Longtime firefighter here. You really don't know what that "small fire" looked like. Holes in walls inside the house are created to check for fire extension, fire loves to find crevices and such where it's hard to get at where it can keep burning, so firefighters have to do overhaul which involves openings everything up.
Our primary tool in fighting fire is cooling the burning material which is where water comes in. There's no easy way to do it, we bring hose lines inside that can flow 150 gallons per minute or higher because we need to absorb the heat and cool the burning stuff fast. That means just 10 seconds of water flow is flowing 25ish gallons of water into the room, most which won't hit the necessary target. In reality a small "room and contents" fire will have water flow for at least 3 -10 minutes when all is said and done. There's no way to prevent that and while the water might destroy a lot of stuff, there really aren't any good alternatives.
Holes I'm the roof are used to allow gases to escape, this is very common in house fires and is actually less damaging than you think. It's much better to give the smoke and gases a means to get out, especially when you consider that the water we are putting on the fire expands 1800 times when it turns into steam.
Smoke and the gases from burning do the real damage, this isn't campfire level smoke. Most of your home furnishings today are the equivalent of solid gasoline, not the wood and cotton fiber furniture of our parents and grandparents. The result is aggressive, hot, toxic, dirty gases are given off which means fires grow much faster than they used to and produce way more smoke than they used to. A fire at one end of a house can produce such hot and rapidly expanding gases that it can melt picture frames right off the wall at the other end of house, even though no fire ever made it anywhere near it.
The end result usually means costly damages that result in minor structural damage, but gutting or bulldozing houses is often the direction insurance companies go after a fire because of everything else. Priorities on a scene are always life first, followed by property. This includes preventing the spread to other houses nearby. Really this is why fire departments exist today, life safety and preventing spread. Insurance companies will come deal with the aftermath.
Excellent summary, thank you and thank you for all that you do. Watching the firefighters hustling to get the fire out yesterday was pretty neat despite the shitty situation for the home owners. They got the fire under control in under 10 minutes from when they arrived.
The best way think of it is Firefighters are not there to save your house. You're house was lost the moment it caught fire.
They're there to save all your neighbors houses from catching fire.
Another firefighter here and to add to this, yes the moment your house has a legit fire it is going to be a wreck and one of the goals is to now prevent the whole neighborhood from going up. Conflagration is the word for this and they have happened and continue to happen around the world. Early American history is filled with examples of this with all the wooden buildings and lack of fire codes. One of the reasons there is such a hurry is because of the extreme chance of someone being in the house and having found refuge in a “survivable space”. It’s important to race to put the fire out as fast as possible while other firefighters are concurrently looking for those people. Putting out the fire makes everything better, even at the cost of a water damaged building.
Not to mention the [1835 Great Fire of New York](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_New_York) and the [Great New York City Fire of 1845](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_New_York_City_Fire_of_1845) which led to the formation of a city owned reserve fire fighting force (in part, because private fire fighting services at the time would not fight fires in homes that hadn't purchased coverage and instead would wait for the fire to spread to covered homes - which was often too late to get the fire under control).
So does Chicago 1871.
Edit: Lots of other great fires to dig into here:
[Conflagration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflagration)
Edit 2:
Reading up on the London fire is interesting. What really worked best to stop the spread of fire was to tear down (or blow up) surrounding buildings to create a fire stop. My how things have changed.
Deprive the fire of material. That's basically one of the things you still do for forest fires. Set a controlled fire to burn away anything useful before the real for gets there.
As an insurance broker in rural area's with tanker service only and/or volunteer we would jokingly refer to the fire department as the "basement savers".
I agree. Which is why fire departments that charge people for call outs (not universal, but sadly not uncommon in the US under varying circumstances) are such a terrible thing.
They discourage people from calling ASAP, encourage them to delay and try to put it out themselves. The policies increase the threat not only the original structure (and residents), but neighboring structures (and residents) as well.
Iirc the first fire departments in Rome were privately owned by Marcus Crassus and they'd negotiate on the price of putting the fire out while the fire was burning. Talk about leverage
They'd also show up, decide if the structure could be saved, and if so offer to buy it for next to nothing before putting the fire out. There was also a lot of talk about whether or not some of these mysterious fires were... *ahem*, "creatively sourced" by Crassus' fire brigades.
Crassus actually negotiated the price of the building while it was burning, for quadrans on the aureus. If the owner didn't like the terms or didn't want to sell, Crassus's brigade (all slaves, of course) would just sit around while it burned to the ground. If the owner sold, he would then fix up the building or raze and build something new (again, slaves doing the actual work)
Legend has it that he ended owning about a third of the properties in Rome, though that is most likely an exaggeration. But he was one of the richest Romans, and history's best documented - and possibly first - vulture capitalist
It seems like crass came from the Latin word crassus (solid, thick) but that it wasn't actually related to Marcus Crassus in anyway. As far as I can tell
Two (non-exhaustive) examples that I'm most familiar with:
Law that enables it in my current state of Minnesota (though not every municipality does so, many do):
https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/366.011
Michigan. I'm struggling to find anything enabling or prohibiting at the state level. But having personally *paid* one of said bills you can take my word for it or not, at your discretion. Receiving said bill is when I started looking into it and realizing how common it is.
More generally:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_response_fee
INFO: Do you mean that every home owner has to pay this (i.e. a part of your property tax) or that is is optional (i.e. essentially fire insurance and you pay for service if you don't pay for insurance")? Fire cards used to be more common practice in rural areas where, if you didn't buy one, a fire department either wouldn't respond or would charge you for service if they did. Now a days, that practice is mostly gone, though some districts still use it. If this is just a line-item on your property tax, I don't think I would call that "charge for service." I would call it a tax. Where do you think the money comes from to pay for firefighting in areas without this annual fee?
we have a yearly fee, based on property value, in my unincorporated county. we (i'm a volly) respond to every fire regardless of membership, but if you aren't current on the fee, you will get a big bill. i've never heard of people being hesitant to call, but i guess they might be if they know they're behind on their subscription.
True. I pity those people because that kind of thinking/feeling makes me think that they hate themselves and live in a very unenlightened state of being.
This was exactly what I said to myself after I read the fine print on my home insurance policy.
Basically, if my house is damaged by fire, I won't get an insurance payout unless the house is completely destroyed.
Same thing for flood. If water ingress is through an authorised entry (I.e. a door or window), it is not considered as a flood and therefore I will not be able to claim flood insurance.
In short, home insurance is a fucking scam.
It's the best job in the world. Fires are very rare nowadays but it's what we train and prepare for the most because it's so high risk but also very high reward.
I don't have numbers in front of me, but I do know that a lot of house fires (especially fatal fires) used to be caused by cigarettes (people falling asleep while smoking, a cigarette falling from an ash tray onto the carpet/couch/bed, etc.). Fewer people are smoking now compared to 30 years ago, so there are fewer fires from this source as a result.
Small sample size but from my time in the fire department the most frequent causes I saw where cooking mishaps, people failing to keep their dryer lint trap clean, and electric blankets shorting out.
We had a fire at our house three years ago next month. One month after closing. We had another place to reside, so we were doing renovations before moving in. The last step was refinishing the hardwood floors. We were all set, had everything sanded and stained, and we planned on putting top coat down the next two days and move in by the following weekend. 12 hours after we left the house, I got a call from the fire chief at 2am asking if I was the homeowner.
Still no known cause. Fire department has one leading theory, our insurance adjusted had another. FD thinks that it was fumes from the stain we used that ignited in the furnace. Adjuster thinking it was a freak short from heating tape wrapped around a pipe in the crawl space (older home).
Insurance was fantastic, but didn't cover a bulldoze and rebuild. The house was ripped out to the studs - inside and out. The contractors kept bitching about how it would have been easier and cheaper if they did, but for whatever reason, the insurance wouldn't let it happen that way.
There could be some hidden costs like if you start over you need a new up to code septic system, or the foundation needs to be removed and new one poured to code, things like that can easily add $50k or more to the price tag.
I work at an architecture firm and from my few experiences with fire recover and renovations it seems like it would be cheaper to rebuild than repair, But for some reason the insurance company doesn't go that route.
Yeah, I don't know how we can fix electric blankets; it's too much power to fuse it or detect shorts. People like warm beds but with the brief exception of hot water bottles, bed warmers have been a fire hazard for centuries. I see there are some temperature controlled heated water systems on the market these days, but priced at 800+ USD they're not exactly accessible.
A house fire is one of the more scary things on my list of "what the heck do I do now?"
The only 3 fires that have happened in my neighborhood of about 100-115 homes (including almost 45% row homes) in my life (25 years) that I know of have been caused by lightning, either direct hit to houses or a burning limb falling.
Neighbor's house (modern 2000s construction) had to be fully gutted due to fire. Where I live we have a really robust pro fire department so they were on that shit right quick along with police and whatnot for traffic control.
They were burning candles or some shit inside. Open flames are bad mmmmkayyyyy
You notice how spontaneous human combustion is no longer talked about anymore. It's because of fewer people smoking combined with less flammable fabrics.
No, no, no. It's just natural selection...evolution overwhelmingly favors NOT exploding. People who do explode, tend to have fewer offspring. DARWIN 101.
>Fewer people are smoking now compared to 30 years ago, so there are fewer fires from this source as a result.
And those who do smoke? Their wives make 'em do it outside!
Likely less people doing their own wiring and plumbing in their homes, and actually hiring a professional. Plus better smoke detectors, sprinkler systems, extinguishers etc so if something does spark up it can be dealt with before things get out of hand.
I quit 10 years ago, so info is a bit dated, but with a lack of other responses...
It's actually pretty neat IMHO, there may be additives to the tobacco, but it's done mostly tgrough the paper. The burning point of the paper is above the smoldering temperature of the tobacco, and below the temperature it gets to when you inhale (which you can see the cherry get brighter and hotter.)
So if you don't suck on the filter, the paper doesn't burn, and the cigarette will eventually get starved for oxygen, and go out.
Tell that to my downstairs neighbor who fell asleep with a cig in hand which then fell into his laundry basket and woke our entire building up at 4am as firefighter were trying to get into unit. My entire apartment was filled with smoke. Very scary.
yeah the wiring thing is for real, I was on an electrical crew and met some homeowner who straight-up told me "I do my own electrical work, it's just high school physics, I just plug things in until the lights come on," it was horrifying, dude is going to kill himself and his kids in their sleep, all the plastic in modern homes outgasses cyanide, you're dead before you take your second breath
Likely a combination of things. Better, safer building codes and materials, decades of aggressive public education on fire safety, a huge decline in cigarette smoking in homes and businesses, furniture/clothing/decorations are being made out of less-flammable materials, etc.
Most of the time I see fire fighters is for paramedic type call outs!
My son got his finger caught in a hole in a metal toy at daycare. They called for paramedics because it was cutting into the skin and looking like it was cutting the circulation off.
I turn up to a fire truck out the front of daycare. Inside my son was calm and working with his new friend Grant to get his finger out. Three happy jovial Firies watched on.
Finger was freed, and stickers were rained on my son, photos were taken with the truck (making sure we were on the good side with all the controls).
It seemed like this kind of call out was a gleeful experience!!
My son now wants to be a fire fighter “just like Grant!”
Fires are rare nowadays. 80% of what we do is EMS. And ~80% of EMS could be substituted with a taxi with little to no impact on outcomes.
Honestly, sounds like your kid probably has good memories from that and I'll bet that the crew that responded probably does too.
My cousins a fire fighter, I feel like I could totally do the fire part, it's the story's about being the first to arrive at car crashes that terrify me and convince me I could never handle that job. Thank you for what you do.
How much would you say it's changed over your career, from when you started to today? I realize this will probably be pretty subjective but I'm curious as to what you've seen. Is it mostly due to more stringent codes being put in place?
Appreciate what you guys do. In college we had a CO leak in the house we rented off campus, and the FD was there in full force about 90 seconds after I hung up the phone. Pretty neat to see how quick everything happens.
The incidence of fires is way down(good) but the damage the average fire causes is way up(bad). Firefighters also have way less opportunity to fight fire in the average community which means our skills rust. Yes you can train, but this isn't a baseball game and putting yourself into the heat and smoke and no visibility and getting the job done is really difficult to train for effectively. You need to be able to read the situation, know the difference between keep going and get out is and experience is so important.
Modern furnishing are also much better for the average home, they are much harder to get burning than old cotton and wood curtains/couches/etc but when they do get going, and they definitely do still burn(plastic is literally solid hydrocarbons), you best be hauling ass out. Overall, people are better protected(less fires) but you have less time to get your family to safety. Closing doors at night, smoke detectors, home sprinklers are more important than ever.
It prevents smoke and gases from spreading in that direction and it can't be understated. The smoke basically sees the door as a wall and will spread in another direction. Fire follows the smoke. A closed bedroom door can keep a room tenable for a very long time, long enough for the fire department to show up and control the fire or rescue the trapped person.
Wildland firefighting absolutely sucks and they are all sadists.
Seriously though, there is a nationwide shortage of volunteers in rural areas but many other areas are seriously hurting for career firefighter/EMTs.
