Ordinary Buildings and Considerations

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Permalink Reply by Brian Jones on August 16, 2011 at 8:27am

Ordinary Construction, or "Main Street USA".  Concrete walls with wooden interior floors and walls.  Older type of construction common for main street store fronts.  Issues we face are obvious, fire eats away the wood beams fron the pockets within the concrete and the floors fail.  Concrete buckles and cracks in fire, so the collapse danger in front of the building is always there.

Apparatus placement can be a nightmare, these are usually main street businesses and the front of the store is usually choked with cars so placing a rig could be tough.  Closing down the road is always a necessity and getting some of the cars moved is a plus but doesnt always happen.

 

The buildings are usually built either side by side, or they share a firewall between two occupancies so the control of the exposures is going to be a problem if you dont get an aggressive start on the fire.  Get plenty of manpower there early to go into exposures and monitor them constantly for extension from the wood beams that share the same pockets in the concrete walls, the fire burns through these voids and spreads easily.  Also, being older buildings the utilities are usually run through the concrete wall by a lazy worker who just punches through with a jack hammer or other tool and do not fill it in with the appropriate fire stopping allowing un-restricted access for fire to spread.

 

My one major experience with this type of building was about 12 years ago, maybe more, about two towns over from us in the next county, Worcester NY, had a fire break out in a bar on main street.  It was Ordinary construction and there were a row of about 5 stores all sharing the strip connected with fire walls.  There was a museum, bar, Whols Department store, Real Estate office and a antique store in order.  Well, the fire spread from the basement of the bar and into the dept store and musuem before the first arriving units, and by the time we got there the dept store was just smoking heavily.  They ordered us into the real estate office to try and remove their file cabinets and computers and salvage what we could before the fire got there.  Then we were in the apartments above the dept store trying to vent the building and it got super hot within seconds and the smoke pumped into the place, our lieutenant at the time started yelling for us to get out.  After 2 minutes of exiting the building the store itself flashed over and flames shot out of the huge plate glass window.  Shortly after that the real estate office was going but we held it there finaly.  The construction was a major factor in the rapid spread plus the shortage of manpower in the initial stages.

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