"Disguised" Buildings

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Permalink Reply by Chris Fleming on August 27, 2008 at 2:45pm

Brent,
I hear you loud and clear on pre-planning, and for target hazards it's a great idea. Getting to the construction site and seeing how buildings are being put together is also great for preplanning and training. However, does a trussed-out, hurricane windowed, building with insulated pannels as walls still get called a "woodframe residential" with smoke coming out of it at 3:00 A.M. ? It's a super tight building with light weight structural members and heavy fire load and, as statistics show, very hazardous for firefighters. Will our members recognize this building as such? Especially if it's a new house in an old neighborhood. You may be able to pre-plan a development, but what about those "rogue" buildings? Same thing with buildings down town. Just because it has bricks showing on the outside doesn't make it ordinary construction. A lot of the newer commercial construction in our city is built more like "non-combustible, light weight" construction. Worse yet, it will be stuck into a block of "ordinary" constructed buildings. I guess the dialogue I was hoping to get going had more to do with accuracy in size up. Call the building what it is, if you know, and don't mislead the troops if you don't. There was an article a few years back about "hybrid" construction that talked about the problems encountered with these buildings, but have we adjusted our size up to deal with this? Thanks for getting involved, and let me know what you think and what you've experienced. Stay safe, bro!
Chris