MFA #22: Death Prevention - The life safety benefits of compartmentation

A riddle: What feature does almost every dwelling already have, can prevent death despite a raging fire, occupants often neglect to put into service, but which firefighters can utilize to improve conditions?  

Answer: A door.  

Recent fire dynamics research has lead to recommendations for dramatic changes in our approach to structure fires, with debates and arguments naturally following as we attempt to understand the new information and integrate it into our practices.  The knowledge that water application to a fire only improves conditions, and that ventilation while a fire is burning merely worsens conditions, has proven so disruptive to our collective understanding of accepted firefighting tactics, and resulted in such passionate discussions, that it threatens to obscure the importance of some of the other research results.  

Potentially lost in all of this hubbub about change is evidence that supports many "traditional" tactics, some of which have even been reinforced by the experimental findings.  One of the more impressive examples of such a validated practice is the effectiveness of shut doors in maintaining occupant survival.  While the concept of flow paths, and their management, is filtering into our collective understanding and practices, even to the point of having us place barriers where none are present (i.e., smoke curtains), what I am focusing upon in this discussion are those barriers already available for use in virtually every building. 

Now, we have long known that closed doors prevent the products of combustion from spreading, and that routinely closing bedroom doors at night was a prudent safety measure.  What was striking, at least to this writer, was the magnitude of that benefit - the extended duration of tenability that simply leaving a door closed can provide to the occupants in the room beyond.  In some ways, the confirmation of the value of this passive defense was almost as remarkable as the debunking of the active tactics (i.e., attacking from the unburned side, and ventilation as a cooling method) that have garnered so much of our attention. 

Both of the UL ventilation studies - Analysis of One and Two-Story Single Family Home Fire Dynamics and the Impact of Firefighter Horizontal Ventilation (http://newscience.ul.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Analysis_of_One_and-_Two_Story_Single_Family_Home_Fire_Dynamics_and_the_Imapct_of_Firefighter_Horizontal_Ventilation.pdf) and Study of the Effectiveness of Fire Service Vertical Ventilation and Suppression Tactics in Single Family Homes (http://ulfirefightersafety.com/category/projects/effectiveness-of-fire-service-vertical-ventilation-and-suppression-tactics/) - as well as the Governors Island (GI) burns (http://ulfirefightersafety.com/category/projects/governors-island-experiments/) utilized measurements of Carbon Monoxide (CO) and temperature.  The UL studies also included a specific analysis of the potential tenability of occupants, with a theoretical cutoff of 8 or 10 minutes to simulate the time of arrival of the fire department and cessation of burning.  (While such a benchmark is necessary to provide the ability to compare results between different experiments, it is recognized that our arrival is not so easily predicted or modeled, so that the actual results could vary with shorter or longer response times.)

The data collected was overwhelmingly supportive of keeping bedroom doors closed, with conditions remaining compatible with life beyond a closed bedroom door even after the predicted arrival of the fire department.  Both Carbon Monoxide and Temperature levels were less than lethal levels in those areas compartmented from the fire, despite deadly conditions in the remainder of the structures.  The opposite was also shown.  That is, that leaving a bedroom door open, even without an open window to create a flow path, allowed the conditions in that open room to become untenable.  For example, in the GI experiments, in one case the Oxygen level in a bedroom with an open door had dropped to 10% (from the "normal" of 21%) even before the window was ventilated, a deficit that would lead to immediate incapacitation of any occupant.  

The GI studies also looked at what happened to the temperature in a room that was at first open to the products of combustion and then had its door closed, a tactic that would be practiced by firefighters performing search, whether VEIS or from the interior.  It was demonstrated that this simple maneuver could reduce the temperature near the ceiling of a bedroom from 450 F to 150 F, and from 170 F to 120 F near the floor.  With the most likely location to find a still-living victim being in a location separated from a fire (See MFA #16: The Rescue Imperative - How to save a life at http://community.fireengineering.com/profiles/blog/show?xg_source=a...), the simple act of shutting a door to improve conditions is a no-brainer move.  Again, the fact that closing doors is good is old news to us all, but it is the strength of the data supporting that practice that is impressive.

Leaving behind for a moment the experimental burns, my department had an incident just last summer that demonstrated the benefits of closed doors in the “real world”.  On July 10, 2015, at 0126, we were dispatched for a reported fully involved structure fire with four occupants trapped, including 2 children.  Crews arrived just over 5 minutes later to find fire showing from the ground floor windows of a single family, cape cod-style dwelling.  One of the adult occupants who had already escaped informed firefighters that she had attempted to reach her 2 year old son, who remained in his second floor room, after she exited her window, but the steepness of the roof prevented her from making her way across.  A ladder was quickly raised to that window by firefighters, while a hoseline was put into play on the fire below.  When the window to the child’s bedroom was forced open, he was found awake and unharmed as his door had been closed to the fire beyond.  He came to the firefighter on the ladder and was carried down to safety.

Upon extinguishment of the fire, the corridor outside the second floor rooms evidenced extensive damage from smoke and heat, while the bedrooms remained pristine inside, an example that my Department has been highlighting at every opportunity since.  Newspaper accounts and press releases regarding this incident, including coverage of a visit of the rescued child to the Station to meet the firefighters who assisted him that night, have prominently mentioned the role that smoke detectors played in alerting the family, and how the closed bedroom door prevented a fatality.  Certainly, such protection is temporary, and uncontrolled fire growth would eventually overcome this benefit, but neglecting this measure would have guaranteed our actions would have been a recovery, rather than a rescue.

Regardless of our opinions regarding the tactical changes spawned by fire dynamics research, here is a finding that every firefighter can support and promote.  If we are to carry out our mission of protecting lives, we must inform citizens of this simple measure they can take that better assures their survival until our arrival.

MJC

The author can be reached at markjcotter@comcast.net