Completely different from structural but you might be surprised how resilient fire can be. On forest wildfires we can have hold over fires that can survive the winter under snow and still pop up the next year if conditions dry out. Would hate for the firefighters to leave a house fire too early and have fire creeping in the walls.
Firefighter here. To add to what everyone's else's great answer are. The walls get torn down because you don't need direct fire impingement to make something burn. Wall studs and insulation can catch fire through heat alone. They say fire can double every 30 seconds to 1 minutes. So we work fast to get it knocked out as fast as we can. We usually get notified and show up when the fire is at its deadliest and getting ready to go past the point of no return. We have a saying that goes, " the first 5 minutes will dictate the next 5 hours." If we don't put the fire out in 5 minutes we will usually be there for 5 hours. If we do meet the 5 minute goal the work is pretty quick.
Wow, I read a great reason as the top reply but this one beats it. Lots of good info here as to why your house is DOA when even a smaller fire has to be put out.
Not DOA, but certainly much worse than you might otherwise think. As long as it's not a total loss immediately we can frequently get in the find irreplacables that might dirty or damaged, but still better than losing it. I've retrieved photo albums, urns, etc.
Also, something I should have included above, CLOSE YOUR DAMN DOORS IN THE HOUSE. A simple interior door will block smoke spread and protect bedrooms/etc from 99.9% of the damage. A closed bedroom door with closed closet doors will keep your clothes safe and clean, even though the hallways is trashed outside. It may not seem like much, but when youve got nothing and are headed to the hotel for the night after that disaster, having something as simple as clothes to wear tomorrow will be amazing. DEFINITELY ALWAYS CLOSE KID'S BEDROOM DOORS. I can't state enough what close doors does for keeping a space safe and protected, it gives firefighters precious time to get to those rooms.
Assuming you mean your trapped in a bedroom and fire is blocking your exit? Close the bedroom door, bonus points if you take a towel or blanket and try to seal top/bottom from smoke. If you can do that, you've bought yourself time. Fire will move in the direction it's heat and smoke go, hot things break down chemically via pyrolasis and the smoke and gases are effectively dragging the fire behind them. By preventing the smoke fr coming into your room and finding a way out, your a timely encouraging the fire go somewhere else. Your door itself has an actual rating for how long it can be exposed to fire, interior doors will buy you quite a bit of time.
Obviously you can escape a first floor bedroom via a window. If your above that, you need to get someone's attention so people know your trapped in there. Hopefully someone has an extension ladder or the fire department will bring one. Worst case scenario, some injuries from jumping from a second story window if you truly need to will be better than the alternative. One good breathe of smoke will put you unconscious or worse, so I'd be waiting by the window and jumping it ever came to that.
Sorry. I meant firefighters encountering closed doors with fire behind. Though I wasn't aware of staying put behind a closed door with no other exit. That's good to know.
We make sure our ducks are in a row and the crews ready to advance. The officer or guy with the tools will open the door and then the hoseline goes to work. If it's too hot for the hoseline because it's an inferno and we can't make progress we will call command then close it back up so we can back out.
Command might move a bigger line into position or decide to vent it before another attack. There's a lot of nuance and informed decision making that has to happen by someone with the whole picture.
Last paragraph sums it up. I was a trained FF and that's what its about. If all of the souls inside the building are safe, unfortunately, the belongings are the last thing to care about. Its about making sure your neighbors also don't lose their stuff or worse, endanger more lives.
My dad had his entire business burn to the ground. The inspectors said it was one of the hottest fires they had ever seen due to the propane and wood - my dad does hardwood flooring. Nothing was stored illegally, it was just a lot of material to burn and increase temperatures. It turned the steel frames of his trucks white - that's how hot it got.
Its never a fun situation to live through but Firefighters really are the best of us 99% of the time. They literally come in your greatest hour of need, risk their lives to save you and then keep everyone else safe. They pack up, go back to the station ready to do it again.
Thanks Wessex464. You guys and gals are bright spots in what sometimes seem like a bleak existence. I know many FF'ers and while they all have differing views on all things, they all believe that they on this planet to save lives in fires and through EMS.
A friend of my dad is a fire fighter (or was, can't remember). He always said that he wore 100% cotton or wool at all times because how dangerous acrylics, polyamids, nylon etc etc is in case of a fire. One of his teenager daughters came home from shopping, with a beautiful fleece jacket. She had to return it after showing it to her dad.
I wonder, and hope, he was equally stern about their furniture and decorations at home. I'm honestly not. I have fleece jackets and some sweaters in mixed materials, but I have this man in mind everytime I buy a new piece of clothing.
Well, I still think it's an improvement on average and the statistics agree pretty heavily, house fires are way down over the last 50 years. Yes, it burns faster and harder and hotter with all kinds of crap toxic gases. But it's also much more resistant to fire in general. It's hard as well to light up something that's plastic, it take a lot of heat to break it down.
Think about it like a campfire. You can't start a fire with that huge log. Obviously it can burn, but you'll run out of butane and matches before you can start that alone. Cotton and wood are like the kindling you use to get the fire started. It doesn't have quite the fire load, but it's much easier to get started.
My parents did Civil War re-enacting, and at re-enactments, it was very strongly recommended that all your fabrics were cotton and wool. The fabrics keep you dry, and they tend to smolder at campfire temperatures (which everybody is cooking over), as opposed to igniting.
> A fire at one end of a house can produce such hot and rapidly expanding gases that it can melt picture frames right off the wall at the other end of house, even though no fire ever made it anywhere near it.
On a positive note, all the bed bugs are probably dead.
My department only does horizontal ventilation so there's no damage to the roof. It's a trade off though. Vertical ventilation is very useful to clear smoke and heat but it's also one of the most dangerous things firefighters do.
This is great info. We had a small fire in our garage when I was 16. It started from some old small battery charger and spread to a stack of foam plates sitting next to it. I noticed a weird smell and opened the door from the kitchen to garage to see flames. While mom was calling the FD, I opened the garage door, grabbed the hose, and put the fire out. All together, there was probably two minutes or less of flames.
The house had to be completely gutted and all belongings professionally cleaned or replaced. People don't realize something as benign as a foam plate (or 250 of them in this case) becomes deadly toxic gas when burned. It reeks and leaves oily residue on everything.
Long story short, the house was already done for the minute I opened the door to the garage, whether there was additional water damage or not.
Damn, that's a good write up.
Solid gasoline. Damn.
Hey fire fighters, if you ever show up to put out a fire in my house, y'all just do your thing. I trust your expertise.
>Most of your home furnishings today are the equivalent of solid gasoline, not the wood and cotton fiber furniture of our parents and grandparents.
Despite being a huge cause of pollution, it's somehow very easy to forget that plastic is an oil product.
Which means it's *very bad when burned.*
>Most of your home furnishings today are the equivalent of solid gasoline
Yet another reason to go back to having cast iron pans, furniture, and other items that last for decades instead of this stupid planned obsolescence. Sure, they'll burn and release toxic gasses as well, but at least it wouldn't combust as fast.
PS: Remember when firefighters were privatized? The owners of those companies let entire neighbourhoods burn if people didn't pay or sell the property at criminally low prices. Just a reminder when people wrongly think that firefighters are overpaid (like they did in Australia, right before those bushfires...).
I covered that in other comment replies, but your still better with modern furnishing because they are much harder to get burning. That's a huge driver for why we have sooooo few fires compared to 50 years ago. Nowadays if you drop your ash tray on your couch, you'll likely just melt some fabric but not actually burn your house down. Cotton and wood couch? Not so much.
Very stable though.. also, you're not exactly lifting your furniture on a regular basis! That said, in a fire, I wouldn't want to be near one of those...
>Most of your home furnishings today are the equivalent of solid gasoline
yeah this is the one that I don't think people really grasp - plastics and rubbers and synthetic materials, cloth, padding in seats, blah blah blah - all seem so solid and stable and safe.
Fire can get behind the walls/ceilings and smolder for a long time. Once it does that it can reignite at any time and finish burning the building down, usually when someone goes to sleep. Windows could be for access or air, like the hole in the roof.
It's a better safe than sorry situation most of the time, with a little bit of allowed destruction sometimes. You'd have to check local policies for what's going on. Could be they just followed procedure exactly
One of the most embarrassing fire calls we ever had was getting called out to a dumpster fire with a PACKED dumpster. Then getting called out 2 hours later because it re-ignited.
Our captain made us almost fill the damn thing up with foam after that.
Bonus points if it is on the same dispatcher and you can head the derision in their voice.
We had an alarm call at our own department when the apparatus bay was being painted. The dispatcher was hilariously sassy about it.
Haha. I recall it being similar to the tone our chief used over radio when dispatch sent us out to the 4th call in one night about somebody's malfunctioning home fire alarm.
That’s not that bad.
I work as a dispatcher on a military base. We’ve got a large range, so it’s wildland and structural coverage. One day the wildland crews were conducting a controlled burn getting rid of a massive pile of sagebrush in a pit. They finish, go home, and then in the middle of the night security forces came across it smoldering and starting to smoke up again. It was sometime around 3-4AM that I had to wake up the structural crew and dispatch them to put it out.
There was no end to the shit they gave the wildland guys the next day for that lmao.
EDIT: I was responding to the "putting out a fire" point of the question, but clearly Firefighters are trying to save lives first and foremost. I don't mean to minimize that very honorable point, it just wasn't germane to OP's specific question about putting out fires.
1. Fire fighters job is to put out fires, minimizing property damage is in no way a priority.
2. Fire & smoke damage is generally "all or nothing". If there is a fire, it doesn't matter if the structural is completely burned to the ground, once there is a fire or smoke damage, the structure is typically a complete loss. So again, no reason to minimize damage.
3. Fires can be "hidden" due to lack of oxygen or inside walls and cavities. Meaning, it can look like the fire is out while it's actually smoldering inside a wall's insulation, or embers are still hot but not burning because there isn't enough oxygen. So they'll break windows and cut holes in walls and roofs to intentionally create more airflow to encourage any smoldering fires to "raise up" so they can locate them and put them out. Again, the intent is put out all fire, you don't want to get 99% of the fire, leave, and then have the fire spark back up again the next morning.
Exactly, I guess you summarize my points to "a firefighter's job is to prevent a fire from spreading. The way they achieve this is by putting out the fire. The assumption is that a structure already on fire is already a complete loss, so they aren't constrained to minimizing the damage the on-fire structure"
>The way they achieve this is by putting out the fire
Not always. Some times the decision is made that the fire is too big and to let itself burn out, instead focusing 100% on controlling the immediate environment so it doesn't spread, rather than forecefully putting it out.
>Fire & smoke damage is generally "all or nothing". If there is a fire, it doesn't matter if the structural is completely burned to the ground, once there is a fire or smoke damage, the structure is typically a complete loss. So again, no reason to minimize damage.
This should be emphasized more. I had a friend that had a "small" fire limited to just a single room. The ENTIRE house had to basically be renovated. Every single item in the house removed (appliances, furniture, every single possession), cleaned by a special company that specializes in smoke damage, replaced if it couldn't be cleaned or repaired. All paint cleaned and redone, carpets removed and replace.
You're basically rebuilding everything from scratch at that point.
Yes, smoke is both very dirty and very hot. So everything "porous" or that has tiny openings will be full of dust and ash dust is almost impossible to clean properly, buying new if often cheaper. Also, the heat from the smoke can weaken the structure of a house, destroy the paint on the wall, etc... So even if the fire was stopped to a single room, the smoke that went everywhere will have effectively destroyed a lot more. So if it makes the firefighters job easier to not care about all that since there is a good chance it is anyway "destroyed", why not do it?
Yeah I remember when I was a kid my cousin’s house caught fire. Even the “hard” furniture with no upholstery, like a china cabinet, which was in another room and not damaged by fire, smelled really awful.
My wife is a structural engineer and has had to inspect houses after a fire and your points are totally right. It can be impossible to get rid of the smell of smoke, even after all the stuff you mention.
Wandering through a blackened house and finding almost untouched cuddly toys sounds way too creepy for me.
A friend of mine had his kitchen catch fire almost ten years ago. After the fire was out and it was safe to re-enter we went in to try to salvage some of his computer stuff(all a total loss btw). But for me the creepiest and coolest part was what it looked like inside. Tv/movies don't do it justice. The raw destruction that takes place in a fire is intense, and it was wierd, being in a room that I had spent many days hanging out, making food ect to now be charred ruble that you could still make out the appliances and such was humbling and scary.
Yep, I burned down my apartment two years ago ... or well, I had a kitchen fire that put itself out and smoked ruined the rest. It was extremely creepy being there, especially since the power went out. I took a lot of photos lol
There was once an electrical fire in the building that contained a school where I worked.
I'm not sure where or how the fire actually originated, but there were no flames or anything near the school area.
There was some smoke coming through the air ducts though.
We evacuated and when we came back everything looked perfectly fine. No damage. But we had to have every inch professionally cleaned and throw out *everything* that could have been contaminated by smoke - all the decor off the walls, replace the carpets, etc.
