Abandoned Homes

A hazard for all firefighters are those neglected rentals and abandoned houses in our territories. They may be empty but that doesn't make then not hazardous. I have made many fires in abandoned houses and gotten a surprise each time, let me share one with you.

The Situation

You are dispatched to building fire in your first due territory. It's one of those pesky "next door to" calls, which usually means someone saw some steam from a drier outlet, thought it was smoke and did the neighborly thing to call for their neighbor. These usually end up in confused and panicked homeowner because now three fire engines and a truck are arriving in front of their house with all the red lights sirens. That's how it goes, usually.



Today doesn't seem to be much different. When your engine pulls up you don't see any smoke in the air, or any flames sillouetting a building against the night sky. However, there are several people jumping and pointing to what seems to be a clearing as the pop open the door and exit with full gear, and begin a trot up a long lane with the officer to where the people are pointing. You then see an abandoned house, boarded up,  dark gray smoke billowing from a gable end above another lower roof line, embers floating harmlessly into the sky.

Turning, the officer rushes past you to begin a 360 degree walk-around the building, while you relay back to the driver and hook up man to back the engine down the lane. This takes a few minutes as you assist the driver down the lane. "This is good," you think, avoiding a long lay of 2-1/2 inch wyed lines.

The main body of the house is average for your area, about 800 square feet, ordinary construction with signs of decent upkeep. There is a smaller add on structure on the BRAVO division. The boards make it difficult to determine how much smoke is coming out, but it becomes apparent what is going down when your lieutenant kicks in the front door and thick black smoke rolls out. The hook up man backs the engine into position and hands off a long line, a preconnected 200' lay of 1-3/4 inch with a 200 GPM nozzle. Advancing the flat loaded hose towards the door is easier than usual.


A step is missing to the front porch, so you pull slack on the line, step up, and pull on your mask and hood down then drop your helmet on top. Holding your breath, you turn the knob on your bottle and get airflow through the regulator with your first breath. You click your chest flashlight on. You can feel the heat as you walk forward. Heat kisses at the space where the mask and hood are supposed to cover.

"Charge my line"

You find a doorway and kneel in it as the water comes blasting from the fully open nozzle. The straight stream plays out as your whip the nozzle in a circle. You advance into the doorway with the nozzle still open, chasing the orange glow back towards another room. You feel the 2nd in engine company guys come in behind you, and the truck guys start on the ceiling and directing you towards the back room. You knock out the last of the main fire in that room and begin wetting down hot spots, including a burning door.

As the ceiling in the smaller part of the room is exposed, more fire appears in the attic. It is quickly knocked out. The foam that is mixed into the line at the pump makes quick work of the deep seated embers in the insulation. As the PPV fan roars to life and the smoke clears, you notice several key building components that made this fire and structure potentially dangerous...

Hidden Dangers

Several key findings were made, before, during, and after firefighting operations.

Construction types - the main building used a kind of stucco construction for interior walls, making it very sturdy. Lucky not much of the original structure was involved and extension into the attic was cut off by the fire attack, and just in time. The occupants that built onto the house cut a hole in the original exterior gable end that was covered by the roof over the addition for heating and air ducts.

Boarded windows and doors - made early fire detection by the people that lived on this small lane impossible, and the fire was allowed to grow unchecked and undetected for some time and created flashover conditions in the addition. Had there been a greater fire load (if the building was occupied) it would definitely have destroyed the addition completely and taken most of the original structure with it, but fire detection would have been much sooner.

Entanglement Hazards - the addition used lightweight ductwork for heat and air, and when exposed to fire, the wires that hold that ductwork open become exposed. Thankfully there were only two stretches of this ductwork in the involved area, so the amount of wires were kept at a minimum.

Other construction shortcuts - The roof over the addition was very flimsy, and this is because of the roof construction. The truss lacked the cross members you would normally see in a premanufactured roof truss. Also, the ceiling fans and other appliances were poorly attached to the ceiling, and they fell when exposed to fire. The original back door in the kitchen had been covered completely and made into a window. You could not tell from the exterior but it was fairly obvious outside. All in all, the add-on appeared to be do-it-yourself project with very little in the way of safety margins.

Lessons Learned

Be aware of the abandoned buildings in your area. Be observant to what kind of activity goes on around them, often times the homeless will use them for shelter or drug addicts as a place to get high out of public view. They are often the cause of fires in these structures.

Be prepared to preserve evidence in these structures, as they could be a crime scene or part of an arson investigation later on. An arrest may hinder on you doing your part to preserve evidence that is not in the way of accomplishing your task.

Fundamental firefighting techniques are crucial to efficient completion of the task. Nozzle control and practice deploying hose lines goes a long way in ensuring that there is no delay in getting water on the fire and then once water is on the fire, making it go out quickly.

Be mindful of the possibility of construction hazards but keep up an aggressive attack, and always have an escape plan.

Remember these things, and you will keep your culture of extinguishment intact while maintaining safe fireground operations.

Fire Attack Operations

There is often much contention between firefighters about who is the most important, the truckies or the pipemen? Although I like spraying water as much as the next guy, I've always been a truckie at heart. That being said, the engine company is one of the most vital parts of the strategy, because you need to spray water to put out the fire. True that it will eventually burn itself out, but one of the main fire service tenants is to conserve property, and letting it burn doesn't match up with that priority.

The idea behind fire attack has always been to put water on the fire, and that idea has changed much over the years. The fire service used to be dominated by straight tipped nozzles that sprayed out a solid stream of water. In the 1950's Lloyd Laymen, former Chief of the US Coast Guard Fire Training Center, devised a new form of fire attack using a fog nozzle. This was an idea imported from the naval services, since they used fog nozzles to control shipboard fires quickly. The new concept was adopted by the mainstream fire service quickly, but there was a catch...

