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interior firefighting ?
any specific way yall do interior attacks or any usefull tips or tactics.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Michael A on
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Put the wet stuff on the hot stuff. Works pretty good. Sorry just trying to figure out what you mean by your question.
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Permalink Reply by Travis Skinner on
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interior firefighting isnt just about puttin water on fire and what i ment by this question is , does anyone have a specific way they do it or anything differant they do or a certain way they like doing things inside a structure when its on fire.
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Permalink Reply by Tyler Lyons on
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Agressive attack from where you can see the fire, some people feel you need to be 2' from the fire before you can open the line. If you can fight it from a doorway and use the edge of the door frame to protect if there is disruption in the thermal layer or steam cloud... Use straight stream across the top of the roof with short bursts (penciling). This will cool the thermal layer and when you hit the seat of the fire, it will not roll steam onto you or your crew... Short bursts with straight stream to the seat of the fire. Try not to cause water damage if possible. I personally like TFT fog nozzles, you can use a strait stream or fog when needed. Most places carry combo nozzles here in the NW. I think most back east use only straight bores.. but I don't know, don't work there.
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"You never want to attack the fire head on. Say for example, you arrive on scene and you have a working room and contents fire in the front"
For a room and contents fire, you absolutely want to attack it head on. If you have better access to the fire from the front door, go that way, if you need the back door go that way, you don't always say use one way or the other. Every situation is different.
If you know how to fight a fire, you won't push it if its done right.
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Now I see where your coming from. There is some great information posted already. I also disagree with the never attack fire head on. You really need to assess the situation and come up with attack plan. Yes you can push a fire through attacking head on but that doesn't mean never attack head on. Honestly to me anyways firefighting isn't a strict set of rules. Don't get a mind set of it must be done this way every time and never do this or that. You must be able to adapt to the current situation and change tactics. Let me back up a bit. Yes there is hard set rules as far as 2 in 2 out, PPE but the true point is saying you can only fight fire this way and never another is not true. Example we run CAFS (Compressed Air Foam System) absolutely love it. Other departments don't run any foam, some use foam with no compressed air. Is any one more right than the other? We could debate it all day long.
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Permalink Reply by Pierre-Louis Lamballais on
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Hi
First of all sorry for my poor english level. I'm French, living in Brasil and flashover instructor for years. In Europe and Brasil we don't use flashover container to observe, but to learn how to attack.
A few years ago I wrote a document, titled "tactical approach to structural fire". I'll translate it because of many misunderstanding, especially in the USA. The main problem is that you can do what you want on structural fire and maybe it can work. And as the number of structural fire is not very important, if you have the chance to kill it quickly, you will think your way of doing is good. Until you play the same game as in Charleston, Keokkuk, Winnipeg and so on.
First point:
What is a stuctural fire? It' a fire in a room, and this room is part of a house (or an appartement). The room is hot,and the house too. Outside, it's cold. So, inside the house you have a higher pressure than outside.
Second point
A fire produces smoke. Not because it's under ventilated. Saying under ventilated fire produce more smoke that well ventilatted one is wrong. When a fire is under ventilated, it decrease. In a structural fire, the bottom of the flame is very well ventilated and that's why the fire rise. But, due to the ceiling, the CO and CO2 stay there and create a layer of gas, without oxygen. When the flame increase in size, its top part start to be inside the CO-CO2 layer as its bottom part is in the fresh air. As the diffusion flame get oxygen by all its surrounding, the bottom part of the flame can get enought oxygen to spread, as the top part is under ventilated and produce smoke. As the bottom continue spreading, the flame inscrease again, and start to touch the ceilling and produce black smoke.
You can see that here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My_-5jhvv_0
Third point
Opening and flashover. In many cases, FF are afraid of flashover. But you don't have to be afraid as it strictly impossible to be catch in a flashover. What's happening are vent induced flashover which are trigged by FF themselves.
Read that:
http://www.tantad.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&si...
As you can understand, ventilation is a very difficult task and when we have a look at the number of accidents, we must stop using that. As if you don't ventilate, you have the time for you.
Fourth Point
Global situation. The strucure is in an over pressure state. As soon as you will enter, you will "put air inside". The smoke will exit from the structure and the fresh air will go inside. They will mix between the entry door and the seat of the fire. Saying "put water on the fire" is easy to say. Buy just have a look at your home: imagine your bed is on fire. Are you able to see it from the entrance of the house? Certainly not. What I've done on the tactical doc, was to analyse many accident. I discoverd they all happened between the entrance and the seat of fire. In fact the few meters you need to cross from the main entrance in order to be able to see the bed in fire. These few meters are the most dangerous but we can't avoid them.
