First responseLarger fire-fighting crews save lives, limit damage in high-rise fires
Between 2005 and 2009 there were, on average, 15,700 high-rise structure fires annually in the United States. Average annual losses totaled 53 civilian deaths, 546 civilian injuries, and $235 million in property damage. When responding to fires in high-rise buildings, firefighting crews of five or six members — instead of three or four — are significantly faster in putting out fires and completing search-and-rescue operations, concludes a major new study.
When responding to fires in high-rise buildings, firefighting crews of five or six members — instead of three or four — are significantly faster in putting out fires and completing search-and-rescue operations, concludes a major new study carried out by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in cooperation with five other organizations.
Results of the study, conducted with thirteen Washington, D.C.-area fire departments, were presented the other day at the 2013 Metropolitan Fire Chiefs Conference in Phoenix.
“Unlike most house fires, high-rise fires are high-hazard situations that pose unique operational challenges to fire service response. How big a fire gets and how much danger it poses to occupants and firefighters are largely determined by crew size and how personnel are deployed at the scene,” says lead researcher Jason Averill, a NIST fire protection engineer. “It’s not simply that larger crews have more people. Larger crews are deployed differently and, as a result, are able to perform required tasks more quickly.”
A NIST release reports that an analysis of fourteen “critical tasks” — those undertaken when potential risks to building occupants and firefighters are greatest — found that three-member crews took almost twelve minutes longer than crews of four, twenty-one minutes longer than crews of five, and twenty-three minutes longer than crews of six to complete all tasks. Four-person crews took nine minutes and eleven minutes longer than five- and six-member crews, respectively.
The study also looked at the effect of using fire service access elevators to move firefighters and equipment up to the staging floor and concluded that most tasks were started two to four minutes faster when using the elevators compared with using the stairs.
The study, funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Assistance to Firefighters Grants Program and conducted in a 13-story vacant high-rise office building in Crystal City, Virginia, involved forty-eight separate controlled experiments, plus forty-eight corresponding computer-modeling simulations, which evaluated three types of representative fires, from slow to fast growing.
“This study will result in better-informed policy and operational decisions influencing levels of staffing and other resources available for responding to high-rise fires,” says Dennis Compton, former chief of the Mesa, Arizona, fire department and chairman of the board of the National Fallen Firefighter Foundation. “These are decisions now confronting hundreds of communities across the country.”
On the basis of the results of computer modeling, which incorporate data from live experimental burns, the study team