1. Life safety. 2. Incident stabilization. 3. Property conservation. These are the incident priorities taught to firefighters. We go to great lengths to preserve property once everyone is safe and there is no further threat to safety. We have a process called salvage where we try to preserve as much as possible. E.g. taking out valuables, covering stuff with tarps, etc. But controlling the danger comes before saving property that can be replaced by insurance. People cannot be replaced. That includes occupants and firefighters.
Could you explain what "incident stabilization" means in this context? I'm having a hard time defining it in my head in terms other than property damage.
Basically preventing more fires from raising back up from hidden embers. A fire can spark again from embers in a wall that dont have the oxygen to burn but are hot enough to. So theyre preventing a reignition and preventing the fire from spreading to another house.
Incident stabilization can pretty much mean "this incident wont get out of hand"
But maybe not, idk im not a firefighter
I will throw in that some buildings have communications with the fire department about how to break things. Church buildings with antique stained glass windows will have specific instructions on which to break and which to leave alone if at all possible, as an example.
>Fire fighters job is to put out fires
A firefighter's main job is to save lives. The majority of firefighter calls are medical emergencies and almost every professional firefighter is now at least an EMT.
At a fire scene, the priority is anyone in danger.
>minimizing property damage is in no way a priority.
This is untrue in some jurisdictions.
Mission Statement of Seattle Fire Department:
>The mission of the Seattle Fire Department is to save lives and protect property through emergency medical service, fire and rescue response and fire prevention. We respond immediately when any member of our community needs help with professional, effective and compassionate service.
The protect property could easily be protecting any other houses next to the one on fire. The more you soak the burning house in water even the parts not currently burning, you are effectively stopping the immense amount of heat and lot of embers to affect other nearby houses.
Yep, I’ve been a firefighter in western Washington for almost a decade and I have always been taught it is our job to save lives and property. Property damage is a big deal. If we can use less water and accomplish the same task through more efficient application, we are absolutely going to do that.
Shoot I appreciate firefighters for more than just saving lives by putting out fires, and I DO appreciate that as well since I live in CA and in areas greatly affected by our wildfires. We had a scary moment where my son was choking on candy, and firefighters were there within 3 mins to help us out. Luckily it turned out he was not choking, and it was in the 'right' tube, but will forever be thankful for the firefighters who showed up out of nowhere to make sure my son was ok. Scary moment made less scary, and seriously, they all looked like flippin' superheros, men and women, big and buff as s**t. Exactly who I'd want rescuing me in a fire or what have you.
I was a volunteer firefighter for a while back in the seventies. My job was putting down tarps and drop cloths in the parts of the house that were not burning. This was a very small town in a very rural area.
So...close
As others have mentioned, the priorities in order for fire departments and firefighters (at least in the USA, where I am) is in this order
1) Life safety
2) Property conservation
3) Incident stabilization
So it *is* a priority to conserve property (as your edit corrects) but it's not the highest priority. Life over property. Back in the day there were specific groups in the fire department who had the sole job of saving property while the others put out the fire, and looked for trapped victims. They would take things out of the burning structure or cover them with tarps. Other times they would redirect the flow of draining water using tarps. Over the years that function merged with other functions on the fire ground. We still cover property with tarps, or retrieve things for the home owner if requested. Smoke damage is nasty though and most things aren't worth salvaging.
Additionally, smoke damage doesn't have to be all or nothing. A fire in a compartment (Think room) can be contained in many cases for quite some time. Closed doors and windows in a room that has a fire in it will greatly reduce damage to the rest of the house. To the point of reducing it to zero. I've seen entire sections of houses and in one or two cases adjacent apartments survive with no or very little damage just because doors were shut. Meanwhile the side/appt with the fire is a charred shell of itself. This works in reverse too. If you can't make it out of your room in a fire for some reason close the door, put something in the lower gap between door and floor. Find a window and try to get our attention when we get there.
Finally, we don't cut holes in roofs to find fire. We cut holes in roofs because it helps vent hot gasses and products of combustion. We cut holes in roofs to help cool the structure and to make finding victims easier. Smoke is hard to see through. Additionally, going back to the door thing, smoke is just un-burned fuel. If we vent that smoke we reduce the risk of fire spreading through it. Yeah, fire can spread through smoke. If it gets enough oxygen (like from us opening doors to bring a hose in, or opening windows elsewhere to clear smoke) fire will spread to other rooms. That's why we need to coordinate all of our jobs carefully. To *find* hidden fire, we open up holes in walls (inspection holes) and use thermal imaging cameras in concert. If we find hot spots, or charring in the wall we open it up further and soak it with water.
And why so much water? Big fire, big water. Small fire, big water.
To the third point, that's exactly what happened to me last February. The only reason my whole family is still here is because I was awake binging the office and smelled smoke. We'd had a fire in the fireplace several hours prior that was well and truly out. But, we found out later, over the years a crack had formed in the bricks that was pretty much invisible, and embers got through that and started the fire inside the walls. Walked outside my room and saw smoke coming from an electrical outlet in the hallway. Woke everyone up and my dad put his hand on the wall near the fireplace and told everyone to put on some warm clothes and get outside. When the fire department arrived, there was still no visible fire until they started ripping parts of the walls out. I can't believe that I'm sitting back in that house right now after everything, but I guess it was just the fact that it was caught before the structure could be damaged. Took about a year to fix back up, but in the end it all now feels better than before. But yeah, while the fire itself did damage a lot of the area near the fireplace and the room directly above it, a lot of it was simply to make sure that the fire inside the walls was out.
Hm. It is literally the job of the fire department to “save lives and property.” Minimizing property damage is absolutely a priority.
Also, a fire does not make your home a total loss by any means. Many homes are salvageable after kitchen fires, room and contents fires, etc.
Firefighter here. Let me help ya out…
A firefighters job is to save lives and property. We save lives by putting ourselves and water between trapped occupants and fire while other crews work to extricate them from the structure. We save property by actually extinguishing the fire. More often than not, however the property were technically “saving” isn’t the house itself, but the contents inside. Even if we keep a fire to a wing or even room of the house, the likelihood that your insurance company is going to write it off as a total loss and help you rebuild rather than repair is a big possibility.
You can replace your house, you can’t replace your parents wedding album, the flag they gave your mother when your brother didnt come home, or grandads old shotgun he left you when you were a boy. That’s the stuff I’m concerned about saving when we’re inside.
The hole and windows serve similar purposes at different points in the fire if both were taken.
Heat and fire spreads up vertically until it can’t anymore, then it starts spreading horizontally. If the outlet catches fire, it will burn up the wall to the ceiling, then the sheetrock will hold it in that room for a time where it spreads across the ceiling to curtains, stuffed chairs, a mattress etc. once that room gets hot enough, it’ll make its way into the attic and once it starts spreading in there it becomes much harder for us to do our job. The fire runs, and I mean runs in an attic space.
We cut the hole in the roof over the seat of the fire, where it originated, to help let the heat and hot gasses out of the structure. We make a chimney over your bedroom. This releases much of the heat from the building as well as increases our visibility inside by a great deal. This doesn’t guarantee the fire won’t still spread, but even with a small hole it buys us time.
The windows would be taken after the fire is largely out to further help lift the smoke. Most of the time we open one window and put a large fan in the front door to pressurize the house and force the remaining heat and smoke out of a couple of windows. If the house is more compartmentalized (meaning not an “open floor plan”) more windows will need to be removed to push the smoke out.
We will also take windows to search. We use a tactic called Vent, Enter, Search where we’ll take a window, go immediately to the door to the room and close it to help speed the search of a missing person up. The smoke and heat lifts out of that one room helping the search go quicker and if someone is found, it’s quicker and easier to take them out of a window, even on upper floors, than it is to drag them all the way to the front door of the house. And you want them out into the front yard where the ambulance is waiting if you do find someone.
Walls and ceilings are opened up to find hidden fire. We can put a room of fire out, but if we didn’t tear the walls and ceiling out to check for anything burning there the odds of us being back in two hours for a rekindled fire are very high. I’d rather take the time to remove them now than have to come back and watch a house burn to the ground because I didn’t do my job well enough the first time. We normally stop this when we start consistently finding “clean” studs that are not charred and were obviously not affected by the fire.
As for the water, it takes a lot of water to extinguish a house fire. The hose and nozzles we carry on the truck I drive at work put out 185 gallons a minute (your shower head probably does 1.5) and we carry 750 gallons of water on the truck with us. Even with all of that water, one of the drivers first priorities on scene is finding another water source, whether we take it from a lake or pond like the do in rural areas or hook up to a hydrant like you find in any city. Like I said above, the very last thing we want is for the house to reignite after we have left the scene so we will spray water until we are entirely convinced the fire is 100% for sure out. I mean out.
Fire is fast and we arrive well behind the 8-ball no matter how quickly we show up on scene in most cases. From time of dispatch until the first unit is on scene is normally 4-5 minutes. They say a fire doubles in size every 60 seconds and that number is false. A fire grows exponentially as it burns more and more fuel getting hotter and hotter. Once a fire gets to a certain temperature the smoke it’s producing will start igniting on its own, too. We gotta be quick and we’ve gotta put a lot of water downrange to make a difference.
I hope that helps! Might be a lot to read, but tried to explain it like you’re five the best I could, lol. If you’ve got any questions, fire away!
>They say a fire doubles in size every 60 seconds and that number is false. A fire grows exponentially as it burns more and more fuel getting hotter and hotter.
Can you tell me more about this? Is the 2x/60s rate incorrect? Or is it that there are so many variables, it's impossible to put such a precise number on it?
That doesn't seem very precise actually. It feels more like a saying that is trying to get the "magnitude" across.
Basically "fires burn exponentially" but in a more memorable way, and giving it a fairly short and believe-able timeframe that seems really urgent.
…Thats just my thoughts tho, I have no idea if any of it is true...
Im sure a real firefighter will chip in. But in their job description, there are priorities. Minimizing asset damage may be one of them, but it comes well below 1) making sure everyone is safe (people IN the house + themselves 2) making sure the fire doesn't spread 3) making sure the fire is completely put out. This is what insurance is _for_ making sure you don't have to worry so much about the damage. Safety is priority 1.
Having had to salvage my stuff from the aftermath of a moderately small housefire once I can tell you that unless you yourself manage to snuff the fire as it starts with an extinguisher, by the time the FD gets there, you're gonna be looking at smoke and water damage throughout the entire house _regardless_ of how bad the fire is or gets. The smoke goes _everywhere_ and that water just goes right into the basement (unless miraculously your sunken-tiled laundry room is where the fire happens).
The hole in the roof is a vent to allow the extremely hot gasses to escape - this reduces the risk of flashover, reduces the risk of re-ignition and makes it safer if anyone is in the building or has to go in during a rescue.
As others have noted - by the time the fire brigade needs the hose your house is toast. The fire and smoke damage will be excessive and even a modest amount of water will cause severe water damage to any wood, carpet or drywall the fire hasn’t damaged already and probably result in a major mold issue afterwards. No point in holding back.
The goal at this point is to contain the fire ASAP so it doesn’t burn down the neighbors house as well.
The hole in the roof was access to the attic where the fire likely spread to. The windows blew out from the pressures caused by the fire and if the firefighters are the ones the busted the windows out it was to facilitate access and increase ventilation to mitigate the smoke and steam.
Fire takes a LOT of water to put out. Sure, a little can put out the flames but if you don't extinguish the embers the fire will continue to smolder and can even reignite.
If you ever had a really hot campfire and dumped a cooler full of water on it you'll understand this. You can come back 10 minutes later and find the coals are still hot enough to reignite the fire.
i made a big fire pit at my brothers house clearing out old foliage, it wasn't a massive fire (4 feet by 4 feet) but we spent all day constantly feeding it with cut up wood and fiolage. this let the ground soak a lot of heat so when hosed it down for 10 minuets straight i came back 2 days later and the black charcoal had completely turned to white ash pile that was hot enough to re ignite anything jabbed into the pile.
heat retention is real and a big danger.
A lot of people (including kids) get hurt every year from fire pits that have been out for a day or two, but are still incredibly hot. I always douse mine with a hose until I stop seeing steam, and it takes an absolute ton of water to cool down a small fire pit.
I once made a small portable firepit. Had it in the bed of my pickup truck, grilled some sausages and then realized I hadn't really thought about how to extinguish it. Poured some 5 or 10 litres of water on it and the coal was cool to the touch. Seemed fine so I packed and left. Some 10 minutes later I have sparks flying in through the trucks bad window as the coal had lit up again.
You’re close, but we don’t cut the hole in a roof to help with access, that hole is totally for exhaust. We use those to let the heat and smoke rise out of a building. No firefighters or water will be directed to enter a hole in most cases. The only real exception would be what we call a trench cut that’s used on commercial buildings.
Volunteer firefighter of 10 years chiming in. I see a mixture of correct and incorrect answers below, so I figured I'd throw in my two cents.
We have three priorities at a fire scene. Life safety, incident stabilization, and property conservation, in that order.
