BY FRANCIS L. BRANNIGAN, SFPE
Editor’s note: Francis L. Brannigan had submitted this column, and others, before his sudden death on January 10.
Nate de Marse of 68 Engine, Fire Department of New York (FDNY), asked, “Does cast iron elongate as steel does in a fire?”
I have never read of this as a problem. For years, I made pancakes on a cast-iron griddle. The old pot-bellied stove was made of cast iron. As I studied further, I recognized that the connection of the floors to the column was equally as, if not more, important than the column itself.
I had never seen the question of elongation raised. Cast-iron columns present other hazards. On page 82 of Building Construction for the Fire Service, 3rd edition (BCFS3), I show the dangerous construction of a cast-iron column connection in the Stone Building in Larimer Square in Denver, Colorado. On page 174, there is a discussion of cast-iron columns; on page 176, there is a sketch of an extremely dangerous but common method of connecting the floor to the column. I visited the ruins of a Boston, Massachusetts, fire in which the son of the incident commander was killed in a collapse. The half-round cuts in the beams were clearly visible.
In the 1920s, there was a collapse in a fire in an old Butler Brothers textile warehouse in New York City, which was assumed to have been caused by hose streams hitting hot cast-iron columns. It was regarded as a lucky escape because the collapse was at the rear, where the building fronted on the next street. The units had responded to a street box alarm and were at the front of the building. If the alarm had come in from the slow-acting thermal automatic alarms then common, the units would have been in the rear of the building-the address on the assignment card-and would have been buried in bricks.
A 1918 promotional examination for battalion chief in FDNY featured a hypothetical fire in an old department store, obviously Wanamaker’s. In his book New York Fire Department Examination Questions, Deputy Chief J.W. Heffernan “fought” the fire question with references to cast-iron columns failing because of cold water. (I believe this was the origin of the myth that water caused hot steel to collapse. The myth is thoroughly discredited on page 259 of BCFS3.) However, it surfaced a couple of years ago in a document distributed by the National Fire Academy. This is not a case of two opposing opinions of equal validity.
There was also an NFPA publication that contained the myth. A Dallas fire officer brought the contradiction to the National Fire Protection Association’s attention. My then editor wrote him a letter sloughing off the question. I passed the question to Dick Gawain, fire protection engineer of the American Iron and Steel Institute. He wrote that I was correct. I sent the file to IFSTA, which published the quote on page 259 as an errata sheet, inserted it in all copies of Science in the Fire Service, but made no attempt to notify those who had purchased the book earlier. IFSTA goes through a validation process in which a number of fire personnel review publications. Since apparently no one had objected to the statement that water on hot steel causes collapse, we have an indication of how widespread the acceptance of the myth was.
I first met Tom Brennan, the then newly appointed editor of Fire Engineering, at the Florida State Fire Academy in Gainesville in 1984. He asked me to write the article “Don’t Hit the Steel-A Myth,” which was printed in Fire Engineering in May 1984. It drew an immediate negative phone call from no less of an authority than my friend Bill Clark, who changed his position after a full discussion of the steel industry’s letter.
In fact, when the Wanamaker’s Building was under demolition, there was a fierce fire in the three-story-high debris pile in the building. Tons of water were thrown into the structure. There were massed hoselines in the tunnel under the street connecting the fire building with the newer Wanamaker’s building.
After the fire, a study of the ruins showed no failure of cast-iron columns.
My good friend, John Cashman, 6th Battalion aide, was in the building with his chief. They heard a roaring noise. John hit a column with an ax; a small hole showed fire roaring up the column. This showed how cast-iron columns could transmit fire from floor to floor.
Cast iron can vary greatly in resistance to fire, depending on the quality of the casting. There is no way we can detect the difference. We cannot tell round steel columns from cast iron by looking at them, but sometimes the cast-iron columns have data cast into them.
Based on my study and observation of connections. I would recommend a defensive operation on any heavy fire where unprotected steel or cast-iron columns are known to have been used.
FRANCIS L. BRANNIGAN, SFPE (Fellow), the recipient of Fire Engineering ’s first Lifetime Achievement Award, devoted more than half of his 63-year career to the safety of firefighters in building fires. He was well known as the author of Building Construction for the Fire Service, Third Edition (National Fire Protection Association, 1992) and for his lectures and videotapes. Brannigan was an editorial advisory board member of Fire Engineering.
