45 p.m. a special call brought Truck 13, a quint-equipped unit having a Squrt boom instead of an aerial ladder, which was added to the mobile home exposure protection, supplying itself with 5-inch hose from a nearby hydrant in the park.
A full third-alarm assignment was requested at 11:56, resulting in the layout shown in the accompanying drawing. Engine 3 pumped into Engine 26’s supply line, and set up a second line to add to Truck 13’s water. Truck 3 manned hand lines in the south corridor, then helped overhaul in the north end. Hose 3 dropped 500 feet of 5-inch hose from the remaining area hydrant, beyond the north end of the complex, filling it out with additional 2½ and 3-inch sections to supply Engine 16, which then became able to beef up the attack on the fire’s north side. Next, Engine 18 took over one of Truck 16’s supply lines to work on the fire from ground level.
At 1:38 a.m. the blaze was brought under control. It did not spread beyond the building of origin.
Felde later had this to say about the incident: “This fire was extremely difficult to control. Each of the upper storage units was jammed with every storage item imaginable. The fire spread rapidly between them unchecked. To stop that spread, fire fighters with SCBA had to enter the upstairs corridor, open the roll-up doors, then cut the fire off. Access to each individual area required substantial forcible entry effort in severe heat and smoke.
Forcible entry
“Not only were the doors locked, but heat relaxed the raising spring at the top so that each door was hard, often impossible, to raise. Many had to be cut in half and peeled open. Approximately 75 of these doors had to be forced, a time-consuming operation. Meantime, fire was freely extended from unit to unit through the flimsy partitions, circumventing lines in the corridor. Control was only achieved by breaking in two or three compartments ahead of the fire, placing lines in those units, then hitting the fire as it broke through the partition.”
Final overhaul was not completed until about nine hours after the first alarm. Total loss was estimated at $300,000, most of it in contents.
Added Felde, “The loss would have been dramatically reduced if fire walls or separations had been used in the construction. It’s our hope that before too long this type of building will be covered by stricter codes designed to confine a fire to its point of origin and lessen the chance of such a rapid, unchecked spread.”
He also pointed out that this kind of hazard is now found in many large metropolitan areas where storage is a problem, notably in the growing “sunbelt” cities having many new or transient residents.
Unregulated storage
“Another problem posed by these complexes,” Felde continued, “concerns what is being stored. The owners and operators cannot regulate what items the renter brings in. Therefore, fire fighters face a loaded question when they respond to a fire there: What is burning? The answer is that anything may be involved, including toxic materials, explosives, corrosives, gasoline, ammunition, etc.”
The truth of that was illustrated in August 1979, when a mini-storage fire in Texas destroyed a number of units in a one-story metal building. Two fire fighters were overcome by vapors from stored chlorine which they had known nothing about. Also unknown to them was the supply of stolen ammunition in one stall, producing a series of explosions while they attempted to control the blaze. According to an NFPA report, “Nearly all the other stalls contained flammable liquids, paper, and furniture . . . One contained lumber. The storage facility was not sprinklered, contained no automatic detection system, and no roof vents.”
Felde concluded by saying, “The fire at Hillview Public Storage resulted in no one being killed or severely injured, but everyone who responded knew he was in for a tough fight. The problems were difficult and unexpected. If you have an occupancy similar to this in your community (and you probably do or will have), a substantial pre-fire plan is definitely in order.”
This article was prepared with the generous assistance of Deputy Chief John Felde and Fire Engineer Tracy McDermott.