Laymen never actually intended for the fog nozzle to be used in an interior attack mode. That's right, not go to an interior attack. This misunderstanding was quickly applied and often with disastrous results. It was continued up until the 1980's, when smooth nozzles started to become common place again, but even today they are far less common than prior to the advent of the fog nozzle. Smooth nozzles require a lot more skill to use and are far easier to handle because of low nozzle reaction. Remember Newton's First Law? Every action has an equal and opposite reaction? The more pressure you pump to a nozzle the higher the reaction force at the point of discharge will be, so if you are pumping 100 psi to a nozzle, you will be getting an equal amount of reaction force at the nozzle.

So the attack REALLY starts before you even make it to the fire. You should familiarize yourself with what you have available, and what your hose lines can do. This is only achievable through study and training. Waiting until you are at the fire to become familiar with your gear is not the right moment. Often individual shifts or in the case of volunteer services, individuals themselves, will prefer a different set up based on their chief or company officer's beliefs. If you are not part of that shift, you need to pay attention what nozzle or hand tools have been misplaced or moved and either move them back or remember where they are.
Often hose will be removed at a fire and may not be replaced. You should keep note of how many sections of hose you have pre-connected or in the beds so you will not "lay out short" and need to stretch additional hose to make up the difference.

As a company officer, the size of the initial line makes a difference in how quickly you get a stop on a fire. The heat release curve states that the maximum heat release is achieved during a free burning period just after flashover, but is not maintained for very long, and eventually burns down into a smoldering state. With this in mind, remember that using a small handline (1.75 inch, usually) while the fire is post-flashover and into a free burning state will not do much. The application of water is directly proportional to the heat release curve, meaning that if you do not apply enough water to combat the heat release of burning materials, you will be getting nowhere on the fire, and it may even advance on you. Lines in excess of 2 inches are preferred. They are not easy to manage when charged and require extra muscle to position, but you will not be fighting fire for very long.

This is where the discussion on nozzles comes in. If you are pumping 150 psi to a fog nozzle on the end of a large handline there will be a HUGE difference in reaction force opposed to 50 or 75 psi, with better flow from the smooth nozzle because there is less in the nozzle itself to impede flow.

Something that is very rarely considered is the air flow into the fire area, which can rapidly change the conditions. A fog nozzle even at a 30 degree fog pattern will entrain over 1000 ft3 of air into the air. This when combined with water hitting superheated materials and converting to steam will produce a steam flow along the path of least resistance (which is usually the path the hose team traveled) and push superheated gas back onto the hose team. This is disrupting the thermal layer, and without ventilation to create that path of least resistance.

Once you have worked your line into position and it's charged, you can now spray water. There is no hard and fast rule, but there are some things to keep in mind. If you spray water directly on what's burning, you will scatter it all over. I prefer an indirect spray pattern regardless of what nozzle you are using. The circular pattern is the easiest to remember and easiest to do, and doesn't involve sharp movements of the nozzle. You should spray water so that it hits both walls, the ceiling, and the floor.

Why the floor? This allows you to use the water stream to sweep the floor of debris that falls in your path as well as cooling the area where you will soon be crawling or walking.

Once you have extinguished the fire, you will be moving immediately into the overhaul phase, but that's another article...

Wildland Firefighting for the Structural Firefighter Part II

Continuation

Firefighting in the wildland environment is tough for the structural firefighter, so what can you use that you already have?

As we discussed earlier, we don't have the specialized equipment or gear in order to fight a wildfire like the Forest Service, but we can successfully control the incident using basic tactics and the benefit of high water flows. For instance, take the following scenario.

Situation

You are dispatched to a reported brush fire in a river bottom, which under normal circumstances is dry but filled with soft dirt and thick vegetation. It is often used by indigent people to set up tent cities due to it being secluded and away from the public view. Most often the cause of these fires is unattended camp fires. As you leave the station, you see a large plume of smoke and a helicopter circling around it.

You arrive to find a police officer pointing you back to an area at the end of a long path. The path appears to be soft dirt, but is narrow and stable enough to be able to move the large engine back into the bottoms. The fire is over a large area and is spreading rapidly in dry grass and light winds out of the south west. The driver puts the engine into pump gear and charges the booster reel, a 1" rubber jacketed line about 300' in length.

You grab a pike pole while the other firefighter takes the nozzle and begins knocking the fire away from the road and extinguishes the materials you pull apart with your pike pole.



The nozzle man advances into the burned area in an attempt to keep the fire from spreading (direct attack) while you use the pike pole to pull burning materials away from the fire in and into the burned area. The nozzle man fogs his stream out to suppress a large area. The next engine company establishes a water supply using 5" hose, and connects to a third arriving pumper for a relay operation. The booster lines are ordered to back out and the deck guns on two pumpers pinch the fire between the master streams and cut off it's advance, then the booster reels move in to mop up.

The incident takes longer than anticipated, the ground has been used to dump tree stumps, and several are now hiding the fire within their stacks. A track hoe is called in to bury the stumps and clear the land.

Lessons Learned and Things to Remember

Weather patterns played a major role in fire spread, and coupled with late detection, allowed the fire to spread unchecked. Had the fire not been detected, it could possibly have taken over the whole area.

Knowing what the fire is doing and it's direction of spread played a factor in the placement of equipment and eventually how it was contained. The deployment of master streams allowed the firefighting effort to extend past the reach of booster reels and used enough water to suppress the fire at a distance, reducing crew fatigue.

Radios allowed coordination of the master streams using spotters to guide them in, communication was key in the effort and a lot of information regarding fire spread and extinguishment progress was communicated back to incident commander.

This incident came to a successful conclusion because of communications and teamwork as well as the adaptability of the firefighters to use what was available to contain what could have become a large wildfire.