Fire Tragedy

The recent tragedy in Charleston, SC that killed 9 firefighters is a stark reminder of the dangers of firefighting. Their sacrifice is truly tragic. And almost certainly it was preventable.

The United States fire service seems to be more "tolerant" of fire risk than other countries. Our firefighter morality rates are generally higher than most other countries in the world. This should not be necessary. Every single firefighter death should be preventable in some way.

Nearly every year the statistics are the same. On average around 100 firefighters are dying. What's really telling is that this is grossly disproportionate to the general long term trend of decreasing emergencies and fires.

Why are we so tolerant of firefighter deaths? Not only should our mortality rates be declining in proportion to the decrease in fires, shouldn't we also see an added reduction in injuries and deaths due to our increased technology and training? It's not happening.

Getting back to the Charleston fire, I haven't heard many of the details. To the best of my knowledge many of these details are either currently unknown, or have yet to be released.

OSHA investigates each firefighter death, as well as NIOSH. I like to read the NIOSH reports. They detail what happened, how it happened, and what should be done to prevent similar accidents in the future. It amazes me at the things they detail in their report. Most of the time it turns out to be things that should be incredibly obvious. Like wearing your seat belt. Or using equipment properly, and maintaining equipment and apparatus. Many times it comes down to general training and safety issues.

Based upon what I do know about the Charleston fire, my personal belief is that this was definitely preventable. I'm sure there will be details to come out to alter my opinion in one way or another. For example, I listened to the released 911 tapes. It was only the police tapes, but from them I was able to hear reports of multiple trapped victims (which was contrary to initial reports of no one inside).

A trapped victim changes things dramatically. That gives us a reason as firefighters to be
in a burning building. Although we can never accept trading our own lives for those of the initial victims. From the rough time line I got from the 911 tapes, however, it sounded like the victims were rescued early in the incident.

So why were there 9 firefighters in a heavily involved building? Another important detail is that the building collapsed at least an hour an a half after the initial report. That's a long time for fire to build.

Building construction is a vital part of how a fire plays out. I'm not familiar with the details of the collapsed building's construction type, or the generally accepted construction types of that region. But based upon the type of store, and the end result, my guess is that it was some sort of lightweight construction.

Lightweight construction is great for the building owner. It greatly reduces the amount of construction materials necessary to build a building. It provides strengths equal to or greater than older construction methods which relied on a great deal of material. It's a win-win, right? Wrong. The one weakness in lightweight construction is that because of the reduction in the amount of material, buildings will fail much, much sooner under fire load.

In fact, I live by the belief that a lightweight construction building can fail within 10 minutes of fire load. And the most common outcome of failure in these types of buildings is a roof collapse. There is really no warning of these types of failures. The roof fails all at once.

This sounds a lot like what happened in Charleston. I really hope the Incident Commander and crew leaders were well versed in the dangers of lightweight construction, and took this into account. Unfortunately, I think it was overlooked, or even worse was not something they were even fully aware of. If it was, this was a completely preventable tragedy. In fact nearly every tragedy should be preventable.

Everyone from the IC down to the probie on the interior crew, should be aware of how building construction affects our response. If 9 were killed, there were likely others in the building at the same time. Did any one of them think about all of that fire load, and how it was affecting the structure? If all of the victims were out of the building, what were firefighters still doing inside? There was nothing to be gained, the building was well past it's deductible and was going to be a total loss. There was heavy fire load (it was a Sofa store: lots and lots of synthetic materials). After an hour and a half, even a traditional heavy construction building would be nearing the failure point. Why did this tragedy need to happen?

It may be a year before we hear a full report from NIOSH. I hope these firefighters did not die in vain. One thing that has definitely resulted is a lot of publicity from this event. 9 firefighters is a large number, even for us in the US. It is garnering attention. Let's hope at least the fire community can learn from this and prevent future tragedies from happening.