RICK DAWSON
WISH
Reprinted with Permission

INDIANAPOLIS - Construction methods have a lot to do with how quickly a fire can spread. Brownsburg investigators say one method may have caused the roof to burn differently.

Last Year an I-Team 8 investigation called Hidden Risk showed that construction using engineered or compressed wood for floor joists fails more quickly in a fire that traditional wood beams.

In one demonstration, firefighters expected it to fail in about ten minutes… it took just three and a half minutes instead.

Brownsburg firefighters say another construction method might have played into Thursday’s fire . The construction of roof trusses using metal plates to hold wood together rather than nails... means the roof will often collapse quicker.

Pat Cremean with the Brownsburg Fire Department explains why. "With the prefab and the gusset plate construction, the gusset plates only go into the wood so far with the teeth that hold them in," says Cremean. "And usually you can have failure in about 20 minutes."

State Fire Marshal James Greeson says the balance between construction safety and cost is a delicate one.

"You always have to balance the building and the fire code with the cost and there's always tradeoffs," says Greeson. "You don't want to make a fire code or a building code that's so restrictive that is escalates the cost so much that developers choose not to build."

At the nationwide Fire Department Instructor Conference here in Indianapolis, Firefighters like Tracy Raynor of Boise, Idaho learn how to battle blazes in differing types of construction

"It shortens our time that we can spend inside, which is unfortunate if we're searching for civilians and things like that, but as an incident commander we have to be a lot smarter about what we're doing," says Raynor.

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