>> daniel madrzykowski: thepresentation today we're going to break up into a few parts. we have the background, whichis giving you a little bit of background about nist and what the fire researchdivision does, and then we want to talk about what isfire in the united states, what is the problem,and then get into the firefighters' workplaceand how has that changed over the past few decades.
then we try to tie in thesechanges with fire dynamics and fire behavior, and this isusually good for the lay person because most people i don'tthink appreciate just how fast a fire could grow andspread in their home. and, of course, earlier thisweek there was a very tragic fire in new york city where seven childrenlost their lives due to a rapidly spreading fire. how are fires inhomes different today,
we'll talk a littlebit about that. and then get to sort ofthe meat of the subject, how do we take ourlaboratory to the street, how do we take the finemeasurements that are done at nist and replicate themin acquired structures that are gettingready to be torn down and you'll get a littleinsight into that. and then we'll close with thelessons learned and how we try to share this informationwith the fire service.
so the fire research divisionworks on a wide range of issues. basically we're trying to focuson reducing the loss of life and the loss of propertyfrom unwanted fire. it's not exactly ourofficial mission statement, but that's the gist of it. we do that by we've developedsmoke alarms and we continue to work on developing new smokealarms, doing demonstrations with automatic firesprinklers to show how efficient and effective they are,emergency egress studies,
reduced furniture flammability. there's been great progressmade in the case of mattresses, if you buy a mattress today in the united states it's amuch more fire safe mattress than it was in say 2005, sothere's been great gains there. we're currently workingon things like sofas and upholstered furnitureand what-not. another way to lookat the problem is if we can't make the furnituresafer do we try to reduce some
of the ignition sources,and so nist worked with the tobacco industry andothers to develop standards for the reduced ignitionpropensity cigarette. sometimes inappropriatelyreferred to as a fire safe cigarette with just reducedignition propensity. nist is a world leader in developing firemodels of all sorts. the one that's mostly in use,
currently the state-of-the-artis the fire dynamic simulator and its partner program,smoke view, which is how youreview the results and visualize the results. these fire modelsare used in research, design and litigationaround the world. it's really the standard forfire models around the world. a new group that wehave started is looking at issues regarding wildland urban interface fires
as that's becoming more and moreof a problem in a large part of the country that aresuffering from droughts and dry weather andbuilding more and more suburban urban sprawl,so to speak, into the wild land, so it's really not thetrees burning necessarily that are the bigger problem, it's when the treescatch the houses on fire that it becomes avery major problem. and as you watch the newsthis summer you'll see events
of that, so we'retrying to understand how to mitigate that hazard. and currently a large portionof our team is working very hard to bring online a uniquestate-of-the-art national fire research laboratory. it's an investment thatwas made a few years ago of over $27 million and itwill really provide some unique capabilities in termsof testing structures and structural capabilitiesagainst fire.
the group that i lead is thefirefighting technology group, and our main objective is to help firefighters dotheir job better and by doing that also help them doit in a safer manner. again, we want toreduce losses from fire, both in terms oflife and property. in addition, we want toprovide data and test methods so we can improve firefighters'protective equipment. and, last but not least, thefirefighters are the ones going
out there every day to deal withour fire problem and we need to get this information tothem, we need to make it part of their training, we need tomake it part of their education so that they have thebest tools, techniques and knowledge to deal with fire. and this doesn't do thisalone, we work with a number of other federal agencies, asyou see the list here - atf, consumer product safetycommission, niosh, they have the federal mandate
for investigatingfirefighter fatalities. we have a group atnist that works with the law enforcement sideof the house, national institute of justice and others, andwe collaborate with them on a number of issues. the nuclear regulatorycommission is playing a major role in validating and verifyingour fire models right now, so that's an importantpartner that we have. the department ofhomeland security
and the us fire administration,of course, that oversees a numberof programs with regard to improving the firesafety in the united states. we also work with a large numberof professional organizations, as you can see there, includedin the list the association of fire chiefs, internationalassociation of firefighters, international society offire service instructors, and many others. the partners i'm really thankfulfor are these fire departments
that we have listed here,as well as the universities and the private laboratories. these are the folks thatget together with us and actually gettheir hands dirty. actually we're onfires together, we're on experimentstogether, and so in the case of the fire departmentsbasically they're willing to own the fire because thelawyers at nist don't like us to go around the countrylighting buildings on fire
so we need to have apartner fire department that has the capabilityto control the fire and put the fire out andbasically take a chance on us because they're investingresources which are usually in high demand in their townto continue this work to try to improve firefightereffectiveness and firefighter safety. so what is the fire problemin the united states? according to nfpa, the nationalfire protection association,
in 2003 we had over amillion fires reported, there were approximately3,000 civilian deaths and almost 16,000civilian injuries, and $11.5 billionin property damage. how has this changed over time? well, this has been an excitingtime to be a researcher, if you will, in fireor to be a firefighter or to be a codes officialor a fire prevention officer because you can see that some
of your work has had quite animpact in reducing the number of structure firesin the united states. they decreased by57% since 1977. coincidentally istarted at nist in 1979 so this has been apretty good track record. it's leveled off here towardthe end so we still have to keep at it and push on it. the other thing to note isthat civilian fire deaths in the united states have alsodecreased by 56% since 1977 and,
again, a very important note. what you see on the yellowline on the bottom, however, are where people die in fire,and they typically don't die in fires at work, theydon't typically die in fires when they're shopping, theydon't typically die in fires when they're on vacationat a hotel or something, they typically die in a place where they should feel thesafest, in their own home, and that's where the majorityof fire deaths have occurred
over time and continue to occur. in fact, you can see it'sbecoming a larger percentage as time goes on ofall fire deaths, so that's really a bigfocus for us in terms of improving firesafety in the home. now we've seen all thesecurves that are just on this nice reduction, sothings are going along fine, but there's one curve that'snot reducing at the same rate and that's firefighterdeaths on the fire ground.
and, as you can see, that curveis kind of bucking the trend and it's a very disturbingtrend. according to dr. fahey[assumed spelling] again at fpa in the late 2000s firefightersdue to traumatic injuries on the fire groundare dying at a rate of three deaths per 100,000fires, where in the late '70s when they had lessprotective equipment, potentially less training,the death rate was lower. so what's going on?
well, what do firefighters wear? in the mid '80s by that point in time pretty much all firedepartments had adopted the use of the self-containedbreathing apparatus or the scba, so those are the tanks that yousee on the firefighters' backs. you see they haveprotected helmets, they have protected facepieces, they have turnout gear, which are very heavy andspecially designed pants, bunker pants and a coat,they wear very heavy gloves
to protect them from the heat,protect them from abrasions and things like that, sowe're trying to protect them from a range of hazardsin that structure. unfortunately, and they alsowear very big and heavy boots. unfortunately, you can imaginethat when you start to put on 30 pounds of gear andyou start to carry tools, which may add another 10or 20 pounds to the load that you're carrying, itcan affect your balance, it can affect your stability, itcan affect how you crawl around
and your ability to move around. also, with the scabmay have some impact on limiting yourvision, as well. well, why is this important? well, if we look at thetwo photos on the bottom and if you live inthe washington, d.c. area you'll recognizethat there were a lot of homes like this that werebuilt in the 1950s and 1960s just insidethe beltway
and just outside the beltway. you also see somerow homes up there, very common inside washington,d.c., very common in baltimore. and then we have sort ofthe little mansion up there in the left-hand corner. so these smaller homes wereabout 1,200 square feet or so. the larger home inthe picture there is in excess of 4,000 square feet. that makes a differencein the size fire
that the firefighters may haveto deal with when they arrive. other things that youcan notice, just looking at the outside of the homeis the pitch of the roof. firefighters typically want toget on the roof and make a vent to let hot smoke and gases out. well, when you have arelatively small flat roof, like the single story, that'snot too hazardous an operation. when you have a high pitchedroof that's now 30 feet above the groundthat becomes more
of an interesting opportunityfor the firefighters. the windows are different, theamount of windows are different, so when they vent they letin more oxygen that can mix with the fire gases that arealready inside the house. something you can't seefrom these pictures, but we know from experiencethe older homes had more compartmentation tohelp limit fire spread. the large rooms in the olderhomes might have been 12 by 20 feet, the bedrooms weretypically a big bedroom was 12
by 12, and the more modernhomes use engineered lumber to increase the span. we can now have two-story highopenings inside that home, it could be 40 feet long,30 feet long, 30 feet wide, very large openings withno compartmentation, nothing to stop thespread of smoke. and as we look at the backof the homes, as well, we see additional windows. we also see there'scombustible decks
on the rear of theselarge homes. we're starting to see a trendacross the united states where many fires are startingoutside on the combustible deck in the wintertime dueto mishandling of ashes from a fireplace, in thesummertime from grilling or using a fire pit ofsome sort on a wood deck. the fire gets into the siding ofthe house, it runs up the side of the house, gets in the attic. by the time the firefightersget there
if they don't perform a fullsize-up they don't appreciate where the fire is and canget caught by surprise and, unfortunately, a fire likethis killed a firefighter in prince william countynot long ago, kyle wilson, and in lowden county there wereseveral firefighters that had to literally jump out ofwindows to save their lives. what do we wrap ourhouses in today? plastic, we have plastic,we have a lot of insulation in our homes, and this is agood thing because we want
to save energy, we wantthem to be energy efficient. the challenge isif a fire starts in our home now all thesmoke and heat is going to get stored inside thehome and basically waiting for the firefighters toarrive and make entry. our thermal paned windowsare more resistant to failure in terms of heat because glassis such a great insulator and so the interior pane willabsorb most of the energy and slow down the potentialfor failure of that glass.