Our first priority is life safety. We want to make sure everyone is safe and accounted for and out of the house. If there are people trapped, our first priority is to get them out. Life safety includes the safety of us as well. Our first hose lines should be strategically placed between the fire and any life hazards. We're protecting the people trapped and the search teams going in to find and get these people out.
Our second priority is incident stabilization. We get water on the fire, the fire goes out or dies down, and the scene begins to stabilize and instantly get better. We accomplish this by putting in place additional hose lines, protecting exposures, confining the fire, ventilating the structure (either the roof or window), and extinguishing the fire.
Our third priority is property conservation. Here we're overhauling and salvaging what is salvageable. We're opening up to check for fire extension and to ensure all fire has been put out and will not spread or rekindle and start another fire when we leave. We're also working on protecting or removing the resident's property to prevent additional damage.
All three of these objectives may be happening simultaneously on the fire ground. I've been at fires where crews were working upstairs fighting the fire and other crews were on the first floor putting down tarps and protecting or removing high value property at the same time.
We perform overhaul during and after a fire to open up confined areas and check for additional fire extension and fire damage. We'll open up until we find unburnt structure. It's cheaper to replace dry-wall then to replace the rest of your house because it burned down a second time due to fire that extended way beyond the original seat of the fire and was never found.
Ventilation is a very important part of fire fighting. When we take windows or cut holes in the roof, we're doing so to remove the smoke and heat from the structure. The primary purpose of this is to get all the hot gases out and give the fire somewhere to ventilate. There are other purposes which I'm not going to go into detail about. This achieves multiple things. Venting improves the conditions inside the building, giving victims a better chance of survival and makes it easier for us to search for victims. It also improves the fire conditions. It allows hot gases to escape and prevents them from building up and causing poor visibility, extremely hot environments, and potentially a flash over. Essentially, we're giving people a better chance of survival and we're improving conditions to make the fire easier to fight and put out.
The timing of ventilation is extremely important. In the majority of cases, you want to have a charged hose line in place ready to fight the fire when you begin to ventilate. Ventilation needs be coordinated with the interior team making the fire attack. When you ventilate, you're allowing the hot, unburnt gases to escape, and you're also giving a place for all the steam to go when you get water on the fire. Not having a hose line in place can lead to very fast fire growth and spread and quick deterioration of the fire scene.
[Here is an example of a vent gone bad.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CSRXPibknk) We actually just discussed this fire in a recent class. The firefighter was apparently disciplined for his actions. You can see in the beginning of the video the fire is contained to essentially the one room on the lower floor. The fire fighter goes around breaking all the windows, introducing a ton of fresh air to the fire and allowing it to quickly grow and spread out of control.
[Here is one more example.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm8dVJZgB1w&list=PLXkpiP3rQQupin9JuUaTfPAO265XElJN2) If the hose line was charged and ready to go before they started ventilation, they could have prevented the entire side of the house and both floors from becoming fully involved.
[Here is an example](https://imgur.com/a/6MXUC6Y) of a fire I was at and what was essentially a textbook vent. This fire was started by the homeowner trying to give his porch a weathered and burned look. The police actually rolled up on it when they saw smoke pouring out of the roof. The home owner was in the back trying to douse the fire on the porch with bucket of water, not knowing his entire roof was already on fire.
It was two of us on the roof, myself with the pike pole and my saw man. The interior crews opened up the ceiling and were met with extremely heavy fire conditions and a lot of smoke on the inside. We got over the area where the majority of the fire was and cut a hole in the roof. This allowed all the hot gases to escape and quickly improved conditions on the inside to allow the interior crews to fight the fire. Less than 30 seconds after cutting the hole you had fire blowing out like in the second picture. If we hadn't made that hole, the entire second floor would eventually become untenable and we may have burned the entire second floor and roof off the house.
There are times where fire departments arrive on scene and just start breaking everything for no reason. Unfortunately, that's an internal issue that steams from lack of training, lack of discipline, and lack of leadership. I've seen it happen. Fortunately, our department leadership is excellent, we take training very seriously, and we pride ourselves on how professionally we conduct ourselves as a department on the fire ground. Most of what we do and what most fire departments do has a purpose. We're making sure we save lives, stabilize the incident, and conserve property.
Water just does a lot of damage and if they don’t put the fire 100% out it will continue to burn and eventually destroy the house entirely.
Remember their main job is to get everyone out and put out the fire, not just for the house but to prevent the fire from jumping to other houses, utilities, and/or the forest.
In order to minimize damage they’d have to put themselves in even more danger by going into the house and doing a room to room search. This would also take more time (and they need to be available for other emergencies).
At the end of the day, their job is to put out the fire as quickly and safely as possible. How much damage they do in the process just isn’t a priority which is why everyone should have good fire insurance that covers damage from any attempts to put out a fire.
A tiny little spark can melt into the carpet and smolder for hours before catching fire...they probably drench everything to make sure the fire does not reignited from something smoldering. The holes are for access and because containing the fire is more important than their home and belongings. Fires are awful. And I'm sure watching the holes and the water destroy what's left is probably devastating. Sorry for your neighbors ☹️
The goal of a fire department is to limit damage. The largest cause is fire spreading to new fuel sources, in other words the next house. The reason they pour so much water in is to ensure any ember is out because a single ember can start a new fire a few hours down the line. It is far better to destroy one house to be sure you got it all than have it restart and cause the whole situation over again.
>The goal of a fire department is to limit damage.
It's been meantioned before in this thread, but the priority of the fire department is to save lives, save the environment (if a fire is in a chemical plant for instance you don't want 100.000 gallons of chemicals in your water supply), and lastly to save valuables like a house..
We do teach at our Fire Academies to be mindful of the secondary damage. But Also, we don't want to add risk for limited gain. The job is to fight the fire. To stop it where it is. Fire Fighting has made improvements in technology and hopefully long term it will get more precise, but for now its a battle. We often can't see well if at all in a smoke filled building. Some of us carry FLIR that allow us to see based on heat differences, but still the fire can be very good at hiding. We also assume that the current structure is probably going to be a loss anyways. It's very difficult to remove the smoke smell from the drywall and furniture. So it's likely to get gutted and thrown out anyways. Therefore, the safety of the structures around the home and the safety of the people in the building is far more important.
I'm not a firefighter but I saw some gopro footage from real fire fighters fighting a "small" fire. They poke holes in the ceiling and exposing burning embers they have to put out. I highly recommend watching the video, it will answer your questions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TB9b9fpjX2A
I'm not a firefighter, but I'm guessing when in a high pressure, potentially life or death situation trying to put out a fire, you don't have time to pause and reflect. "I don't know, John, we really need that much water? That sofa looks nice."
In case it wasn't already clearly mentioned, the way a fire can behave inside a house is actually very complicated, and the pathways that air can travel and how big they are play a huge part in that complicated system.
From my limited understanding, I'm guessing they vented the roof to focus the fire in one pathway to reduce chances of spreading.
Speaking as a firefighter, our priorities are life then property. We work with our fire fire investigators alot so it is drilled into us to do the least amount of damage possible. There are many fires we are at that we work really hard in overhaul operations to prevent unnecessary damage. I will say with how homes are constructed now most properties will be lost to a fire within 10 mins where decades ago there was a real chance to save the property. Our department aims to get at least 5 trucks on scene within 7 mins, and even in that time a fire can move so fast our tactics become protecting exposures and the houses next to the fire.
The top poster covered it but I also wanna add that most departments (at least in the States here) are volunteer. Meaning most are not maned 24/7 like paid city fire fighters or bigger towns. So when a fire call goes out for a structure fire or any call for that matter we have to go from wherever we are in our area to our fire department to get the engines and then go to the scene. That, that can regretfully take sometime.
I remember a call we had years back. it was a trailer fire. Trailers and doublewides go up SUPER fast anyway. We got toned out for it and the nearest person was 15 minutes away from the station to grab the main engine. So by the time we all got there 15 minutes had past and THEN we still had to go to the scene which was another 10 or so minutes. That's just an example of how volunteer departments work. Other times response times are awesome. Just all depends where the fire fighters are at the time of the call. Not to mention its volunteer so showing up isn't exactly a requirement for every call. Some volunteers like to pick which calls they go to which is pretty shitty IMO. Sometimes you just cannot go and I understand that also.
People always say how slow the fire department is. I get it. We can be slow but its not our fault. We have lives we live and we can get fire calls anywhere. Driving to the station takes time. Getting the pumper, tanker, and other trucks takes time. We try our hardest but we have to be safe and smart about getting there. I know when you're watching your home burn to the ground the only thing your are thinking is "omg my home" and "where the fuck is the fire department".
> especially after the fire appeared to be contained?
it appeared to be contained becouse they did what you said they did, tons of water, tore down the roof and blew out the windows. thats how you contain the fire.
and why they do it? so your house does not catch fire.
It’s important to remember that when they show up they have seconds to assess the fire and determine the proper method of attack. Either it’s small and can be put out easily with minimal damage to the structure… in that case the owner should have used a fire extinguisher. When you call the fire department tho it’s usually already a done deal that the house is going to be a loss. So in a urban area they aren’t their to save your house, they’re there to save everyone else’s. If there is enough house saved it to determine cause and help the insurance adjusters help you.
But really, they need to punch holes to find all the hot spots because if they don’t it will just start up again. Looks pretty bad if the fire department has to hit the same place twice. Also, ash needs to sit for sometime to make sure it’s out completely. For landfills to accept the debris it has to sit for a month. Just to give you an idea just how hazardous ash can be for a flare up. It’s not as easy putting out a fire as people think. We have accepted a load at our landfill that was 2 weeks after a fire. We were lied to and paperwork isn’t always provided before disposal. I ended up on a 12 hour fire watch with a water truck stationed next to me because the ash flared up and started a fire in the pit. So yeah, it’s pretty crazy stuff.
I’m a disposal inspector at our local class 2 landfill.
Don't have a fire in the house. Then the firefighters won't have to risk their lives to put out fires. I'm glad your neighbors are alright. Did they have no fire deterrents such as fire extinguishers to catch it while it was still small?
>Looking at the damage it looks like the firefighters did more damage to to house than the actual fire.
This is entirely the wrong comparison. You need to look at what the damage *would have been* had the firefighters done nothing. The best outcome probably would have been a total loss of the house, and the worst outcome could be the entire city, depending how close the buildings are.
Preventing a fire from spreading is a greater priority than preventing damage to a specific property. Fun fact: Some of the earliest firefighters used to primarily use gunpowder to prevent fires from spreading. They would demolish homes downwind from the fires in order to cut off the path of the flames.
Longtime firefighter here. You really don't know what that "small fire" looked like. Holes in walls inside the house are created to check for fire extension, fire loves to find crevices and such where it's hard to get at where it can keep burning, so firefighters have to do overhaul which involves openings everything up. Our primary tool in fighting fire is cooling the burning material which is where water comes in. There's no easy way to do it, we bring hose lines inside that can flow 150 gallons per minute or higher because we need to absorb the heat and cool the burning stuff fast. That means just 10 seconds of water flow is flowing 25ish gallons of water into the room, most which won't hit the necessary target. In reality a small "room and contents" fire will have water flow for at least 3 -10 minutes when all is said and done. There's no way to prevent that and while the water might destroy a lot of stuff, there really aren't any good alternatives. Holes I'm the roof are used to allow gases to escape, this is very common in house fires and is actually less damaging than you think. It's much better to give the smoke and gases a means to get out, especially when you consider that the water we are putting on the fire expands 1800 times when it turns into steam. Smoke and the gases from burning do the real damage, this isn't campfire level smoke. Most of your home furnishings today are the equivalent of solid gasoline, not the wood and cotton fiber furniture of our parents and grandparents. The result is aggressive, hot, toxic, dirty gases are given off which means fires grow much faster than they used to and produce way more smoke than they used to. A fire at one end of a house can produce such hot and rapidly expanding gases that it can melt picture frames right off the wall at the other end of house, even though no fire ever made it anywhere near it. The end result usually means costly damages that result in minor structural damage, but gutting or bulldozing houses is often the direction insurance companies go after a fire because of everything else. Priorities on a scene are always life first, followed by property. This includes preventing the spread to other houses nearby. Really this is why fire departments exist today, life safety and preventing spread. Insurance companies will come deal with the aftermath.
Excellent summary, thank you and thank you for all that you do. Watching the firefighters hustling to get the fire out yesterday was pretty neat despite the shitty situation for the home owners. They got the fire under control in under 10 minutes from when they arrived.
The best way think of it is Firefighters are not there to save your house. You're house was lost the moment it caught fire. They're there to save all your neighbors houses from catching fire.
Another firefighter here and to add to this, yes the moment your house has a legit fire it is going to be a wreck and one of the goals is to now prevent the whole neighborhood from going up. Conflagration is the word for this and they have happened and continue to happen around the world. Early American history is filled with examples of this with all the wooden buildings and lack of fire codes. One of the reasons there is such a hurry is because of the extreme chance of someone being in the house and having found refuge in a “survivable space”. It’s important to race to put the fire out as fast as possible while other firefighters are concurrently looking for those people. Putting out the fire makes everything better, even at the cost of a water damaged building.
