Abstract
This paper describes experimental investigations of fire service ventilation and suppression practices in full-scale residential structures, including a one-story, 112 m2, 3 bedroom, 1 bathroom house with 8 total rooms and a two-story 297 m2, 4 bedroom, 2.5 bathroom house with 12 total rooms. The two-story house featured a modern open floor plan, two-story great room and open foyer. Seventeen experiments were conducted varying fire location, ventilation locations, the size of ventilation openings and suppression techniques. The experimental series was designed to examine the impact of several different tactics on tenability: door control, vertical ventilation size, and exterior suppression. The results of these experiments examine potential occupant and firefighter tenability and provide knowledge the fire service can use to examine their vertical ventilation and exterior suppression standard operating procedures and training content. It was observed that door control performed better at controlling the thermal exposure to occupants than did fully opening the door. Additionally, the impact of increased vertical ventilation area was minimal, and only slightly reduced the thermal exposure to occupants in a few non-fire rooms. In the two-story structure, the non-fire rooms on the second floor consistently had larger thermal fractional effective rate (FER) values (approximately 2.5× the thermal risk to oocupants) than did the non-fire rooms on the first floor. Water application was also shown to reduce the thermal risk to occupants 60 s after water application 1/3rd the original values on second floor rooms of the two-storry structure and by at least 1/5th of the original values on the first floor rooms of both structures. Data also showed that the impact of front door ventilation on the toxic gases exposure was minimal, as the toxic gases FER actually increased after front door ventilation for several experiments. However, after vertical ventilation there was a 30% reduction in the toxic gases exposure rate in two of the one-story structure experiments.
Highlights
There is a continued tragic loss of firefighter and civilian lives during residential fires
We included data from both non-fire rooms, where surviving victims may be impacted by the fire service even if they stay in place, as well as fire rooms, through which victims may attempt self—rescue or be evacuated by firefighters
It was observed that in all cases, venting the structure resulted in fractional effective rate (FER) values that either did not improve occupant tenability or, at worst case, significantly reduced occupant tenability
Summary
There is a continued tragic loss of firefighter and civilian lives during residential fires. One significant contributing factor is the lack of understanding of fire behavior in residential structures resulting from the use of ventilation as a firefighter practice on the fire ground. The changing dynamics of residential fires as a result of evolutions in home construction materials, contents, size and geometry over the past 30 years compounds our lack of understanding of the effects of ventilation on fire behavior [1]. NFPA estimates that from 2009 to 2013 [3], U.S fire departments responded to an average of 357,000 residential fires annually. These fires caused an estimated average of 2470 civilian deaths and 12,890 civilian injuries each year. Relatively little research has been conducted to scientifically inform the Fire Service on intervention techniques that can further reduce risk to occupants who may be trapped in structures where installed systems are not present
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