so if the oxygen runs out insidethe structure before the glass breaks, again, it's going to change what the firefightersfind on the fire ground. when we see these homes burn andwe see all that heavy black soot in the images that meansthat it's a fuel rich fire, that means that thefire has not mixed with enough oxygen fast enoughin order to have a clean burn. in fire department vernacularthe condo project that is there in the upper right-handcorner would be considered
fully vented. the windows are allout, the roof is off, and yet it's stilla fuel rich fire. in the '90s we worked with thephoenix fire department to look at structural collapse issues, so here is a traditionalconstruction, older construction, heavytimber, hardware store that they're gettingready to tear down, so they let us burn in it.
you notice that we had flamesand then we didn't have flames, we just have smoke, untilwe sent a firefighter to the front door to open up and let more airinside the structure. once the firefighter opens up the structure we geta reemergence of flames at the roof line andwithin 10 minutes of them opening thefront door we're going to have a fairly significantstructural collapse,
that if any firefighterswere in there at that time clearlythey'd be injured or killed. so these things happenpretty fast in the big scheme of things. by the time that somebodynotices the fire, somebody calls in the fire, the fire departmentresponds, the clock is ticking and the fire keeps, thephysics of the fire keep going. it's not watching theclock because the fact of the matter is wood, whichis a very sustainable fuel,
burns and the worst place tohave wood is up high in a space because when a fire burns thehot gases go up to that space and start to pyralize the wood. there have been great gainsin property protection and protection foroccupants in some of these large wood structuresthat are being built all over the country in theform of condominiums or mixed use structureswith businesses on the first couple levelsand then wood frame structure
above them for residential. the challenge is they don'tsprinkler the entire building so all that atticarea that you see in the upper right-hand cornerthere would have no sprinklers in it, it would bea mechanical space. and we just had an exampleof what happens with that about a month ago in newjersey when they burned down a large condominiumcomplex. once the fire got up in theattic there's no way the
firefighters can stop it. and firefighters are gettingadditional challenges every day, more people are puttingsolar panels on the roof, they're getting fuel cells intheir home, we have all sorts of different power sourcesfor vehicles nowadays, hybrid vehicles,batteries, compressed gas. i understand the hydrogencar is coming so we'll see, and that can be veryexciting, as well, from a fire perspective.
so, in summary, to look at someof the data from our brothers in the census bureau, houses in the united states have gottenquite a bit larger on average from the '70s to the 2000s, thehousing lots are getting smaller so these bigger houses aregetting closer together, again, bad news for fire development. during the past 50years the fuel loads in our homes have changeddramatically, they've gone from being where our furniturewas principally made of cotton
and steel springs and youneeded the steel springs in the cushions because thecotton would kind of bat down, cotton will smolder,it's fairly easy to ignite, but it burns slowly. polyurethane foam, whichhas replaced cotton as the principal foamplastic in our furniture, is extremely resilient, itmakes a great seating material, it's hypoallergenic in a sense. so i mean it's a good materialuntil it catches fire and then
when it catches fire it has amuch higher heat of combustion than the natural materials. it burns with a high amount ofsoot so it's a very dirty fire, and it results infuel rich conditions within the home very,very quickly. this kind of burning, in simpleterms we say it burns hotter and faster, so whatthat means is for occupants you havemuch less safe time to get out after you hear yoursmoke alarm and, of course,
if you don't have a smokealarm you're doomed. as we mentioned, the homedesigns, as well, have changed. so fire dynamics, what is it? it's a relatively new science. the first textbook on firedynamics wasn't written until 1985. people have been studying firefor a long time, but typically in very separate disciplines,looking only at the chemistry of the fire or the heattransfer, the heat release rate
of the fire, andthen they started to bring it all together,the material science, the fluid mechanics, to seereally what it takes for a fire to interact, to ignite,to spread and develop. so what is a fire? in basic terms it's a gas phaseexothermic chemical reaction. in other words, itemits heat and light. so the fire tetrahedron iscomposed of we need a fuel, we need some sortof oxidizing agent.
we have 21% oxygen inthe air we breathe, so that's our oxidizingagent typically. we need some heat or ignitionsource and then for it to have these flames, we havethis uninhibited chemical reaction, but the keything is the fuel needs to be in gaseous form. solids don't burn andliquids don't burn. the oxygen is in gaseousform and the fuel needs to be in a gaseous form tomix with it and the heat
in order to have a flame. so let's take a look atthat, let's take a look at our fire tetrahedron. the heat source will heat up thefuel, the fuel will pyralize, basically give off a fuel gas, it will mix withthe gaseous oxygen, and then a flame will developwhen all the conditions and the concentrationsare right. and then we have thischemical chain reaction
that sustains the flameand keeps it going, and there we can seehow that sort of evolves in a very artistic sense. smoke is a fuel, so a verysimple demonstration you could do to prove that is takea candle in a safe area and blow it out and thenbring up a lighted match to the fire gases thatare coming off the candle and watch what happens. [ pause ]
the fuel gases ignite andthe flame travels back down to the source of thefuel, which is the wick, so smoke is the fuel, that's thefuel that the firefighters need to manage more than anything. fuels are very different today. if you take a pieceof wood and ignite it with a candle you'll seethat it burns fairly clean and that the flame spread onthe wood will be slow relative to say a piece ofexpanded polystyrene
where you can see it's a verysooty flame, a very dirty flame, and the flame spreadwill be very quick. the pictures aren't thatdissimilar from looking at this acetylene torch. in the fuel rich case theacetylene torch is not being mixed with, premixedwith oxygen, it's just a diffusionflame that's picking up the oxygen in the air. and, as we can see,we have a weak flame
and a very sooty flame,there's a lot of unburnt fuel in those soot particles. when we add additional oxygenwe see we get a lot more energy out of the flame andit burns very clean. so one finding thatwas developed at nist in the early '80s was this ideaof how much oxygen it takes to generate a certain amount ofheat that it became a constant, it didn't matter if we wereburning acetylene or gasoline or cardboard on averagefor every kilogram
of oxygen that's consumed yougenerate 13 mega jewels of heat, so basically no oxygen, no heat. fuels are different today, sounder the legacy fuel you'll see that we have a sofa that's,again has some cotton batting and older materials in it, andwe light it on fire and we see that the fire doesn'tgrow very rapidly. with the modern furniturethat's made of polyurethane foam and polyester battingyou can see that the fire growth is muchmore rapid and the amount
of smoke that's beingproduced is much more intense. imagine that spreadingthrough your home. so fuels are definitelydifferent today. pyrolysis, we mentionedthis earlier, it's the chemical decompositionof a compound in one or more substances, basicallyjust due to heat alone, heat breaks down the material. so here's a lookat a common sofa that you might have onevery similar in your home,
the seating cushions,the yellow materials, the polyurethane foam, it'sabout five to six inches thick, the polyester battingis wrapped around it and then the textilematerial that's covering it in this case is alsomade out of polyester. the back cushions you see arealso just pure polyester batting so they're a lighter weight,lower density material than the seat cushions. so watch what happens, we burnedthe sofa in our laboratory
in gaithersburg, maryland, whenwe put an open flame to one of these sofas immediately yousee heavy black smoke coming off, again an indicationthat it's excess fuel. in this case that smoke isgoing into our calorimeter so we can measure the heatrelease rate, but in your house that smoke would be collectingunder the ceiling and starting to spread from oneroom to another. as the foam plastics start toburn and melt they begin to drip and spread fire down to thefloor level, this has the impact
of now exposing that six-inchcushion of polyurethane foam from both the top andthe bottom, to the flame as we see the flames startto pick up under the sofa. that increases theheat release rate and basically increasesthe hazard from this sofa. as the sofa starts to melt awayit allows more air to come in and mix with the fuel and you'llsee that the fuel is melting at such a high rate thatyou'll actually see it flowing across the board thatwe're using there
to protect our loadcell, so flowing fire. if this happened in a highway at a larger scale theywould call it a hazmat. the reality is ifyou have a fire in your home todayit's a hazmat scene. so that sofa by itself, whichonly weighs a little more than 100 pounds, has more thantwice the energy needed to flash over a typical scale residentialroom with an open door, you need about two megawattsto generate that flashover.