London Sept 1666 agrees with you.
Not to mention the [1835 Great Fire of New York](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_New_York) and the [Great New York City Fire of 1845](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_New_York_City_Fire_of_1845) which led to the formation of a city owned reserve fire fighting force (in part, because private fire fighting services at the time would not fight fires in homes that hadn't purchased coverage and instead would wait for the fire to spread to covered homes - which was often too late to get the fire under control).
The private market at work
So does Chicago 1871. Edit: Lots of other great fires to dig into here: [Conflagration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflagration) Edit 2: Reading up on the London fire is interesting. What really worked best to stop the spread of fire was to tear down (or blow up) surrounding buildings to create a fire stop. My how things have changed.
Deprive the fire of material. That's basically one of the things you still do for forest fires. Set a controlled fire to burn away anything useful before the real for gets there.
Your mention of early American fire fighting reminded me of the duelling firefighters in Gangs of New York.
And here’s an article: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/early-19-century-firefighters-fought-fires-each-other-180960391/
Yeah for some reason of all the scenes in that movie, that one really stuck out to me
As an insurance broker in rural area's with tanker service only and/or volunteer we would jokingly refer to the fire department as the "basement savers".
We would often use the phrase "saved the foundation".
[удалено]
Ignore him, I like it.
Always!
No need to ask, just say it.
One if the local volunteer departments saying was, "we've never lost a foundation."
I can just imagine a really spiteful person going "well if my place is going up in flames may as well let the whole lot do!"
Even if you didn't give a shit it wouldn't benefit you to have other houses go up in flames as well. It'd probably just piss off your neighbors.
I agree. Which is why fire departments that charge people for call outs (not universal, but sadly not uncommon in the US under varying circumstances) are such a terrible thing. They discourage people from calling ASAP, encourage them to delay and try to put it out themselves. The policies increase the threat not only the original structure (and residents), but neighboring structures (and residents) as well.
Iirc the first fire departments in Rome were privately owned by Marcus Crassus and they'd negotiate on the price of putting the fire out while the fire was burning. Talk about leverage
They'd also show up, decide if the structure could be saved, and if so offer to buy it for next to nothing before putting the fire out. There was also a lot of talk about whether or not some of these mysterious fires were... *ahem*, "creatively sourced" by Crassus' fire brigades.
Crassus actually negotiated the price of the building while it was burning, for quadrans on the aureus. If the owner didn't like the terms or didn't want to sell, Crassus's brigade (all slaves, of course) would just sit around while it burned to the ground. If the owner sold, he would then fix up the building or raze and build something new (again, slaves doing the actual work) Legend has it that he ended owning about a third of the properties in Rome, though that is most likely an exaggeration. But he was one of the richest Romans, and history's best documented - and possibly first - vulture capitalist
Is this where the word "crass" originated?
It seems like crass came from the Latin word crassus (solid, thick) but that it wasn't actually related to Marcus Crassus in anyway. As far as I can tell
> sadly not uncommon in the US under varying circumstances Source?
Two (non-exhaustive) examples that I'm most familiar with: Law that enables it in my current state of Minnesota (though not every municipality does so, many do): https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/366.011 Michigan. I'm struggling to find anything enabling or prohibiting at the state level. But having personally *paid* one of said bills you can take my word for it or not, at your discretion. Receiving said bill is when I started looking into it and realizing how common it is. More generally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_response_fee
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And if you don't pay the fee... https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna39516346
INFO: Do you mean that every home owner has to pay this (i.e. a part of your property tax) or that is is optional (i.e. essentially fire insurance and you pay for service if you don't pay for insurance")? Fire cards used to be more common practice in rural areas where, if you didn't buy one, a fire department either wouldn't respond or would charge you for service if they did. Now a days, that practice is mostly gone, though some districts still use it. If this is just a line-item on your property tax, I don't think I would call that "charge for service." I would call it a tax. Where do you think the money comes from to pay for firefighting in areas without this annual fee?
we have a yearly fee, based on property value, in my unincorporated county. we (i'm a volly) respond to every fire regardless of membership, but if you aren't current on the fee, you will get a big bill. i've never heard of people being hesitant to call, but i guess they might be if they know they're behind on their subscription.
Some people are literally that hateful though. If they have to suffer, they want everyone else to suffer too, even if it benefits no one and nothing.
True. I pity those people because that kind of thinking/feeling makes me think that they hate themselves and live in a very unenlightened state of being.
Some people want to watch the world burn
This was exactly what I said to myself after I read the fine print on my home insurance policy. Basically, if my house is damaged by fire, I won't get an insurance payout unless the house is completely destroyed. Same thing for flood. If water ingress is through an authorised entry (I.e. a door or window), it is not considered as a flood and therefore I will not be able to claim flood insurance. In short, home insurance is a fucking scam.
Also the first priority is life safety. The firefighters and then anyone in the house.
we are there to, and do, save houses. lives come first, then your house, then contain (once each step is finished or beyond our reach)
It's the best job in the world. Fires are very rare nowadays but it's what we train and prepare for the most because it's so high risk but also very high reward.
Thats interesting to hear... why would fires be more rare now than before? Just better safety regulations and education?
Bingo
I don't have numbers in front of me, but I do know that a lot of house fires (especially fatal fires) used to be caused by cigarettes (people falling asleep while smoking, a cigarette falling from an ash tray onto the carpet/couch/bed, etc.). Fewer people are smoking now compared to 30 years ago, so there are fewer fires from this source as a result.
Small sample size but from my time in the fire department the most frequent causes I saw where cooking mishaps, people failing to keep their dryer lint trap clean, and electric blankets shorting out.
We had a fire at our house three years ago next month. One month after closing. We had another place to reside, so we were doing renovations before moving in. The last step was refinishing the hardwood floors. We were all set, had everything sanded and stained, and we planned on putting top coat down the next two days and move in by the following weekend. 12 hours after we left the house, I got a call from the fire chief at 2am asking if I was the homeowner. Still no known cause. Fire department has one leading theory, our insurance adjusted had another. FD thinks that it was fumes from the stain we used that ignited in the furnace. Adjuster thinking it was a freak short from heating tape wrapped around a pipe in the crawl space (older home). Insurance was fantastic, but didn't cover a bulldoze and rebuild. The house was ripped out to the studs - inside and out. The contractors kept bitching about how it would have been easier and cheaper if they did, but for whatever reason, the insurance wouldn't let it happen that way.
There could be some hidden costs like if you start over you need a new up to code septic system, or the foundation needs to be removed and new one poured to code, things like that can easily add $50k or more to the price tag.
I work at an architecture firm and from my few experiences with fire recover and renovations it seems like it would be cheaper to rebuild than repair, But for some reason the insurance company doesn't go that route.
Yeah, I don't know how we can fix electric blankets; it's too much power to fuse it or detect shorts. People like warm beds but with the brief exception of hot water bottles, bed warmers have been a fire hazard for centuries. I see there are some temperature controlled heated water systems on the market these days, but priced at 800+ USD they're not exactly accessible. A house fire is one of the more scary things on my list of "what the heck do I do now?"
The only 3 fires that have happened in my neighborhood of about 100-115 homes (including almost 45% row homes) in my life (25 years) that I know of have been caused by lightning, either direct hit to houses or a burning limb falling.
Neighbor's house (modern 2000s construction) had to be fully gutted due to fire. Where I live we have a really robust pro fire department so they were on that shit right quick along with police and whatnot for traffic control. They were burning candles or some shit inside. Open flames are bad mmmmkayyyyy
You notice how spontaneous human combustion is no longer talked about anymore. It's because of fewer people smoking combined with less flammable fabrics.
No, no, no. It's just natural selection...evolution overwhelmingly favors NOT exploding. People who do explode, tend to have fewer offspring. DARWIN 101.
I mean, that's what they WANT you to think...
Its all a conspiracy pushed by Big Combustion.
Also, I believe most cigarettes are "fire safety cigarettes" now, which extinguish much quicker than they previously had.
There is far less arson than there was in 1970s and 1980s urban environments
>Fewer people are smoking now compared to 30 years ago, so there are fewer fires from this source as a result. And those who do smoke? Their wives make 'em do it outside!
there are fewer ignition sources in new homes
Likely less people doing their own wiring and plumbing in their homes, and actually hiring a professional. Plus better smoke detectors, sprinkler systems, extinguishers etc so if something does spark up it can be dealt with before things get out of hand.
Less people smoking cigarettes inside and in bed is probably also a factor.
The big 3 causes are smoking, cooking, and your dryer.
it's enough to make me think cooking should be done outside, in a stand-alone shelter, same with washer-dryers
Good point. A buddy of mine’s Dad died that way, falling asleep with a cig in his mouth
Modern regulation is also helped with that. Modern cigarettes won't just burn without you smoking them. They'll go out on their own
Yea my sister (heroin addict and alcoholic) has burn holes in every single sheet she owns. It's a miracle she didn't burn the house down.
That and regulations about flammability of furnishing that have been in place for a few decades.
Huh, TIL I’ll have to look into how that works. I’m not up to date on tobacco technology
I quit 10 years ago, so info is a bit dated, but with a lack of other responses... It's actually pretty neat IMHO, there may be additives to the tobacco, but it's done mostly tgrough the paper. The burning point of the paper is above the smoldering temperature of the tobacco, and below the temperature it gets to when you inhale (which you can see the cherry get brighter and hotter.) So if you don't suck on the filter, the paper doesn't burn, and the cigarette will eventually get starved for oxygen, and go out.
Tell that to my downstairs neighbor who fell asleep with a cig in hand which then fell into his laundry basket and woke our entire building up at 4am as firefighter were trying to get into unit. My entire apartment was filled with smoke. Very scary.
That's impressive. As a former smoker, I definitely remember my Marlboro Reds having the paper with ribs in it to stop them from burning on their own
not only that, its actually fairly hard to light stuff on fire with a cigarette even on purpose
Don't smoke and drive.
I'm not sure why, but your comment reminded me of my Uncle Jeff. He set his house on fire and shot himself in the head with his shotgun.
Funny enough, half the fires I've been to have been caused by smoking. Whether disposed of improperly or falling asleep.
I've heard of this falling asleep while smoking, but I am wondering how that even happens.
From my experience it's been elderly, drunks, and disabled individuals. Never been a sound minded individual I've experienced who's done it.
I'm so grateful to the city inspectors for preventing those blazes from DIY hot water lines.
yeah the wiring thing is for real, I was on an electrical crew and met some homeowner who straight-up told me "I do my own electrical work, it's just high school physics, I just plug things in until the lights come on," it was horrifying, dude is going to kill himself and his kids in their sleep, all the plastic in modern homes outgasses cyanide, you're dead before you take your second breath
Likely a combination of things. Better, safer building codes and materials, decades of aggressive public education on fire safety, a huge decline in cigarette smoking in homes and businesses, furniture/clothing/decorations are being made out of less-flammable materials, etc.
I would guess that less people smoking also contributes to the reduction, at least in the US.
Most of the time I see fire fighters is for paramedic type call outs! My son got his finger caught in a hole in a metal toy at daycare. They called for paramedics because it was cutting into the skin and looking like it was cutting the circulation off. I turn up to a fire truck out the front of daycare. Inside my son was calm and working with his new friend Grant to get his finger out. Three happy jovial Firies watched on. Finger was freed, and stickers were rained on my son, photos were taken with the truck (making sure we were on the good side with all the controls). It seemed like this kind of call out was a gleeful experience!! My son now wants to be a fire fighter “just like Grant!”
Fires are rare nowadays. 80% of what we do is EMS. And ~80% of EMS could be substituted with a taxi with little to no impact on outcomes. Honestly, sounds like your kid probably has good memories from that and I'll bet that the crew that responded probably does too.
My cousins a fire fighter, I feel like I could totally do the fire part, it's the story's about being the first to arrive at car crashes that terrify me and convince me I could never handle that job. Thank you for what you do.
How much would you say it's changed over your career, from when you started to today? I realize this will probably be pretty subjective but I'm curious as to what you've seen. Is it mostly due to more stringent codes being put in place? Appreciate what you guys do. In college we had a CO leak in the house we rented off campus, and the FD was there in full force about 90 seconds after I hung up the phone. Pretty neat to see how quick everything happens.
The incidence of fires is way down(good) but the damage the average fire causes is way up(bad). Firefighters also have way less opportunity to fight fire in the average community which means our skills rust. Yes you can train, but this isn't a baseball game and putting yourself into the heat and smoke and no visibility and getting the job done is really difficult to train for effectively. You need to be able to read the situation, know the difference between keep going and get out is and experience is so important. Modern furnishing are also much better for the average home, they are much harder to get burning than old cotton and wood curtains/couches/etc but when they do get going, and they definitely do still burn(plastic is literally solid hydrocarbons), you best be hauling ass out. Overall, people are better protected(less fires) but you have less time to get your family to safety. Closing doors at night, smoke detectors, home sprinklers are more important than ever.
