Not just what and how, but why!
Fire Rescue magazine Editor in Chief Tim Sendelbach recently raised a number of questions related to door control in his recent on-line article, Becoming Better Informed on the Fireground(2014). This article, has generated a fair bit of on-line discussion around the following issue: Which is a better tactic to provide a more tenable environment for … Read more
Social Learning Last week, at the Underwriters Laboratories (UL) Firefighter Safety Research Institute (FSRI) Advisory Board Meeting, we discussed changes in the fire environment over the last 40 years and also explored how to effectively roll out the new UL Vertical Ventilation on-line course. On my flight home, was checking Facebook and found several interesting … Read more
Each of the UL ventilation studies has generated a list of tactical considerations, many of which overlap or reinforce one another. It is useful to revisit the tactical considerations developed in the horizontal ventilation study and to integrate these with those resulting from the vertical ventilation research project. Download the Tactical Integration Poster as an … Read more
A pre-arrival video of a July 23, 2013 residential fire posted on YouTube illustrates the impact of ventilation (making an entry opening) in advance of having a hoseline in place to initiate fire attack. The outcome of increased ventilation mirrors the full scale fire tests conducted by Underwriters Laboratories (UL) during their Horizontal Ventilation Study … Read more
Even as a member of the technical panel on the UL Vertical Ventilation Study, it will take some time to fully digest all of the data presented in the Study of the Effectiveness of Fire Service Vertical Ventilation and Suppression Tactics in Single Family Homes (Kerber, 2013). However, the tactical implications presented in this report … Read more
Door Control Doctrine As discussed in my last post, doctrine is a guide to action rather than a set of rigid rules. Clear and effective doctrine provides a common frame of reference, helps standardize operations, and improves readiness by establishing a common approach to tactics and tasks. Doctrine should link theory, history, experimentation, and practice … Read more
There has been an increasing awareness that smoke is fuel and that hot smoke overhead results in thermal insult (due to radiant heat transfer) and potential for ignition. However, the hazard presented by smoke as gas phase fuel can extend a considerable distance from the current area of fire involvement. Reading the Fire Print a … Read more
This post will finish up with Captain Mike Sullivan’s Fire Attack Questions. In the coming weeks I will explore the research conducted by UL, NIST, and FDNY on Governors Island last summer (see the video of a presentation on this research at FDIC later in this post). If you have questions or topics that you … Read more
The eighth and tenth tactical implications identified in the Underwriters Laboratories study of the Impact of Ventilation on Fire Behavior in Legacy and Contemporary Residential Construction (Kerber, 2011) are the answer to the question, can you vent enough and the influence of pre-existing openings or openings caused by fire effects on the speed of progression … Read more
The seventh tactical implication identified in the Underwriters Laboratories study of the Impact of Ventilation on Fire Behavior in Legacy and Contemporary Residential Construction (Kerber, 2011) is the influence of changes in ventilation on flow path. “Every new ventilation opening provides a new flow path to the fire and vice versa. This could create very … Read more