this sofa alone has morethan four megawatts. how many people only havea single piece of furniture and no carpeting in their home? so we started to getinto compartment fires and we understand thatfire growth is a function of fuel property, quantity,ventilation, all these things, compartment geometry, locationof the fire in the room and is there any wind. so in a very simplecase, again in our lab,
we're going to put thefriend of the blue sofa, a very similar blue sofa into asmall room with an open doorway and we're going tolight it on fire. if you remember from theprevious video it took about five-and-a-halfto six minutes to get that entire sofainvolved in flame. here you're going tosee what we referred to as a compartmentation affectbecause the smoke is being held over the sofa and the smokehas heat it starts to radiate
down on the sofapreheating the sofa for the flame to spread faster. so we'll get more of thesofa involved faster, we'll eventually get enoughexcess fuel trapped in the room that the gases, themselves,will ignite remote from the sofa and start to spread throughthe room and transition into a phenomenawe call flashover. notice that this is taking place in a little morethan three minutes.
so what is flashover? flashover is the transitionphase where we change from having a hot gas layerin the top of the room and a cool fresh air layerin the bottom of the room, to once that hot gas layerauto ignites the radiation from it auto ignites almosteverything else in the space. we have a well-mixed reactor,basically, burning from floor to ceiling in excess of 600centigrade or 1,100 degrees f. so let's look atanother flashover, again,
i'm using my friend,the blue sofas, and this time we havea dry christmas tree. so that's a natural fuel,right, there's no synthetics in the dry christmas tree, andwhat you'll see is that even that fuel will generatea fuel rich condition, heavy black smoke will startto come out of the tree. it's not mixing wellenough to get it burned, and you'll see the fire triangleright in front of your eyes as the flames burn at theinterface of the hot fuel gases
and where it's mixingwith oxygen as those hot gases aremoving across the room. now we're going to see a veryclear example of pyrolysis. the radiant energy from theflames are now heating the sofa and the chair to such a pointthat the polyester is turning into a white fuelvapor and that's going up into the hot gas layer,again which will mix and burn at a later time once theconcentration is right and once we have enough oxygen.
again, look at the speed withwhich this is developing. we had a tragic case inannapolis, again last month, where two grandparents andtheir grandchildren were killed. they had a huge tree in a verylarge home, a 15-foot tree. nist burned some 15-foot trees for the wild landurban interface study, a dry tree like that cangenerate 30 megawatts of energy or the equivalent of about sixsofas going from zero to maximum in a matter of seconds.
here's the most common causeof fires in the united states, unattended cooking, that'sthe number one leader in the number of fires. and they don't lookso bad initially. someone walks away for alittle while maybe to go check on the kids, watch television,some people actually run out, have run out to the storeto get an ingredient and left food on the stove. as you see in this 13-inchcast-iron skillet i've got a
little bit of cookingoil, it auto ignites due to the high temperatureand then the flame grows as energy re-radiatesback into the pan, it extends our combustion zone. we start to see the flamesimpinging on the cabinets, which are made out of anengineered wood product, and they start to pyralize. and what looks like we'rein almost an empty room, a 12 by 12 room withno other furniture
than what you see there, you say that can't go toflashover, can it? well, let's take a look. the flames continue tospread, the off gassing from the cabinets are nowadding to the combustion, which is allowing the flamesto impinge on the ceiling. we're re-radiating so muchenergy back into the pan that the oil that's leftin the pan is starting to do what we refer to as boilover, it's bubbling and foaming
and now spilling onto thesurface of the kitchen range. our high pressureplastic laminate on our countertopsis now bubbling and popping and pyralizing. and now you see thatwe're starting to get some ghosting flamesor intermittent flames in the hot gas layeras it starts to move toward theopen vent via the door. so now we'll takea look at the door
and watch the vinyl flooringpyralize, auto ignite and quickly we transitionto flashover. so how do the firefightersinteract with this? well, again, we discussed that they have some verygood protective equipment, but their face pieceis made of a plastic, it's an industrial plastic,it's a high temperature plastic, but it's still plasticand it melts at a relatively low temperature,
relative to the heatgenerated by the fire. flame temperatures can beanywhere from 1,400 degrees to 2,000 degrees, and once thatface piece reaches 280 degrees or 300 degrees itstarts to soften and then it will beliquid pretty much by the time it's400 degrees or so. other equipment thatfirefighters carry into the space for theirown safety, such as radios, there's currently no standardfor firefighter radios in terms
of how much heatthey're required to take. so many of the devicesthat they carry in with them currentlycould melt at 140 degrees or certainly less than200 degrees and fail them, where their gear is designedto take more energy than that. so we're testing all thesethings, trying to work with the appropriate standardsdevelopment organizations and improve the productsand improve the materials that the fire service has,but in the meantime we want
to make sure thatthe fire service at least knows what thelimitations of this gear is. unfortunately, we're reactivein this sense in many ways. niosh has a program where theystudy firefighter fatalities, and they start to- the whole purpose of them studyingthese fatalities is to develop root causes and theystart looking at a trend here where there were anumber of fatalities where firefighters'face pieces had melted,
that that was the first item tofail, that they still had air in their bottle but yet theydied inside the fire room or inside the fire structure. so nist took thatinformation and started to run some experiments totry to get an understanding of how this phenomena works, what is the face piecevery susceptible to. so here we're going to light afire with a very small burner, it's about 16 inches on aside, it's only about that big.
we're going to fuelit with natural gas. it's going to generate a flamethat as it moves up and down, as it pulses, it's aboutthree to five feet tall, and it's about six feetin front of the manikins. now the manikins arevery specialized, they actually breathe, they havea controlled breathing device in them, so they're breathingabout 40 liters a minute of air. and right now we have a camerainside the breathing manikin's head, looking outthrough the face piece.
and so what you'll notice asyou look through the face piece at the flame is that you'llstart to see some crazing and damage occur to the facepiece very early on and we start to see the spideringcoming out now. and then if you watchclosely this is sped up 10 times right nowin the interest of time. we'll slow it downto real-time shortly. you'll notice that the facepiece is pulsing in and out with every breath the manikintakes, that's how soft it is.