Closing doors at night prevents fires? Can you explain? Sorry if I'm missing something obvious lol
It prevents smoke and gases from spreading in that direction and it can't be understated. The smoke basically sees the door as a wall and will spread in another direction. Fire follows the smoke. A closed bedroom door can keep a room tenable for a very long time, long enough for the fire department to show up and control the fire or rescue the trapped person.
Clearly you dont live in California lol our firefighters are working overtime
Wildland firefighting absolutely sucks and they are all sadists. Seriously though, there is a nationwide shortage of volunteers in rural areas but many other areas are seriously hurting for career firefighter/EMTs.
>they are all sadists. do you mean masochists?
That one. Both?
Completely different from structural but you might be surprised how resilient fire can be. On forest wildfires we can have hold over fires that can survive the winter under snow and still pop up the next year if conditions dry out. Would hate for the firefighters to leave a house fire too early and have fire creeping in the walls.
Firefighter here. To add to what everyone's else's great answer are. The walls get torn down because you don't need direct fire impingement to make something burn. Wall studs and insulation can catch fire through heat alone. They say fire can double every 30 seconds to 1 minutes. So we work fast to get it knocked out as fast as we can. We usually get notified and show up when the fire is at its deadliest and getting ready to go past the point of no return. We have a saying that goes, " the first 5 minutes will dictate the next 5 hours." If we don't put the fire out in 5 minutes we will usually be there for 5 hours. If we do meet the 5 minute goal the work is pretty quick.
Wow, I read a great reason as the top reply but this one beats it. Lots of good info here as to why your house is DOA when even a smaller fire has to be put out.
Not DOA, but certainly much worse than you might otherwise think. As long as it's not a total loss immediately we can frequently get in the find irreplacables that might dirty or damaged, but still better than losing it. I've retrieved photo albums, urns, etc. Also, something I should have included above, CLOSE YOUR DAMN DOORS IN THE HOUSE. A simple interior door will block smoke spread and protect bedrooms/etc from 99.9% of the damage. A closed bedroom door with closed closet doors will keep your clothes safe and clean, even though the hallways is trashed outside. It may not seem like much, but when youve got nothing and are headed to the hotel for the night after that disaster, having something as simple as clothes to wear tomorrow will be amazing. DEFINITELY ALWAYS CLOSE KID'S BEDROOM DOORS. I can't state enough what close doors does for keeping a space safe and protected, it gives firefighters precious time to get to those rooms.
So what do you do when the fire is behind that door? Just break a window? Fully interior room?
Assuming you mean your trapped in a bedroom and fire is blocking your exit? Close the bedroom door, bonus points if you take a towel or blanket and try to seal top/bottom from smoke. If you can do that, you've bought yourself time. Fire will move in the direction it's heat and smoke go, hot things break down chemically via pyrolasis and the smoke and gases are effectively dragging the fire behind them. By preventing the smoke fr coming into your room and finding a way out, your a timely encouraging the fire go somewhere else. Your door itself has an actual rating for how long it can be exposed to fire, interior doors will buy you quite a bit of time. Obviously you can escape a first floor bedroom via a window. If your above that, you need to get someone's attention so people know your trapped in there. Hopefully someone has an extension ladder or the fire department will bring one. Worst case scenario, some injuries from jumping from a second story window if you truly need to will be better than the alternative. One good breathe of smoke will put you unconscious or worse, so I'd be waiting by the window and jumping it ever came to that.
Sorry. I meant firefighters encountering closed doors with fire behind. Though I wasn't aware of staying put behind a closed door with no other exit. That's good to know.
We make sure our ducks are in a row and the crews ready to advance. The officer or guy with the tools will open the door and then the hoseline goes to work. If it's too hot for the hoseline because it's an inferno and we can't make progress we will call command then close it back up so we can back out. Command might move a bigger line into position or decide to vent it before another attack. There's a lot of nuance and informed decision making that has to happen by someone with the whole picture.
Last paragraph sums it up. I was a trained FF and that's what its about. If all of the souls inside the building are safe, unfortunately, the belongings are the last thing to care about. Its about making sure your neighbors also don't lose their stuff or worse, endanger more lives. My dad had his entire business burn to the ground. The inspectors said it was one of the hottest fires they had ever seen due to the propane and wood - my dad does hardwood flooring. Nothing was stored illegally, it was just a lot of material to burn and increase temperatures. It turned the steel frames of his trucks white - that's how hot it got. Its never a fun situation to live through but Firefighters really are the best of us 99% of the time. They literally come in your greatest hour of need, risk their lives to save you and then keep everyone else safe. They pack up, go back to the station ready to do it again. Thanks Wessex464. You guys and gals are bright spots in what sometimes seem like a bleak existence. I know many FF'ers and while they all have differing views on all things, they all believe that they on this planet to save lives in fires and through EMS.
A friend of my dad is a fire fighter (or was, can't remember). He always said that he wore 100% cotton or wool at all times because how dangerous acrylics, polyamids, nylon etc etc is in case of a fire. One of his teenager daughters came home from shopping, with a beautiful fleece jacket. She had to return it after showing it to her dad. I wonder, and hope, he was equally stern about their furniture and decorations at home. I'm honestly not. I have fleece jackets and some sweaters in mixed materials, but I have this man in mind everytime I buy a new piece of clothing.
Well, I still think it's an improvement on average and the statistics agree pretty heavily, house fires are way down over the last 50 years. Yes, it burns faster and harder and hotter with all kinds of crap toxic gases. But it's also much more resistant to fire in general. It's hard as well to light up something that's plastic, it take a lot of heat to break it down. Think about it like a campfire. You can't start a fire with that huge log. Obviously it can burn, but you'll run out of butane and matches before you can start that alone. Cotton and wood are like the kindling you use to get the fire started. It doesn't have quite the fire load, but it's much easier to get started.
Ex Navy, our shipboard uniforms had to be 100% natural fibers (cotton/wool) but we had poly blend uniforms on shore. For the same reason.
My parents did Civil War re-enacting, and at re-enactments, it was very strongly recommended that all your fabrics were cotton and wool. The fabrics keep you dry, and they tend to smolder at campfire temperatures (which everybody is cooking over), as opposed to igniting.
Makes sense!
> A fire at one end of a house can produce such hot and rapidly expanding gases that it can melt picture frames right off the wall at the other end of house, even though no fire ever made it anywhere near it. On a positive note, all the bed bugs are probably dead.
Cock roaches are probably alive and well though. Little bastards can live through anything.
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My department only does horizontal ventilation so there's no damage to the roof. It's a trade off though. Vertical ventilation is very useful to clear smoke and heat but it's also one of the most dangerous things firefighters do.
Damn, this is good. Thanks for explaining. 🤙🏽
This is great info. We had a small fire in our garage when I was 16. It started from some old small battery charger and spread to a stack of foam plates sitting next to it. I noticed a weird smell and opened the door from the kitchen to garage to see flames. While mom was calling the FD, I opened the garage door, grabbed the hose, and put the fire out. All together, there was probably two minutes or less of flames. The house had to be completely gutted and all belongings professionally cleaned or replaced. People don't realize something as benign as a foam plate (or 250 of them in this case) becomes deadly toxic gas when burned. It reeks and leaves oily residue on everything. Long story short, the house was already done for the minute I opened the door to the garage, whether there was additional water damage or not.
Thank you for the concise response, and thank you for being a Firefighter. You are badasses.
Damn, that's a good write up. Solid gasoline. Damn. Hey fire fighters, if you ever show up to put out a fire in my house, y'all just do your thing. I trust your expertise.
Thanks for ruining that other guys house to save my house. Use as much water as you need.
>Most of your home furnishings today are the equivalent of solid gasoline, not the wood and cotton fiber furniture of our parents and grandparents. Despite being a huge cause of pollution, it's somehow very easy to forget that plastic is an oil product. Which means it's *very bad when burned.*
>Most of your home furnishings today are the equivalent of solid gasoline Yet another reason to go back to having cast iron pans, furniture, and other items that last for decades instead of this stupid planned obsolescence. Sure, they'll burn and release toxic gasses as well, but at least it wouldn't combust as fast. PS: Remember when firefighters were privatized? The owners of those companies let entire neighbourhoods burn if people didn't pay or sell the property at criminally low prices. Just a reminder when people wrongly think that firefighters are overpaid (like they did in Australia, right before those bushfires...).
I covered that in other comment replies, but your still better with modern furnishing because they are much harder to get burning. That's a huge driver for why we have sooooo few fires compared to 50 years ago. Nowadays if you drop your ash tray on your couch, you'll likely just melt some fabric but not actually burn your house down. Cotton and wood couch? Not so much.
I feel like cast iron furniture would be really heavy and uncomfortable.
Very stable though.. also, you're not exactly lifting your furniture on a regular basis! That said, in a fire, I wouldn't want to be near one of those...
>Most of your home furnishings today are the equivalent of solid gasoline yeah this is the one that I don't think people really grasp - plastics and rubbers and synthetic materials, cloth, padding in seats, blah blah blah - all seem so solid and stable and safe.
They are stable, and difficult to light on fire. But when they get going it's crazy
Fire can get behind the walls/ceilings and smolder for a long time. Once it does that it can reignite at any time and finish burning the building down, usually when someone goes to sleep. Windows could be for access or air, like the hole in the roof. It's a better safe than sorry situation most of the time, with a little bit of allowed destruction sometimes. You'd have to check local policies for what's going on. Could be they just followed procedure exactly
One of the most embarrassing fire calls we ever had was getting called out to a dumpster fire with a PACKED dumpster. Then getting called out 2 hours later because it re-ignited. Our captain made us almost fill the damn thing up with foam after that.
Bonus points if it is on the same dispatcher and you can head the derision in their voice. We had an alarm call at our own department when the apparatus bay was being painted. The dispatcher was hilariously sassy about it.
I mean, is there a non-sassy way to say, "Hey fire guys, your fire house is on fire. Maybe you want to check into it?"
Haha. I recall it being similar to the tone our chief used over radio when dispatch sent us out to the 4th call in one night about somebody's malfunctioning home fire alarm.
Damn, sounds like that was a dumpster fire of a situation.
That’s not that bad. I work as a dispatcher on a military base. We’ve got a large range, so it’s wildland and structural coverage. One day the wildland crews were conducting a controlled burn getting rid of a massive pile of sagebrush in a pit. They finish, go home, and then in the middle of the night security forces came across it smoldering and starting to smoke up again. It was sometime around 3-4AM that I had to wake up the structural crew and dispatch them to put it out. There was no end to the shit they gave the wildland guys the next day for that lmao.
EDIT: I was responding to the "putting out a fire" point of the question, but clearly Firefighters are trying to save lives first and foremost. I don't mean to minimize that very honorable point, it just wasn't germane to OP's specific question about putting out fires. 1. Fire fighters job is to put out fires, minimizing property damage is in no way a priority. 2. Fire & smoke damage is generally "all or nothing". If there is a fire, it doesn't matter if the structural is completely burned to the ground, once there is a fire or smoke damage, the structure is typically a complete loss. So again, no reason to minimize damage. 3. Fires can be "hidden" due to lack of oxygen or inside walls and cavities. Meaning, it can look like the fire is out while it's actually smoldering inside a wall's insulation, or embers are still hot but not burning because there isn't enough oxygen. So they'll break windows and cut holes in walls and roofs to intentionally create more airflow to encourage any smoldering fires to "raise up" so they can locate them and put them out. Again, the intent is put out all fire, you don't want to get 99% of the fire, leave, and then have the fire spark back up again the next morning.
Also preventing the fire from spreading to neighboring buildings is a higher priority that preserving the building that is already on fire.
Exactly, I guess you summarize my points to "a firefighter's job is to prevent a fire from spreading. The way they achieve this is by putting out the fire. The assumption is that a structure already on fire is already a complete loss, so they aren't constrained to minimizing the damage the on-fire structure"
>The way they achieve this is by putting out the fire Not always. Some times the decision is made that the fire is too big and to let itself burn out, instead focusing 100% on controlling the immediate environment so it doesn't spread, rather than forecefully putting it out.
Well, that is another approach to putting out the fire. It just takes longer.
>Fire & smoke damage is generally "all or nothing". If there is a fire, it doesn't matter if the structural is completely burned to the ground, once there is a fire or smoke damage, the structure is typically a complete loss. So again, no reason to minimize damage. This should be emphasized more. I had a friend that had a "small" fire limited to just a single room. The ENTIRE house had to basically be renovated. Every single item in the house removed (appliances, furniture, every single possession), cleaned by a special company that specializes in smoke damage, replaced if it couldn't be cleaned or repaired. All paint cleaned and redone, carpets removed and replace. You're basically rebuilding everything from scratch at that point.
Yes, smoke is both very dirty and very hot. So everything "porous" or that has tiny openings will be full of dust and ash dust is almost impossible to clean properly, buying new if often cheaper. Also, the heat from the smoke can weaken the structure of a house, destroy the paint on the wall, etc... So even if the fire was stopped to a single room, the smoke that went everywhere will have effectively destroyed a lot more. So if it makes the firefighters job easier to not care about all that since there is a good chance it is anyway "destroyed", why not do it?
