One of the first tasks for firefighters arriving at a blazing home has long been to ventilate the structure — make holes in it — so that hot gases and smoke can escape. It has been this way for generations: a so-called roof man from a ladder company opens a hatch or saws through the ceiling, while other firefighters break windows as they search inside, often before the first drop of water has hit the fire.
But house fires have changed. Now, spurred on by at least one grievous injury to a firefighter last year, the New York Fire Department is rethinking its tactics for residential fires, while trying to hold onto its culture of “aggressive interior firefighting” — charging inside burning buildings as fast as possible.
As it is the largest municipal department in the country, its new course may well affect the tactics of other fire departments.
“We’re an organization steeped in tradition and we’ve been fighting fires for many years in certain ways and they worked,” the fire commissioner, Salvatore J. Cassano, said in a phone interview.
“But we owe it to everybody who works for us and the people we serve to look at the way we fight fires.”
Plastic fillings in sofas and mattresses burn much faster than older fillings like cotton, helping to transform the behavior of house fires in the last few decades, firefighters and engineers say.
With more plastic in homes, residential fires are now likely to use up all the oxygen in a room before they consume all flammable materials. The resulting smoky, oxygen-deprived fires appear to be going out. But they are actually waiting for an inrush of fresh air, which can come as firefighters cut through roofs and break windows.
Scientists and the Fire Department will conduct an ambitious experiment beginning Monday on Governors Island in New York Harbor: they will burn down 20 vacant row houses stuffed with modern furniture, to gauge which techniques work best in fighting the blazes.
Firefighting has become too risky. Better to let houses burn down.
Come on, Gamecock, at least they are using actual houses and testing theories. This is much better than just doing things the way we always have or being totally resistant to actual testing in a controlled fashion. Be happy–this is a good sign.
Oxygen depravation makes sense, let’s see if it works in the real world.
Allen: “deprivation”, not “depravation”.