what's a little difficult to seeright now is that there's a hole in that face piece andwhen we shut the flame down it'll be very clear tosee the hole in the face piece. so firefighters thathave experienced this in say a trainingenvironment have told me that they were warm,they didn't feel too bad, they certainly didn't feela lot of heat on their face, and then all of a sudden itfelt like just a blistering, a burning on theirforehead or on their cheek,
wherever that hole hadopened up in the face piece. and there you see howsoft the face piece is, the hole is pulsing and moving with every breaththe manikin takes. so radiation is really oneof the bigger challenges for the plastic face piece, and the reason is plasticis an excellent insulator and it absorbs thermalradiation so that you could be in 200-degree air, butif you have line of sight
with a hot fire your facepiece could get to 400 degrees or higher very quickly becauseit's absorbing that radiation. look at the comparison ofsome of the current standards for turnout gear, forpersonal alarm safety systems, the pass device for thermalimagers, things like that, we can see that they're alltested to at least 500 degrees, everything except the scba, the self-containedbreathing apparatus, and of course the reason is theplastic face piece cannot take
500 degrees. so the new standard that cameout in 2013 based on work done at nist now exposes itto a radiative heat flux of 15 kilowatts per metersquared for about five minutes, and the idea there isthat it still may soften and develop a hole, butthe breathing manikin has to maintain a positive pressureseal for 24 minutes afterwards to provide time for someoneto rescue the firefighter. so, again, it needsto be combined
with firefighter trainingso that they know not to touch the face piecebecause it's so soft, they need to leave it in place. and just to give you somereference as we're talking about all these temperaturesand heat fluxes and what-not, the human skin at about 130degrees has the potential to receive a seconddegree burn injury, in other words start to blister. pain to exposed skin occurs
at about five kilowatts permeter squared, that would happen within seconds, andthe threshold for rollovers we're startingto do that transition of flashovers, about 20kilowatts per meter squared. when we actuallyhave flames impinging on things it's anywherefrom say 160 to 200 kilowattsper meter squared. so firefighters area traditional bunch, they're good folks,and every community
in america is fortunateto have a fire department that they can rely onwhen they're in trouble, almost any kind of trouble. and fire departments nowadaysare pretty much all hazard, whether it's autoaccident, hazmat, responding to a terroristincident, it's not just all about fire anymore, but theystill need to be prepared for the fire when it occurs. and in the '90s there wasa big change in tactics
and that change wasdriven by technology, that change was drivenby the adoption of the self-containedbreathing apparatus. the development andacceptance of these bunker gear that firefighters wear. and they came upwith some practices that whenever possiblethey're going to attack from the unburned side to theburned side, and that kind of got reinterpretedto we're going to go
in the front door every time. ventilation, it's defined asbeing a systematic removal and replacement of heatedair and smoke and toxic gases from a structure withcooler air, however, that kind of gotshortened and redefined to venting equals cooling. i'll show you that'snot the case. when you vent a fuelrich environment, a hot fuel rich environment,
and give it more oxygen thefire is going to get bigger. the most aggressive and efficient fire attackis from the interior. again, that turned intoaggressive interior attack, and there's all this discussionabout don't flow water from the outside, you'll pushfire, you'll hurt people. basement fire attacksalways need to be done from the interior because,again, we're not going to flow water from the outside.
and, of course, in some circleswhen they just don't want to talk about it they say, well, this is how we'vealways done it. so one of the firstfirefighter fatality incidents that i became involved withoccurred in vandalia avenue in new york city, three fdnyfirefighters died december 1998. and to look at thebuilding, the fire occurred on the tenth floor,it's difficult to determine whetherthe fire apartment was
on the downwind sideor the upwind side or whether there weretwo fire apartments based on the soot stainson the building. as it turned out the firewas on the upwind side and, unfortunately, the door to the fire apartment wasleft open by an occupant. in the open apartment, onthe lower left-hand corner, a gentleman there wasgetting smoke in his apartment and so he openedhis windows to try
to let some of the smoke out. unfortunately, because hewas on the low pressure side, the downwind side, theintensity of the smoke coming in his apartment increased. then he opened the door to hisapartment and could not get out due to the high amountof smoke, so he went back in his bedroom, closed the doorand safely rode out the fire. lieutenant caveleri[assumed spelling], firefighter bohan[assumed spelling]
and firefighter bop[assumed spelling] went through the smoke doorfrom the elevator lobby, they were approachingthe fire apartment and basically got caughtbetween the fire apartment and the open apartment. they were in what wecall the flow path. once the windows in thefire apartment failed and a wind-driven fire occurred,a very high intensity fire in that apartment, basicallythe heat dropped them
where they stood and they died. this is an imageof the corridor, going from the fire apartment,looking to the attack stair where the rescuers were coming, trying to respondto their may day. this is what was left ofthe fire apartment, itself. you can see it was hot enoughto spall the concrete beams that composed the ceiling. and so the fire dynamicsimulator,
which wasn't even called thatat this time, it was very rough and in draft stage, the firedynamic simulator wasn't officially released till2001, was used to get a sense of what might haveoccurred in this fire. so you can see thelittle flicks of orange as the fire is developingin the fire apartment, and then we have smokethat's going to start, as the fire increases inintensity the smoke is going to pour out through theopen door into the corridor.
we see it flowing into the openapartment, and then we're going to see with the impactof the window failing and we'll see a surge of smoke and flame pushingdown the corridor. as the firefightersradioed their may day, the other firefighters in theattack stair opened that door, and then you'll see thatonce they opened that door and it vented through thatyellow vent on the top, the bulkhead vent of thestair, that flame also came in
and burned them and sloweddown their ability to get to the original victims. it took about 10 years toget the funding together, to get the partnershipstogether, and to really takea look at this by burning actualexperiments instead of just looking atthe fire model. and so we, in our laboratoryat nist we built an apartment, where we had a bedroom,a hallway, the bedroom is
in the orange there,the hallway connects to the living room towardthe bottom of the image, they're both 12 feet by 16 feet,the hallway is 12 feet wide. they open out into acorridor that goes 24 feet in each direction, inone direction it's closed and in the other direction ithas an open vent simulating a door to an open stairwell. there's a hollow coredoor that's installed in the target room that'sin between the bedroom
and the living room, so wecall that our target room. somebody could besafe there for awhile and we'll take a look at that. the flow path is basicallycomposed of the volume or the rooms in the hallway, and then what directionthe flow goes and where it goes is controlledby the inlets and pressure. so in this case the highpressure area is going to be in the bedroom and flowalways goes from high pressure
to low pressure, and the lowerpressure is going to be the path through the livingroom and out the vent. it's pretty clear just by thecolors i drew in the flow path that the higher hazard area forfirefighters to be operating in is toward the outletside, on the exhaust side, between where the fire is andwhere the fire wants to go. so we prepared these rooms justas you'd find in anybody's home with real fuel, realsynthetic fuels. we measured the heat releaserates of them so we have an idea
of what the hazard is,so you get some idea of the peak heat release rate that a small upholsteredchair is almost two megawatts and the sofa is abouttwo-and-a-half megawatts, it's sort of a loveseatsize sofa, and the bed, the king-sized bedthere is four megawatts. we start the fires witha little waste container and that's about 30 kilowatts. and the first test wedid is a baseline test
and it has absolutely nowind supplied to it, at all, so all the movement that you'regoing to see is a function of the fire acting as a pumpentraining fresh air in, heating the gases up,causing them to expand, increasing the pressure inthe fire room and then pushing out to lower pressureareas through vents. so the fire startednext to the bed. on the upper left-handside you'll see the view of the window that'sstill intact.
once we break that window oronce that window fails due to the fire you'll see adramatic change throughout the space. currently smoke is nowspreading through the hallway, it's into the livingroom that we see on the left-handside lower frame, and we see in thethermal imager view on the upper right-hand side, the amount of heat that's nowpouring out into the corridor
and moving toward the vent. if firefighters werein there currently and they were crawlingthey would be safe, their gear could protectthem from that thermal load, but once the window getsvented everything changes and it changes within seconds. so now we have a situationthat if firefighters were in the corridor they would beexposed to untenable conditions, they within 30 seconds or lessthey would have to either change
that environment or finda different place to be if they hope to survive. notice that at this point in time the targetroom is still clear, while all the other roomsare full of black smoke. the door to the targetroom starts to fail in about six minutes. so what's the impact onthe heat release rate, the amount of energy thatthe fire is producing?