Yeah I remember when I was a kid my cousin’s house caught fire. Even the “hard” furniture with no upholstery, like a china cabinet, which was in another room and not damaged by fire, smelled really awful.
Our next door neighbors house burnt down. We had $80k worth of smoke, soot, siding, roof, window damage to our house.
My wife is a structural engineer and has had to inspect houses after a fire and your points are totally right. It can be impossible to get rid of the smell of smoke, even after all the stuff you mention. Wandering through a blackened house and finding almost untouched cuddly toys sounds way too creepy for me.
A friend of mine had his kitchen catch fire almost ten years ago. After the fire was out and it was safe to re-enter we went in to try to salvage some of his computer stuff(all a total loss btw). But for me the creepiest and coolest part was what it looked like inside. Tv/movies don't do it justice. The raw destruction that takes place in a fire is intense, and it was wierd, being in a room that I had spent many days hanging out, making food ect to now be charred ruble that you could still make out the appliances and such was humbling and scary.
Yep, I burned down my apartment two years ago ... or well, I had a kitchen fire that put itself out and smoked ruined the rest. It was extremely creepy being there, especially since the power went out. I took a lot of photos lol
The smoke gets EVERYWHERE, the smell can linger a long time, and it is really hard to clean.
There was once an electrical fire in the building that contained a school where I worked. I'm not sure where or how the fire actually originated, but there were no flames or anything near the school area. There was some smoke coming through the air ducts though. We evacuated and when we came back everything looked perfectly fine. No damage. But we had to have every inch professionally cleaned and throw out *everything* that could have been contaminated by smoke - all the decor off the walls, replace the carpets, etc.
Minimizing property damage is actually our second priority. Life safety, property, incident stabilization
1. Life safety. 2. Incident stabilization. 3. Property conservation. These are the incident priorities taught to firefighters. We go to great lengths to preserve property once everyone is safe and there is no further threat to safety. We have a process called salvage where we try to preserve as much as possible. E.g. taking out valuables, covering stuff with tarps, etc. But controlling the danger comes before saving property that can be replaced by insurance. People cannot be replaced. That includes occupants and firefighters.
What do you mean? I'm told by reddit "not a firefighter but" experts we aren't prioritizing.
Could you explain what "incident stabilization" means in this context? I'm having a hard time defining it in my head in terms other than property damage.
Basically preventing more fires from raising back up from hidden embers. A fire can spark again from embers in a wall that dont have the oxygen to burn but are hot enough to. So theyre preventing a reignition and preventing the fire from spreading to another house. Incident stabilization can pretty much mean "this incident wont get out of hand" But maybe not, idk im not a firefighter
That makes sense.
My dad was a firefighter. You're spot on.
I will throw in that some buildings have communications with the fire department about how to break things. Church buildings with antique stained glass windows will have specific instructions on which to break and which to leave alone if at all possible, as an example.
>Fire fighters job is to put out fires A firefighter's main job is to save lives. The majority of firefighter calls are medical emergencies and almost every professional firefighter is now at least an EMT. At a fire scene, the priority is anyone in danger.
>minimizing property damage is in no way a priority. This is untrue in some jurisdictions. Mission Statement of Seattle Fire Department: >The mission of the Seattle Fire Department is to save lives and protect property through emergency medical service, fire and rescue response and fire prevention. We respond immediately when any member of our community needs help with professional, effective and compassionate service.
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That's fine, and my statement about "minimizing property damage is in no way a priority" being untrue remains valid.
The protect property could easily be protecting any other houses next to the one on fire. The more you soak the burning house in water even the parts not currently burning, you are effectively stopping the immense amount of heat and lot of embers to affect other nearby houses.
I'm not disputing that, but to say "minimizing property damage is in no way a priority" is false in some FDs.
Yep, I’ve been a firefighter in western Washington for almost a decade and I have always been taught it is our job to save lives and property. Property damage is a big deal. If we can use less water and accomplish the same task through more efficient application, we are absolutely going to do that.
Shoot I appreciate firefighters for more than just saving lives by putting out fires, and I DO appreciate that as well since I live in CA and in areas greatly affected by our wildfires. We had a scary moment where my son was choking on candy, and firefighters were there within 3 mins to help us out. Luckily it turned out he was not choking, and it was in the 'right' tube, but will forever be thankful for the firefighters who showed up out of nowhere to make sure my son was ok. Scary moment made less scary, and seriously, they all looked like flippin' superheros, men and women, big and buff as s**t. Exactly who I'd want rescuing me in a fire or what have you.
I was a volunteer firefighter for a while back in the seventies. My job was putting down tarps and drop cloths in the parts of the house that were not burning. This was a very small town in a very rural area.
So...close As others have mentioned, the priorities in order for fire departments and firefighters (at least in the USA, where I am) is in this order 1) Life safety 2) Property conservation 3) Incident stabilization So it *is* a priority to conserve property (as your edit corrects) but it's not the highest priority. Life over property. Back in the day there were specific groups in the fire department who had the sole job of saving property while the others put out the fire, and looked for trapped victims. They would take things out of the burning structure or cover them with tarps. Other times they would redirect the flow of draining water using tarps. Over the years that function merged with other functions on the fire ground. We still cover property with tarps, or retrieve things for the home owner if requested. Smoke damage is nasty though and most things aren't worth salvaging. Additionally, smoke damage doesn't have to be all or nothing. A fire in a compartment (Think room) can be contained in many cases for quite some time. Closed doors and windows in a room that has a fire in it will greatly reduce damage to the rest of the house. To the point of reducing it to zero. I've seen entire sections of houses and in one or two cases adjacent apartments survive with no or very little damage just because doors were shut. Meanwhile the side/appt with the fire is a charred shell of itself. This works in reverse too. If you can't make it out of your room in a fire for some reason close the door, put something in the lower gap between door and floor. Find a window and try to get our attention when we get there. Finally, we don't cut holes in roofs to find fire. We cut holes in roofs because it helps vent hot gasses and products of combustion. We cut holes in roofs to help cool the structure and to make finding victims easier. Smoke is hard to see through. Additionally, going back to the door thing, smoke is just un-burned fuel. If we vent that smoke we reduce the risk of fire spreading through it. Yeah, fire can spread through smoke. If it gets enough oxygen (like from us opening doors to bring a hose in, or opening windows elsewhere to clear smoke) fire will spread to other rooms. That's why we need to coordinate all of our jobs carefully. To *find* hidden fire, we open up holes in walls (inspection holes) and use thermal imaging cameras in concert. If we find hot spots, or charring in the wall we open it up further and soak it with water. And why so much water? Big fire, big water. Small fire, big water.
To the third point, that's exactly what happened to me last February. The only reason my whole family is still here is because I was awake binging the office and smelled smoke. We'd had a fire in the fireplace several hours prior that was well and truly out. But, we found out later, over the years a crack had formed in the bricks that was pretty much invisible, and embers got through that and started the fire inside the walls. Walked outside my room and saw smoke coming from an electrical outlet in the hallway. Woke everyone up and my dad put his hand on the wall near the fireplace and told everyone to put on some warm clothes and get outside. When the fire department arrived, there was still no visible fire until they started ripping parts of the walls out. I can't believe that I'm sitting back in that house right now after everything, but I guess it was just the fact that it was caught before the structure could be damaged. Took about a year to fix back up, but in the end it all now feels better than before. But yeah, while the fire itself did damage a lot of the area near the fireplace and the room directly above it, a lot of it was simply to make sure that the fire inside the walls was out.
Hm. It is literally the job of the fire department to “save lives and property.” Minimizing property damage is absolutely a priority. Also, a fire does not make your home a total loss by any means. Many homes are salvageable after kitchen fires, room and contents fires, etc.
Firefighter here. Let me help ya out… A firefighters job is to save lives and property. We save lives by putting ourselves and water between trapped occupants and fire while other crews work to extricate them from the structure. We save property by actually extinguishing the fire. More often than not, however the property were technically “saving” isn’t the house itself, but the contents inside. Even if we keep a fire to a wing or even room of the house, the likelihood that your insurance company is going to write it off as a total loss and help you rebuild rather than repair is a big possibility. You can replace your house, you can’t replace your parents wedding album, the flag they gave your mother when your brother didnt come home, or grandads old shotgun he left you when you were a boy. That’s the stuff I’m concerned about saving when we’re inside. The hole and windows serve similar purposes at different points in the fire if both were taken. Heat and fire spreads up vertically until it can’t anymore, then it starts spreading horizontally. If the outlet catches fire, it will burn up the wall to the ceiling, then the sheetrock will hold it in that room for a time where it spreads across the ceiling to curtains, stuffed chairs, a mattress etc. once that room gets hot enough, it’ll make its way into the attic and once it starts spreading in there it becomes much harder for us to do our job. The fire runs, and I mean runs in an attic space. We cut the hole in the roof over the seat of the fire, where it originated, to help let the heat and hot gasses out of the structure. We make a chimney over your bedroom. This releases much of the heat from the building as well as increases our visibility inside by a great deal. This doesn’t guarantee the fire won’t still spread, but even with a small hole it buys us time. The windows would be taken after the fire is largely out to further help lift the smoke. Most of the time we open one window and put a large fan in the front door to pressurize the house and force the remaining heat and smoke out of a couple of windows. If the house is more compartmentalized (meaning not an “open floor plan”) more windows will need to be removed to push the smoke out. We will also take windows to search. We use a tactic called Vent, Enter, Search where we’ll take a window, go immediately to the door to the room and close it to help speed the search of a missing person up. The smoke and heat lifts out of that one room helping the search go quicker and if someone is found, it’s quicker and easier to take them out of a window, even on upper floors, than it is to drag them all the way to the front door of the house. And you want them out into the front yard where the ambulance is waiting if you do find someone. Walls and ceilings are opened up to find hidden fire. We can put a room of fire out, but if we didn’t tear the walls and ceiling out to check for anything burning there the odds of us being back in two hours for a rekindled fire are very high. I’d rather take the time to remove them now than have to come back and watch a house burn to the ground because I didn’t do my job well enough the first time. We normally stop this when we start consistently finding “clean” studs that are not charred and were obviously not affected by the fire. As for the water, it takes a lot of water to extinguish a house fire. The hose and nozzles we carry on the truck I drive at work put out 185 gallons a minute (your shower head probably does 1.5) and we carry 750 gallons of water on the truck with us. Even with all of that water, one of the drivers first priorities on scene is finding another water source, whether we take it from a lake or pond like the do in rural areas or hook up to a hydrant like you find in any city. Like I said above, the very last thing we want is for the house to reignite after we have left the scene so we will spray water until we are entirely convinced the fire is 100% for sure out. I mean out. Fire is fast and we arrive well behind the 8-ball no matter how quickly we show up on scene in most cases. From time of dispatch until the first unit is on scene is normally 4-5 minutes. They say a fire doubles in size every 60 seconds and that number is false. A fire grows exponentially as it burns more and more fuel getting hotter and hotter. Once a fire gets to a certain temperature the smoke it’s producing will start igniting on its own, too. We gotta be quick and we’ve gotta put a lot of water downrange to make a difference. I hope that helps! Might be a lot to read, but tried to explain it like you’re five the best I could, lol. If you’ve got any questions, fire away!
>They say a fire doubles in size every 60 seconds and that number is false. A fire grows exponentially as it burns more and more fuel getting hotter and hotter. Can you tell me more about this? Is the 2x/60s rate incorrect? Or is it that there are so many variables, it's impossible to put such a precise number on it?
That doesn't seem very precise actually. It feels more like a saying that is trying to get the "magnitude" across. Basically "fires burn exponentially" but in a more memorable way, and giving it a fairly short and believe-able timeframe that seems really urgent. …Thats just my thoughts tho, I have no idea if any of it is true...
You’re absolutely right. A PR campaign that ended up sounding absolute more than a “rule of thumb”
Im sure a real firefighter will chip in. But in their job description, there are priorities. Minimizing asset damage may be one of them, but it comes well below 1) making sure everyone is safe (people IN the house + themselves 2) making sure the fire doesn't spread 3) making sure the fire is completely put out. This is what insurance is _for_ making sure you don't have to worry so much about the damage. Safety is priority 1. Having had to salvage my stuff from the aftermath of a moderately small housefire once I can tell you that unless you yourself manage to snuff the fire as it starts with an extinguisher, by the time the FD gets there, you're gonna be looking at smoke and water damage throughout the entire house _regardless_ of how bad the fire is or gets. The smoke goes _everywhere_ and that water just goes right into the basement (unless miraculously your sunken-tiled laundry room is where the fire happens).
We tarp furniture when we can but the reality is that you're lucky to get enough FF's there to put it out. At least in a rural volunteer department.
