Article great message for fire personnel
I recently read on fireengineering.com “On Firefighter Training: Being Your Best Is Their Best Chance” by Brian Brush. It was a great article, and I forwarded it to all the fire personnel in our department. Thanks for this article and the many other great articles that fireengineering.com provides for our viewing.
Nathan Espinoza
Firefighter/EMT-Paramedic
Bowling Green (OH) Fire Division
Update on residential sprinklers
There have been some changes since the article on Pennsylvania’s residential sprinkler efforts appeared in your magazine (“Residential Sprinklers Still Under Fire,” John Waters and Tim Knisely, Fire Engineering, January 2011).
1 The builders were successful in having both the House and the Senate pass House Bill 377, removing the requirement for residential sprinklers in single-family detached and duplex houses.
2 The builders must offer the systems as an option to the buyer.
3 The state fire commissioner’s office is developing educational materials—to be posted on its Web site—to which the builders are to refer potential buyers.
For those who see their glass as half-empty, we lost sprinklers in single-family detached dwellings and duplexes. For those who see their glass as half-full, we won townhouses. During this entire debate, the possibility existed that we would lose it all.
Our governmental system guarantees the right of elected officials to make bad decisions. Our legislature exercised that right last month, and the newly elected governor signed the legislation as his first law of his administration.
The Pennsylvania Residential Fire Sprinkler Coalition committed itself to complete honesty in our efforts. We made it a point to ensure that any statement made was independently verifiable; sadly, I cannot say the same for the opposition. In the end, the builders used half-truths, patently false statements, unsubstantiated allegations, and anecdotal bad examples to carry the day. Unfortunately, they were partly successful—this time.
John R. Waters, EFO, MS
Chief Fire Marshal
Director/Safety & Codes Enforcement
Upper Merion Township, Pennsylvania
Weigh risk vs. benefit of live burns
“Live Burns: Maximizing Safety” by Michael Kinkade (April 2011 issue) is a very good article! I have read of many deaths, injuries, and near misses resulting from training fires in acquired structures. As Kinkade relates, members of the training team sometimes add dangerous (and unnecessary) elements to the setup, frequently without informing the others. In one scenario when I was a rookie student, instructors threw coffee cans of JP-4 at the ceiling to simulate flashover while the main fire got started in hay bales and wooden pallets.
I’m a rural fire defense coordinator for 54 fire departments. One of my groups reported that a local church asked them to burn a derelict structure on the property so that the church could replace it with a modern annex. They decided to make the burn serve a dual purpose by planning several live fire evolutions before letting it go to the ground, reasoning that their training fires would be more realistic by allowing them to involve not only the contents but also the structure. A criticism often leveled at training fires in purpose-built burn structures is that there are no “building fires, only contents fires, so realism suffers.”
Before they could implement their plan, a representative from the state’s Department of Environmental Quality arrived, spelling out regulations that had to be applied to the proposed exercise: remove all asphalt (i.e., composition shingles), asbestos, and lead-based paint prior to conducting the burn. At the conclusion, all remaining debris had to be collected and deposited in an approved disposal facility. For an all-volunteer department with minimum funding, the regulations, although reasonable, would entail excessive costs in relation to the benefits. The department abandoned the plan and told the pastor that he would have to make other arrangements.
Under the circumstances, I felt that they made the right call. I have known of power lines being inadvertently downed and vinyl siding being melted off a neighboring house by radiant heat from a demolition fire. Unintended consequences, for which the fire department can be deemed liable, not only involve unwanted expense and are bad for public relations but also pose a life and property hazard for citizens and firefighters.
Charlie Enlow
Rural Fire Defense Coordinator
Oklahoma Economic Development Authority
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