well, once we vent the windowit goes from two megawatts to more than 12 megawatts. the bedroom temperaturesyou see range from about 1,200 degreesfahrenheit near the ceiling to about 500 degrees fahrenheitnear the floor, that all happens in less than fourminutes, clearly untenable for an unprotected civilian. once the window is vented noticehow we transition a flashover where we have wellmixed burning,
floor to ceiling thetemperatures all increase and they're all over1,100 degrees fahrenheit. what about in the living room? so let's say a firefighterwas working pretty fast, they wanted to see if theycould affect a rescue, they're working their way back to the fire roomin that apartment. they're in the living room,and then that window fails. it goes from a condition
that where they would becrawling would be 300 degrees or less to a condition whereat a minimum it would be at least 750 degrees. as you might note from thechart i showed you earlier none of their equipment canbe tested to 700 degrees, it can't survive 700 degrees,your skin starts to blister and boil at 130 degrees. so, again, an untenablesituation. the velocity in the hallway,how fast heat is transferred
to people is also not only afunction of the temperature and the energy, but also afunction of the velocity, how that hot gasis mixed and moving around your body oraround the target. so initially without the windowvented we just have a ceiling jet or the gases nearthe ceiling are moving at about six miles an hour,the red line with the squares. as we get to the green line andthe blue line, the green line is at four feet above the floorand the blue line is one foot
above the floor, notice thatonce the window is vented that high pressure pushing to the low pressure is nowpushing a velocity even at the floor level of aboutsix to nine miles an hour. anyone that's bought anelectric oven lately, if you go in to buy anelectric oven they're going to sell you what type of oven? a convection oven,the only difference between the old school ovenwith the heating element
and the convection oven isthe convection oven has a fan to increase the velocity of the hot gas movingaround the turkey. what's the purpose of that? to cook the turkey faster. unfortunately, high velocityhot gases take away the firefighters' safetime much faster. what about totalunburned hydrocarbons? this is such a fuel richenvironment in the living room,
we've got more than 12% of gasessuch as acetylene and methane that have been broken downfrom the materials pyralizing and getting ready to burn that if we give it more airthat's the fuel that's ready to burn. here's a case where weactually impose a wind on it, so again you're lookingat the inlet, which is where the glass is,and you're looking at the exit into the public corridor,which is where the open door
from the apartment is. once the glass failsit's exposed to a 20-mile-an-hour windpushing through that apartment. this is playing inreal-time and, again, watch how rapidly conditionsfor firefighters would change. again, going from tenablefor firefighters crawling in that corridor tountenable within seconds. how do you control it? well, you don't want togive it an inlet or outlet,
we have to controlthe flow path. one way of doing it iskeeping the door closed. so in this case even thoughthe window is vented the door to the corridor is closed, andyou can sort of see a steel rod in the image that wewelded to the door in order so that we could openit safely without having to put firefighters inside thatpotentially lethal environment. so, again, things forfirefighters to look for, what's the wind outside,can you see
with the thermal imager smokepushing with a high amount of energy around the door, can you feel energycoming around the door? in which case don't lineup in front of that door and open it back outbecause if you line your crew up to make the pushthat's what they're going to be assaulted with. last one of the lab experiments,and this one is a good one because it actuallyhappened to us, the phenomena
that we're look at here happenedto us in experiment three, it wasn't exactly part ofthe plan, it was just sort of something that occurred. and what had happened was thatwe generated so much excess fuel that it resided in our40-foot by 30-foot hood with a six-foot ventilationduct pulling 90,000 scfm, enough smoke sat therethat it auto ignited. and now that exposed the topof our test prop in the lab to a lot of radiation,and we said, well,
that was pretty interesting,let's see if we can do that again and be ready forit so we can get a good video of it, get some goodpictures, and also we want to see what the impactof putting a hose line through the window would be on this flaming that's goingall the way from one end of the apartment, through theapartment, and up into our hood. so now as we watch the stackvideo view, which is sort of in the middle there on thebottom, we're going to start
to see flames coming out ofthat and they're going to pulse up and down for awhile. now we've auto ignited thegases that are in our hood, our 30 by 40-foot hood,and now we're going to flow about 80 gallons per minute ofwater, a low amount of water in firefighting terms,into the bedroom. and you notice whathappened, the fire went away in the stack immediately, andyou might look and say, well, wait a minute, we stillhave flames in the bedroom,
but as we're goingto get our view back in the bedroom camera there, thesecond one from the left on top, we're going to see thatwe just have a bunch of debris fires basicallygoing in there, what's left of the bed,what's left of some chairs and dressers andthings like that. these are fires that firefighters gear is easilydesigned to withstand the energy and the heat from those andgo in and fight that fire.
the key thing is the water from the outside tookaway the fire gases. firefighters' gearis not designed and firefighters can't outrunwhen the fire gases auto ignite and spread throughthe entire property. so within a month we foundourselves out in the field in high-rises in chicagoand new york city looking at wind driven fires, andthe fire departments had come up with a number of strategiesthat they thought would work
to handle these kind of fires,but they didn't have any way of testing it, theydidn't have any way of measuring howgood it would be. so nist went and instrumentedthese high-rise buildings with miles and miles of thermalcouple wire and cable and videos to show this is what's referredto as a wind control device, by blocking the windyou smother the fire, you cut off the pressurefrom the air, and you see that the fire
in the living room was reducedsignificantly, the temperatures in the hallway dropped bymore than 50% within a minute without flowing anywater yet at all. another idea is the floor belownozzle or the high-rise nozzle, it's fairly lightweight,easy to maneuver. what you see in theinset there is that we have flames rolling thefloor of the public hallway, clearly firefighters couldnot safely make entry into that public hallway.
so what we're going to do isapply water to the bedroom of this apartment sofire is going all the way through the bedroom, down thehall, through the living room and out into the publichallway, and look at the impact that again flowing water from the floor belowhas on that fire. they make an adjustment toget some water in the window, there we go, andwithin seconds the fire in the public hallway is out.
conditions are cooled down,the threat of a flashover or another flashover is gone,firefighters can now make entry as they normally would on thefire floor, do their search, finish putting out thefire, and affect any rescues for any viable victims. we see things that wetry to help the officers, say here's when you need toknow how to and when to size up. so we had natural wind this day, the wind is blowing theflames back into the room.
at some point in time thepressure inside the room gets so large that it basicallyshoots out a fireball, so if you're a firefighterand you roll up on a scene and shooting out fireballs startthinking about what plan b is. you shouldn't be marchingdown that corridor. it was commonly thoughtthat if the windows vented and flames were coming out thewindow then it's safer to be in the hallway - that'snot the case, the homes are so fuel rich, we have so muchenergy stored in our houses
that when it burns, likein this apartment here, there's a tremendousamount of flaming and burning energygoing down the hallway. and this doesn't just happenin high-rises, this happens in single family homes, as well. in this case twofirefighters in houston died. we were asked tocome down and look at the fire behaviorand model it. the victims wentin the front door,
which was the downwindside, the low pressure side. they made it to theback of the house, that's where theirnozzle was found, and then their bodies werefound in the front of the house as you can see in the livingroom and the dining room. the fire started in the attic, it was well involved beforethe fire department arrived. they had at least20-mile-an-hour winds coming from the rear of the structure,and you can see that's
where most of theburn damage is. where the people are standing,down there in the image, that's where the front door is where the firefightersmade entry. the occupants had alsoopened the garage door because they wererescuing their cars. we made, again, a firedynamic simulator model, what we put into the modelwas not only the geometry and the thermal and chemicalproperties of the fuels
that are there, butalso the timeline of what the firefighter'sactions were. so you can see where wehave little blue marks where ladder 26 made roof vents. we have another blue vent markthere just behind the front door where engine 36 was pulling theceiling and things like that. the big feature thathappened here were the windows on the back side ofthe house failed. when there was no wind,you can see that the blue,
the cooler color, when welook at a cross section of the house was lifted, so the firefighters haverefuge closer to the floor. once the wind penetratedthe house it mixed the fire, the fire got hotter and droppedthe heat all to the floor. just looking at it from the top, down at the front floor view 10seconds before the glass failed it was relatively safe forfirefighters to crawl in there and make an attack, 10seconds, within 10 seconds
after the glass failed it wasuntenable thermal conditions blowing out the front door. so as a fire officer ifyou're ignoring the wind and you send a crew in on thedownwind side effectively you're taking a chance, you're flippingthe coin as to whether they live or die based on whether a pieceof glass less than a quarter of an inch breaks or not. and, again, here's anotherimage showing the flow path where the intense heat isand how the firefighters got
to a cooler place, but not coolenough for them to survive. so this brings usto a difference in what they had been taught. firefighters fordecades had been taught about the fuel controlledfire, ignition, growth, fully developed and then decay,so if we had a pile of pallets in a parking lot and we lit themon fire or we had a campfire that we would light on fire it'sgoing to behave in this manner. as the logs go away,the fuel goes away,
the fire is going to decay. when we put a fire inside astructure we can create a very different kind of phenomena,the ventilation controlled fire. and in this casewhat we're showing is that the fire can'tget to flashover, can't get fully developed yetbecause it runs out of oxygen and then the heatrelease rate comes down, the temperatures come down, until there's a changeof ventilation.