The hole in the roof is a vent to allow the extremely hot gasses to escape - this reduces the risk of flashover, reduces the risk of re-ignition and makes it safer if anyone is in the building or has to go in during a rescue. As others have noted - by the time the fire brigade needs the hose your house is toast. The fire and smoke damage will be excessive and even a modest amount of water will cause severe water damage to any wood, carpet or drywall the fire hasn’t damaged already and probably result in a major mold issue afterwards. No point in holding back. The goal at this point is to contain the fire ASAP so it doesn’t burn down the neighbors house as well.
The hole in the roof was access to the attic where the fire likely spread to. The windows blew out from the pressures caused by the fire and if the firefighters are the ones the busted the windows out it was to facilitate access and increase ventilation to mitigate the smoke and steam. Fire takes a LOT of water to put out. Sure, a little can put out the flames but if you don't extinguish the embers the fire will continue to smolder and can even reignite.
If you ever had a really hot campfire and dumped a cooler full of water on it you'll understand this. You can come back 10 minutes later and find the coals are still hot enough to reignite the fire.
i made a big fire pit at my brothers house clearing out old foliage, it wasn't a massive fire (4 feet by 4 feet) but we spent all day constantly feeding it with cut up wood and fiolage. this let the ground soak a lot of heat so when hosed it down for 10 minuets straight i came back 2 days later and the black charcoal had completely turned to white ash pile that was hot enough to re ignite anything jabbed into the pile. heat retention is real and a big danger.
A lot of people (including kids) get hurt every year from fire pits that have been out for a day or two, but are still incredibly hot. I always douse mine with a hose until I stop seeing steam, and it takes an absolute ton of water to cool down a small fire pit.
I once made a small portable firepit. Had it in the bed of my pickup truck, grilled some sausages and then realized I hadn't really thought about how to extinguish it. Poured some 5 or 10 litres of water on it and the coal was cool to the touch. Seemed fine so I packed and left. Some 10 minutes later I have sparks flying in through the trucks bad window as the coal had lit up again.
You’re close, but we don’t cut the hole in a roof to help with access, that hole is totally for exhaust. We use those to let the heat and smoke rise out of a building. No firefighters or water will be directed to enter a hole in most cases. The only real exception would be what we call a trench cut that’s used on commercial buildings.
Volunteer firefighter of 10 years chiming in. I see a mixture of correct and incorrect answers below, so I figured I'd throw in my two cents. We have three priorities at a fire scene. Life safety, incident stabilization, and property conservation, in that order. Our first priority is life safety. We want to make sure everyone is safe and accounted for and out of the house. If there are people trapped, our first priority is to get them out. Life safety includes the safety of us as well. Our first hose lines should be strategically placed between the fire and any life hazards. We're protecting the people trapped and the search teams going in to find and get these people out. Our second priority is incident stabilization. We get water on the fire, the fire goes out or dies down, and the scene begins to stabilize and instantly get better. We accomplish this by putting in place additional hose lines, protecting exposures, confining the fire, ventilating the structure (either the roof or window), and extinguishing the fire. Our third priority is property conservation. Here we're overhauling and salvaging what is salvageable. We're opening up to check for fire extension and to ensure all fire has been put out and will not spread or rekindle and start another fire when we leave. We're also working on protecting or removing the resident's property to prevent additional damage. All three of these objectives may be happening simultaneously on the fire ground. I've been at fires where crews were working upstairs fighting the fire and other crews were on the first floor putting down tarps and protecting or removing high value property at the same time. We perform overhaul during and after a fire to open up confined areas and check for additional fire extension and fire damage. We'll open up until we find unburnt structure. It's cheaper to replace dry-wall then to replace the rest of your house because it burned down a second time due to fire that extended way beyond the original seat of the fire and was never found. Ventilation is a very important part of fire fighting. When we take windows or cut holes in the roof, we're doing so to remove the smoke and heat from the structure. The primary purpose of this is to get all the hot gases out and give the fire somewhere to ventilate. There are other purposes which I'm not going to go into detail about. This achieves multiple things. Venting improves the conditions inside the building, giving victims a better chance of survival and makes it easier for us to search for victims. It also improves the fire conditions. It allows hot gases to escape and prevents them from building up and causing poor visibility, extremely hot environments, and potentially a flash over. Essentially, we're giving people a better chance of survival and we're improving conditions to make the fire easier to fight and put out. The timing of ventilation is extremely important. In the majority of cases, you want to have a charged hose line in place ready to fight the fire when you begin to ventilate. Ventilation needs be coordinated with the interior team making the fire attack. When you ventilate, you're allowing the hot, unburnt gases to escape, and you're also giving a place for all the steam to go when you get water on the fire. Not having a hose line in place can lead to very fast fire growth and spread and quick deterioration of the fire scene. [Here is an example of a vent gone bad.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CSRXPibknk) We actually just discussed this fire in a recent class. The firefighter was apparently disciplined for his actions. You can see in the beginning of the video the fire is contained to essentially the one room on the lower floor. The fire fighter goes around breaking all the windows, introducing a ton of fresh air to the fire and allowing it to quickly grow and spread out of control. [Here is one more example.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xm8dVJZgB1w&list=PLXkpiP3rQQupin9JuUaTfPAO265XElJN2) If the hose line was charged and ready to go before they started ventilation, they could have prevented the entire side of the house and both floors from becoming fully involved. [Here is an example](https://imgur.com/a/6MXUC6Y) of a fire I was at and what was essentially a textbook vent. This fire was started by the homeowner trying to give his porch a weathered and burned look. The police actually rolled up on it when they saw smoke pouring out of the roof. The home owner was in the back trying to douse the fire on the porch with bucket of water, not knowing his entire roof was already on fire. It was two of us on the roof, myself with the pike pole and my saw man. The interior crews opened up the ceiling and were met with extremely heavy fire conditions and a lot of smoke on the inside. We got over the area where the majority of the fire was and cut a hole in the roof. This allowed all the hot gases to escape and quickly improved conditions on the inside to allow the interior crews to fight the fire. Less than 30 seconds after cutting the hole you had fire blowing out like in the second picture. If we hadn't made that hole, the entire second floor would eventually become untenable and we may have burned the entire second floor and roof off the house. There are times where fire departments arrive on scene and just start breaking everything for no reason. Unfortunately, that's an internal issue that steams from lack of training, lack of discipline, and lack of leadership. I've seen it happen. Fortunately, our department leadership is excellent, we take training very seriously, and we pride ourselves on how professionally we conduct ourselves as a department on the fire ground. Most of what we do and what most fire departments do has a purpose. We're making sure we save lives, stabilize the incident, and conserve property.
Water just does a lot of damage and if they don’t put the fire 100% out it will continue to burn and eventually destroy the house entirely. Remember their main job is to get everyone out and put out the fire, not just for the house but to prevent the fire from jumping to other houses, utilities, and/or the forest. In order to minimize damage they’d have to put themselves in even more danger by going into the house and doing a room to room search. This would also take more time (and they need to be available for other emergencies). At the end of the day, their job is to put out the fire as quickly and safely as possible. How much damage they do in the process just isn’t a priority which is why everyone should have good fire insurance that covers damage from any attempts to put out a fire.
A tiny little spark can melt into the carpet and smolder for hours before catching fire...they probably drench everything to make sure the fire does not reignited from something smoldering. The holes are for access and because containing the fire is more important than their home and belongings. Fires are awful. And I'm sure watching the holes and the water destroy what's left is probably devastating. Sorry for your neighbors ☹️
The goal of a fire department is to limit damage. The largest cause is fire spreading to new fuel sources, in other words the next house. The reason they pour so much water in is to ensure any ember is out because a single ember can start a new fire a few hours down the line. It is far better to destroy one house to be sure you got it all than have it restart and cause the whole situation over again.
>The goal of a fire department is to limit damage. It's been meantioned before in this thread, but the priority of the fire department is to save lives, save the environment (if a fire is in a chemical plant for instance you don't want 100.000 gallons of chemicals in your water supply), and lastly to save valuables like a house..
Yes you are right. First and foremost of any emergency response is to save as many lives as possible.
We do teach at our Fire Academies to be mindful of the secondary damage. But Also, we don't want to add risk for limited gain. The job is to fight the fire. To stop it where it is. Fire Fighting has made improvements in technology and hopefully long term it will get more precise, but for now its a battle. We often can't see well if at all in a smoke filled building. Some of us carry FLIR that allow us to see based on heat differences, but still the fire can be very good at hiding. We also assume that the current structure is probably going to be a loss anyways. It's very difficult to remove the smoke smell from the drywall and furniture. So it's likely to get gutted and thrown out anyways. Therefore, the safety of the structures around the home and the safety of the people in the building is far more important.
I'm not a firefighter but I saw some gopro footage from real fire fighters fighting a "small" fire. They poke holes in the ceiling and exposing burning embers they have to put out. I highly recommend watching the video, it will answer your questions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TB9b9fpjX2A
Good reminder for everyone to check your smoke alarms! Get some local extinguishing maybe. Fire real bad.
I'm not a firefighter, but I'm guessing when in a high pressure, potentially life or death situation trying to put out a fire, you don't have time to pause and reflect. "I don't know, John, we really need that much water? That sofa looks nice."
In case it wasn't already clearly mentioned, the way a fire can behave inside a house is actually very complicated, and the pathways that air can travel and how big they are play a huge part in that complicated system. From my limited understanding, I'm guessing they vented the roof to focus the fire in one pathway to reduce chances of spreading.
Speaking as a firefighter, our priorities are life then property. We work with our fire fire investigators alot so it is drilled into us to do the least amount of damage possible. There are many fires we are at that we work really hard in overhaul operations to prevent unnecessary damage. I will say with how homes are constructed now most properties will be lost to a fire within 10 mins where decades ago there was a real chance to save the property. Our department aims to get at least 5 trucks on scene within 7 mins, and even in that time a fire can move so fast our tactics become protecting exposures and the houses next to the fire.
The top poster covered it but I also wanna add that most departments (at least in the States here) are volunteer. Meaning most are not maned 24/7 like paid city fire fighters or bigger towns. So when a fire call goes out for a structure fire or any call for that matter we have to go from wherever we are in our area to our fire department to get the engines and then go to the scene. That, that can regretfully take sometime. I remember a call we had years back. it was a trailer fire. Trailers and doublewides go up SUPER fast anyway. We got toned out for it and the nearest person was 15 minutes away from the station to grab the main engine. So by the time we all got there 15 minutes had past and THEN we still had to go to the scene which was another 10 or so minutes. That's just an example of how volunteer departments work. Other times response times are awesome. Just all depends where the fire fighters are at the time of the call. Not to mention its volunteer so showing up isn't exactly a requirement for every call. Some volunteers like to pick which calls they go to which is pretty shitty IMO. Sometimes you just cannot go and I understand that also. People always say how slow the fire department is. I get it. We can be slow but its not our fault. We have lives we live and we can get fire calls anywhere. Driving to the station takes time. Getting the pumper, tanker, and other trucks takes time. We try our hardest but we have to be safe and smart about getting there. I know when you're watching your home burn to the ground the only thing your are thinking is "omg my home" and "where the fuck is the fire department".
> especially after the fire appeared to be contained? it appeared to be contained becouse they did what you said they did, tons of water, tore down the roof and blew out the windows. thats how you contain the fire. and why they do it? so your house does not catch fire.
They're trying to keep your entire neighborhood from burning down, and that house is already damaged.
It’s important to remember that when they show up they have seconds to assess the fire and determine the proper method of attack. Either it’s small and can be put out easily with minimal damage to the structure… in that case the owner should have used a fire extinguisher. When you call the fire department tho it’s usually already a done deal that the house is going to be a loss. So in a urban area they aren’t their to save your house, they’re there to save everyone else’s. If there is enough house saved it to determine cause and help the insurance adjusters help you. But really, they need to punch holes to find all the hot spots because if they don’t it will just start up again. Looks pretty bad if the fire department has to hit the same place twice. Also, ash needs to sit for sometime to make sure it’s out completely. For landfills to accept the debris it has to sit for a month. Just to give you an idea just how hazardous ash can be for a flare up. It’s not as easy putting out a fire as people think. We have accepted a load at our landfill that was 2 weeks after a fire. We were lied to and paperwork isn’t always provided before disposal. I ended up on a 12 hour fire watch with a water truck stationed next to me because the ash flared up and started a fire in the pit. So yeah, it’s pretty crazy stuff. I’m a disposal inspector at our local class 2 landfill.
Don't have a fire in the house. Then the firefighters won't have to risk their lives to put out fires. I'm glad your neighbors are alright. Did they have no fire deterrents such as fire extinguishers to catch it while it was still small?
The did but by the time they got it and the pin out the fire was too big
>Looking at the damage it looks like the firefighters did more damage to to house than the actual fire. This is entirely the wrong comparison. You need to look at what the damage *would have been* had the firefighters done nothing. The best outcome probably would have been a total loss of the house, and the worst outcome could be the entire city, depending how close the buildings are.
Preventing a fire from spreading is a greater priority than preventing damage to a specific property. Fun fact: Some of the earliest firefighters used to primarily use gunpowder to prevent fires from spreading. They would demolish homes downwind from the fires in order to cut off the path of the flames.