there's no change in ventilationthe fire might smother itself and put itself out. if more oxygen is introducedto these hot fire gases that are stored in our wellinsulated homes the fire can reach fully developed stagein as little as 30 seconds to 80 seconds, 200 secondsdepending on the size of the box, the sizeof the house. so this has happened tofirefighters many times. so let's look at anexample, again working
with the chicago firedepartment we had the luxury of burning 20 identicaltownhouses. i'm only going to showyou one, but, you know? see, we will havea beer we can go through all 20, it'sa good thing. you can see the living roomon the front of the house, the dining room and kitchen onthe first level in the rear, and we had bedrooms onthe second floor, again, furnished one bedroom view thati'll show you as at the top
of the stairs looking outto the top of the stairs and then the other bedroom viewis in the front of the house. so we're looking at the frontof the house, we start the fire in the sofa, you'll startto see the flames coming up from the sofa, so the twobottom images there are the first floor. the top two imagesare the second floor. the middle image on thetop is the rear bedroom. and so we see the smokecoming up the stair and coming
in through the open doorof the rear bedroom. then in the image on the upperright we see the smoke filling the bedroom that has theopen window on the front. that's the only openingto the outside. so smoke goes, follows thepath of least resistance, high pressure goes to lowpressure, that window serving as a low pressure vent. we start to see flames coming upthe stairwell, we see the glow, then we see flamesentering the front bedroom.
the velocity and the intensityof the black smoke coming out that window is increasing, and then it's justgoing to stop. as the oxygen concentration in the house drops belowwhat the fire needs for flaming combustion theheat release rate comes down, the temperatures come down,and it just condenses the gases to the point where it stopspushing and starts sucking. once the fire department makesthe vent, you can see how
that flow path is establishedwith the air inlet low in the door where wehave a bidirectional vent at the front door and aunidirectional vent coming out the exhaust of the bedroom. fire is going to developa little bit at transition of flashover within 80seconds of opening that door. this kind of scenariois basically a trap for firefighters in the past. they would arrive, theysee nothing but smoke,
they think they'reearly in the fire vent. they might commitresources, people to go search for victims upstairs, and ifthe line is not ready to put that fire out, if they don'tcome in and out of there in less than 60 seconds they'regoing to have to jump out windows, jumpfor their life. here's a scenario in washington,d.c., 1999, it's referred to as the cherry road fire. and two firefighters died inthis fire, one firefighter was
in front of the sofa thatyou sort of see upstairs at that little yellowblock, firefighter matthews. and firefighter phillipswas by the door, which is the verticalrectangle you see on the upper level there. the fire startedin the basement, the basement was ventilated. when all the fire department gotthere all they saw was smoke. once the basement was ventilatedit flashed over the basement,
high momentum, high velocity,hot gases started coming up the stairs and impactedthe two firefighters and they both died. there was a third firefighterthere that received burns over 65% of his body,but he survived to sort of tell us his experience. so these phenomenahappen again and again. funerals were held, but nota lot of change was going on in the fire servicein terms of we need
to do something different. the leadership of the fdny,the fire department of the city of new york, said now we reallyneed to do something different. they met with theirfirefighters, they have 11,000 firefighters,they had focus groups. they said what's itgoing to take for us to get a better understandingof this? and they said we need to makesure that the victims are safe, we need to make sure thatwe're doing the best thing
for victims, not just thebest thing for our safety. and so that's why theseexperiments were set up on governor's island, weconducted these in conjunction with underwriters laboratory. and, again, old abandonedfederal property that they left in very nice shape for us. it used to be a coastguard training base. we had a lot of verysimilar structures. we could look at the upstairsbedrooms and monitor them
for gas concentrations, aswell as temperatures to look at how victims wouldbe affected. again, we're using real fuels. the places were left inwonderful condition for us with the wood cabinets, nicecarpeting and everything, we just had to add thebeautiful furniture. i hope you enjoy the mauves andthe purples there, you know, we got a good price on it. we put a lot of furniture in thebasement for the basement fires,
as well, but a lot of the fuel in an unfinished basement isreally in the floor assembly, itself, the exposedwood at the ceiling. again, if you lookat your furniture at home you'll see very similarwarnings, you know, be careful, don't have this near openflame, et cetera, et cetera. and being as how i'm fromnist and the main point of our business is measurementi had to include a slide there to give you an idea of some ofthe instrumentation that we put
in these structures - bidirectional probesmeasure both the temperature and the pressure so we can getthe velocity of the hot gases, whether they're comingout of the door or the cool gasses going inthe door or how that changes over time with the fire. thermal couples,we've put hundreds of thermal couplesthroughout the house so we could see the thermalgradient, the temperatures
from the ceiling down to thefloor in the various rooms in the house and thehallways and what-not. we have our gas analysisequipment so we can understand thetenability of victims. typically folks inresidential fires die due to smoke before they would getburned to death or something like that so it'simportant to monitor that. and then, again, we runmiles of video cable and data because that's how we'regetting this information
out to teach people, to showthem what's actually going on in the house. so here's a fairly simple case where in the past folkswere hesitant to put water in a basement window, theywould go inside and try to force their waydown the basement. and the reason was that theythought they would push fire, they thought that theywould make conditions worse, they might steam somebodyinside, but you can tell looking
at the thermal imagingview at the top of the stairs there's not a lotof violent movement of heat, there's no significantincrease in temperatures. in fact, the temperaturesare going down and they knock the fire out sofloat water as fast as possible on the fire and mitigatethe hazard and things will get better, so water throughthe basement window. here's how we're trying to sharethe data, instead of in the form
of graphs, a simple graphic thatshows once we introduce water into the window for about60 seconds the temperature in the basement in thefront went from 1,700 f. down to 300 f. near the ceiling. at the top of the stairsnear the ceiling it went from 600 degrees fahrenheitto 200 degrees fahrenheit and the heat flux dropped from 14 kilowatts permeter squared to zero. even in the bedrooms remote,
the open bedroom remote upstairsthe temperature dropped from 225 to 190, so it made conditionsthroughout the structure better. and, of course, if we had moretime i could show you graphics where we put waterin the front door, water in the second storywindow, move the fire all around the house and weget very similar results. this is one of themore recent simulations that we've completedin my group at nist. it's available, there's a nicenarrated version, it's about 10
or 11 minutes long on youtube, just go to the nist youtubechannel and you can find it on the fire play list. so it happened june 2nd,2011, and this incident kind of brings a lot ofthings together, it brings the equipment, thefailures of the equipment, the failures of the radios, thisoccurred to these firefighters. it appears that theirbottles may have heated and they may have ingested hotair from the bottle possibly.
we're still doingsome research on that. it talks about flowpaths and it talks about appropriate fire attack. you can see this house is on anice hillside in san francisco, two stories on the front,several stories on the rear. the fire starts in alower level on the rear. they call these theirupside-down houses, the living room isin the basement, the street levelhas the bedrooms,
and then the upstairs level hasthe kitchen and dining room. the fire starts nearthe sectional sofa in the living room. the victims are on thestreet level, they're there with their hose lineto protect the stair. their hose was there,it was charged, they never seemed to flow it. between the time that someone,an officer talked to them and conditions werefine, they weren't hot,
just a little bit smoky. and left, as soon as thatofficer left the house he noticed the conditionsdramatically changed, and the reason theydramatically changed was because the windowsfailed on the bedroom on the living roomlevel, the lower level, and that level flashed over. the windows were onlyheld in with vinyl frames, no steel supports or wood framesupports, so once they started
to fail the entire wall of windows failedwithin two minutes. so, again, our modelshows things like how much energy canwe get out of this fire. and what you see here from theheat release rate, we should - and we had a potential ofabout 20 megawatts of energy with all the furnitureand the carpeting and everything downstairs. however, notice by thered dotted line that due
to the oxygen limitation we wereonly getting about six megawatts out of that fuel packageuntil the windows failed. once the windows failedyou notice that we shoot up to more than 30 megawatts. wait a minute, we onlystarted off with the potential of 20 megawatts, where didthis other fuel come from? it came from theaccumulated fire gases that were held in the structure. again, that's the hazard thefirefighters need to mitigate.
so here's a view of the model. as you can see, it'sadvanced quite a bit since we first modeledcherry road years ago. we started to see the smokefrom the front of the house. here we'll get some definition,so remember the fire is on the basement floorand the firefighters that died are onthe first floor. as the fire intensifies and thewindows fail they then continue very quickly to fail acrossthe back of the structure.
this doorway here on theside of the structure at the fire level is where theyultimately successfully attack the fire. so, again, part of the tacticsand part of the consideration is if you size up thishouse and you determine that the fire would be beneathyou don't put your firefighters in the chimney, don'tput them above the fire. make your initial attack onthe same level as the fire is. and, again, we talk aboutheat transfer rates,
and it's a function ofnot only just the energy, but also the velocity. so the firefightersare at the bottom of the stairs thereat the street level. it's currently blue, which meansit's got about zero velocity, but after the windowsfail we see we clearly get about 10 miles an hour ofmovement and that's even with the flames venting outthe rear of that structure. and then we also look at theincrease in temperature which,
again, is anotherpart of the hazard. so before the windows failedthey're 200 degrees f. or below, and then after thewindows failed we can see that now they're between 800degrees and 1,200 degrees in the area wherethey were located. again, well above what anyof their gear can take. we don't only work withlarge cities and towns, we had a great opportunityto work with the state fire marshal'soffice down in south carolina
and a number of thedepartments in south carolina. the burns were actuallyconducted with the spartanburgfire department. and what we tried to show withthese burns is different ways, different alternate meansof attacking a fire. so in this case this is somewhat of a traditionalmeans of attack. the firefighter justopened the front door, and in the lower right-handcorner there's a thermal imaging
view, where we're lookingfrom the rear of the house, down the central hall, outthrough the front door. the kitchen is just off to the left-hand sideof that hallway view. in the lower left-hand cornerwe just popped open the kitchen door. we allowed bout 30seconds for it to simulate the firefightersmaking their way to the kitchen, forcing the door, and thenwe have a monitor nozzle,
a water nozzle inthere that's going to flow 150 gallonsper minute of water to simulate an interiorattack on that fire. and we flow water for afew seconds and we start to see it has a prettygood impact, but notice there was asurge of heat that came into the house oncethat door was open, it would have been flowingover the firefighters' heads and causing damage to theinterior of the house.
interestingly enough,most of the construction in single family homes hasno fire rating whatsoever, the floors aren't rated,the walls aren't rated, the ceilings aren't rated. the only exception to that inmost parts of the country is if you have an attached garagethat wall has to be fire rated and that door hasto be fire rated. so in this particular case usingthis tactic the firefighters are going in the structure
and basically disablinga fire protection device to fight the fire. let's look at it from anotherperspective, let's look at it to say what if they hitit from the outside first? so the views you're looking aton the bottom are a video view, looking at the insideof the kitchen door and a thermal imaging viewlooking inside the kitchen door. we're not going to openthe front door this time. the first move thefirefighters make is
to take the charged hose lineand as soon as possible open it up and flow water in thatgarage and knock the fire down. so the officer whois doing the size up, that's what the officeris doing, taking that 360 degreelap of the house, he doesn't see any victimshanging out windows or anything, and he's telling hisfirefighters let's flow water on that fire. use the reach of your stream.
notice as soon as the streamgets into the upper layer, where most of thehot gasses are, the fire goes out immediately. now they can move in closer andcontinue to knock down the fire. notice the conditionof the kitchen, the fire door is holding, thekitchen is in very good shape. to be fair, the fire servicehas reason to be concerned about exterior attack. they say, dan, we'veseen fire being pushed.
i've had fire being pushed on mebecause part of it is you need to use the appropriate toolsand the appropriate tactics. so what we have in thisbuilding are two rooms that are on fire upstairs. if you look at the lower levelviews, video on the left and ir on the right, we're lookingat the small hallway that's about four feet, thatconnects those two rooms. the hallway has combustiblefinish inside, which is why it'sburning, and in the room
that we just attackedwith a straight stream, 150 gallons a minute,we're maximizing the amount of water that's gettingin the room, we're minimizing the amountof extra air being entrained in the room and, mostimportantly, we're leaving that vent open so smoke andheat can come out of it. and, as a result, youdidn't see much change at the top of the hallways. now we're going to dosomething bad, watch the impact.
there's your pushing fire,pushing it down the stairs. we took a fog nozzleand we covered the vent, so now we have a highpressure vent instead of a low pressure vent, highpressure flows to low pressure. we minimized the amount ofwater that got in there, so the little bit of water thatgot in there converted to steam, it was very inefficient,and using a fog nozzle like that is the same as puttinga fan in front of that window. you're entraining atremendous amount of air,
so you're making the firebigger, you're pushing it in one direction, andyou see the result. once even with the fog nozzleif you step up a couple steps and get water in the windowefficiently that stops the push and shuts everything down. i'll show you another push. so in this case we didtwo different houses with the straight streamon one side of the street and then i'll show you the fog
because obviously thefog is more interesting. the straight streamjust puts the fire out. so what we have here are tworooms that are connected inside by a hallway, and the fireroom has the bigger window and unfortunately for us partof the window pane slid down and is blocking the aircoming into the room so that really slowed the fire down because it doesn'thave the oxygen it wants. so we're going to call afirefighter with a pike pole
and he's going to clearthat window for us and then the fire is goingto resume its growth rate because now it hasthe oxygen it needs to increase its heat releaserate and increase its hazard. you're going to noticethat the smoke pushing out of the target room orthe attached room that's not on fire just yet we'regoing to start to see flames in the smoke coming out ofthat little window as soon as it gets lean enough andmixes with enough oxygen
as it rolls over the eaves. so we'll see a little bit offlame there, it's going to back up and give us a littlebetter view here in a second. there you can see some orangein the smoke there coming out of the small window and nowwe're going to do the bad thing and hit it with a fog line,and there's your fireball. so, again, the techniques andthe tactics are very important. so how do we communicateall this information to the fire service?
well, we try to use ourweb page as much as we can, nist.gov/fire, and if you'retaking notes online that's the website you want to takebecause these other websites that i'm going to show you where you can great firefightertraining information are all listed on that web page. again, you'll recognizeour partners, isfsi, where we did thespartanburg burns with them, and they have threedifferent programs online.
all these programs areavailable to the public for free because they're fundedby assistance to firefighters grants thatcome from dhs and fema, and so that's been a greatasset in developing networks to really get this information out to the 30,000fire departments that are in the united states. ulfirefightersafety.com,they've got seven or eight programs online.
the basement fires happen tobe an arr grant that they got from nist and wecollaborated on that together, so that's a verygood opportunity. international association ofarson investigators runs cfi, or certifiedfireinvestigatortrainer.net, again, it has information onfire dynamics and some of the other fire fatalitiesthat nist has studied with their modelsand experiments. the iff is the firefightersunion, international association
of firefighters, they haveseveral good programs on youtube that reflect this information. we've been workingwith nyu poly, fdny and several other firedepartments, including chicago and now la and houston, where they're using web basedtraining options or starting to. every firefighter has gota smartphone and the idea of getting somebody to sitdown for an hour at a time or a half hour at a time
at a computer terminal isgetting harder and harder to do, but if you can push out trainingto them that they can watch for five minutes and comeback to it later or watch in between calls and what-notthat's a good opportunity. la county fire department, the home of hollywood hasreally taken that mantle and run with it, so they've producedsome very high quality videos for training thatthey're willing to share with other fire departmentson their web page.
the other interesting thing that they've been doingis they've been pushing out this informationfor about 10 months, training their entiredepartment online, using a learningmanagement system, as well as gettingsome local resources from the company officersdoing hands-on drills. since they've started that training they've reducedtheir firefighter burn injuries
by half, so it ishaving an impact. epstar is run through theinternational association of fire chiefs, again, it'sa portal that's designed for fire chiefs, all theresearch is sort of boiled down to a one-pager withlinks that they can give to their training officeror other people to spread through the department. modern fire behavioris another website, that's where all thegovernors island studies live
that were done jointly with ul. the other thing thatwe see as a success or that we're making the turnis that the organizations that develop trainingmaterials that they sell to the fire service, that thefire service use for training for firefighter one, firefightertwo, company officer, et cetera, they're starting toadopt this material into their manualsand sell them. so, again, it isreaching the core groups
that it needs to reach. and, last but not least, nist used to be called thenational bureau of standards because a lot of ourfocus is supposed to be on developing standards fortrade, commerce, safety, and we are seeing that thefire dynamics are moving fairly rapidly now into a number ofstandards that are designed to help firefighters train and also firefighters'emergency equipment,
designs for theirfire equipment. so, with that, i don't know ifwe've got any questions online or we have a few minutes or? >> yes, we can take questions. thanks, dan, that wasfascinating and scary, and i want to go home andcheck my smoke detector. >> daniel madrzykowski:absolutely. >> i actually havea question for you, we had dr. hunter fanning[assumed spelling] come and talk
about the netzero house,they're working to that - has your group been workingor consulting with their group to try and make sure that whatthey are doing is not more flammable than previousinflammation tactics? >> daniel madrzykowski: well,there's a couple of things, number one, it absolutelyis more flammable, but number two it's afully sprinklered home. and so they've taken a number of other fire protectionprecautions intact
with building that, as well. so, again, these things reallyneed to go hand-in-hand, and i don't want to let theopportunity go for that question about the importance ofautomatic fire sprinklers. there are two states currently that require automaticresidential fire sprinklers in every home that's builtand that's california and maryland currently. unfortunately, thereare other states
and automatic fire sprinklersare in the model codes for residential homesand, unfortunately, there are other states thatare actually passing laws and mandating that thelocalities cannot implement the model code to givetheir state occupants that level of fire safety. and it's kind of crazyas we see these incidents across the united states, andfire is one of those things and where most peoplethink that's not going
to happen to me. the number of firesare going down. we don't see fires,we're more likely to get into a car accidentcertainly, but the problem is as we had a tour ofthe library earlier and there was someconcern about the fact that there were sprinklers inthe library and what damage that might do to the books. i pointed out to thehead librarian, you know,
you can dry stuff off,but you can't unburn it. and so sprinklers are avery important feature, but at a minimum you wantto have smoke alarms. smoke alarms are inexpensive,don't limit yourself, put one in every sleepingarea, have one on every floor. again, the tragedy thathappened earlier this week in new york perhapsbut for a couple of smoke alarms it might havebeen a different outcome. >> anyone else online or inthe room with anything to ask?
here, okay? >> two questions. the first is hopefully brief and that's what impactdoes a metal roof have on a residence andfire behavior? >> daniel madrzykowski:well, a metal roof, as you might imagine, doesn'tcontribute to the fuel load, so that's a prettypositive thing. it's not made out of taror other material there.
it's not made out ofwood shakes, for example. so that's a good thing. it's going to seal fairly well. any heat that's under itit's going to radiate back into the space, and so interestingly enoughthere was just a research program conducted byul on attic fires. and, again, you want tocoordinate your ventilation, you don't want to open thingsup too much before you're ready
because the attic as longas it maintains its shape and its compartmentation isgoing to limit the amount of air that gets involved and limitthe amount of fire spread. so if you can get waterinto that space and start to cool it off early before youstart to vent to let the smoke and the toxic gases outyou'll be better off. so the metal roofdoesn't have any, typically the firefightersaws can cut through that pretty easilyand that sort of thing.
the advantage it would have from a fire perspective is itdoesn't add any additional fuel. >> okay, and a follow-upquestion, i'm sure many of us are thinking thesame thing, what do you do if there's a fire in your house, what are the steps givenall the new research that people should take? >> daniel madrzykowski: youneed to get you and your family out as soon as possible.
don't, you know, keep yoursmoke alarms in good shape, when you hear the alarmget out of the house, stay out of the house. and, in fact, as you're leavingthe house you can do yourself a favor form a propertyperspective and the firefighters a favorby closing the door and slowing down the fire growth rateuntil they get there. you want to practiceexit strategies so that your family knowswhere to meet in case they have
to come out differentdoors or different windows. and there's a lotof information, free informationonline from usfa on how to practice exit drills and firesafety information like that. >> okay, just to be a littlebit more specific what if the downstairs is on fire andit's not safe to go downstairs, what should you do withthe upstairs bedrooms? >> daniel madrzykowski: youwant to isolate yourself, if your bedroom door wasn'tclosed to start with and you see
that you can't get downstairs toget out, close the bedroom door. if you open the bedroomwindow keep in mind that you may actually draw moresmoke in, so if you're going to open the window and getout you need to do that. get on the phone, letpeople know where you are, and get help thereas soon as possible. the door will protect you for alimited amount of time, minutes, but you may need to lookat getting out that window. >> do you happen toknow how structure fires
or wild land fires affectradio wave propagation, the communications devicesthat firefighters use? >> daniel madrzykowski:ah, not so much. we're working with some folksout of boulder, bill young and some other people, andthey're working with us where we're testing theradios in terms of heat. they're looking at howthat impacts the signal and the signal strength. we know that sound is impactedby heavy amounts of soot
and smoke with regardto like the pass device, the warning alarm thatthe firefighters have. so if they go down and they'remotionless this pass device would start to giveoff a 95-decibel sound so that their rescuerscould help zero in on them and find them. and there's been someresearch at the university of texas-austin and some otherplaces recently that indicate that does have a pretty bigimpact on the sound waves.
we don't know about the radiowaves, but soot has a lot - it's particulate matter and so potentially could providesome level of interference. >> great. one more from thepeople on webex - what are some of the ways the averagefirefighter is using technology to improve operations? >> daniel madrzykowski: a lot of fire departmentsthe new technology if you will might bethermal imaging cameras,
and the important thingwith any technology is not to just make the deal withthe mayor and the councilmen and what-not andget that technology in your firefighters' handsor your fire officers' hands, you really need to train themon how to use that technology. if they don't understandwhat the capabilities, as well as the limitations of that technology are youmay not gain any improvement in performance or anyimprovement in safety.
but thermal imagers are beingwidely used, there is a lot of training going on, andthey're extremely valuable for sizing up a house tolocate where the fire is. you really want to locate where the fire isbefore you make entry, and then you can make somedecisions then instead of going in the smoke andsearching for the fire try to make some decisions of whereyou want to attack the fire. and it may be from the inside,that may be the fastest way
to get water on the fire, in other cases it may be takinga line around to the rear. >> and unless there areany other questions i think that sums it up. dan, thank you so much. >> daniel madrzykowski:thank you, i appreciate the opportunity. >> great. and for those askingonline the video will probably be available in a fewdays, we will post it
to library.doc.gov [assumedspelling], you can click on the view past events linkon our calendar on the left. thanks, everyone. >> daniel madrzykowski:great host, thank you.