The US way of doing is to ventilated, in order to try to win a race between the spread of fire and the exit of smoke. If the smoke go out very quickly, and the guy can enter also very quickly, they have the opportunty to flow water to the seat and win the battle. If the smoke stay a lot, As the fire is well ventilated you have two solutions:
1) the FF are not working fast, so the house burst in flame before the guys enter, then they will perform and exterior attack and let the house in a complete state of destruction
2) the FF are working fast, so they will be catch in a vent induce flashover and can survive only by jumping through window,which explain a lot the use of RIT instruction
There is also another detail, explaining some accident: look at the door of the room where you are now. Imagine the smoke layer is at the half of the door. This mean halp of the door is used for smoke to exit, and the bottom part is used as air intake. Now, imagine you create a smoke hole at ceilling level. As the top of the room is in a higer pressure state than outside, the smoke will go out by this hole, but fresh air from the inside would be able to enter through tis hole. But, back tio the door: previousli, top half of the door was for the smoke to go out. With the help of the hole, now the smoke layer is rising. And now, maybe only 1/3 of the top part of the door is used for smoke to exit. Nice, but this mean that, from now, we have not yet and air intacke of 1/2 of the door but of 2/3 of the door...
In fact, by performing a top ventilation, we help the air intake, as a second (and very bad) effect of our action. If the outlet is big enought, when the fire will increase, it will not have enought smoke to "flash", but if the fire spread quickly (which is possible with the help of the increased of air intake), you will "flash" the room.
Our way of doing is different. As the fire is waiting for air, we will not give it what it's waiting for. So we enter and close the door behind us. We travel the few meters from entrance to seat of fire, cooling the gases as they are the danger. For that, we use very very small burst of water in fog pattern. This cool a lot, and dilute the gases avoiding ignition.
Then, when we arrived to the seat of fire, we use solid bore to attack, but we alternate solide bor with fog patern. We use the two because we face two fuels: a gaseous one (big volume, a 3D fuel so we use fog against it) and a solide one (chair, sofa.. so 2D fuel and we use solide bore).
Trying to cool gases with solide bore is a complete non-sense. And also, trying to kill a solid fire with a little fog pattern is also a non-sense.
Best regards
Pierre-Louis
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I think you did a great job at translating. I wish I had pictures of a fire we had years ago. It was completely contained to the upstairs of the home. There was a perfect soot line on the wall of the stair well of where the smoke remained in the home. There was very little smoke in the downstairs in fact we were able to walk upright to the staircase and we began our attack. It was amazing the heat difference as well, you could feel the heat through the flash hoods as you worked your way up the stairs. But we were able to contain the fire to room of origin. Too bad the entire upstairs had massive smoke damage and the downstairs received water damage from the attack upstairs.
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Hi Michael,
Concerning the water damage, we can have a "calcul". In fact, a structural fire heat release rate don't depend on fuel, but on air. It's hard to think about that, so, during my course, I give a simple example: imagine you have a room with enought air to let the fire burn two sofas. If you have just one sofa, the max HRR of the fire will be the one of one sofa in fire. But if you have 3 sofas, as you don't have enought oxygene, the max HRR will be of two sofa. So in this case, the limit came from air.
Some will answer "Yes but we have windows". Or course. But windows will renew air, and are not able to put inside the room more air than the volume of room can contain.
Knowing that, we can compute the max HRR of a fire. It came from what we know as the Thornton rules. Hard to set in a correct manner, but what we can say is that, with a room with ceiling at 8 feet, for each 3 feet square of surface, we can rise up to about 1.2 Mw.
This mean a dining room of 6mx6m so of about 19x19 feet (large!!) can produce about 43Mw. A liter of water can absord more than 2Mw. This means, with only 25 liters of water (7 gallons) you can kill such a fire...
Of course, it's a theorical approach.But if we multiply by 10 (which is a big variation) the volume of water, we get only 70 gallons...
And we must admit that, if we have water dammage, maybe there is something wrong somewhere.
I'll open an other post with some pictures
Best regards
Pierre-Louis
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Permalink Reply by Mike Schlags (Captain Busy) Retd on
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Qu'est-ce une réponse exceptionnelle Pierre. Merci beaucoup de partager la façon dont votre train et de répondre aux feux intérieurs. Il montre encore une fois à quel point les mêmes que nous sommes vraiment. Je n'ai pas regardé votre profil encore, mais je suppose que vous êtes encore au Brésil? Pourquoi diable avez-vous quitté la France pour le Brésil? Sauf bien sûr si vous vivez dans un paradis tropical ou quelque chose comme ça ... : D Restez frère coffre-fort, CBz
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Yes we could have less water damage. But its truly a hard thing to control while fighting, quite a bit of water was used to cool the air enough to gain access. I wish we only used 70 gallons. But I can say when in the fire water rates and gallons coming out of the nozzle doesn't cross my mind. Should it? Yes it should does it mean I spray water for the sake of spraying. No. I probably need more training. I will be first to admit that.
Only last few years have I paid any attention to water usage. Thats only because I am now the engineer and I'm on pump panel. So I watch my gauges and watch the water usage counter go up and up. We have no pressure hydrants in my district all water used comes from tanker shuttles. And drop tank on the ground behind my engine is my only source.
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My wife is high rank officier at the Brasilia Fire Service. :)
And in comparison with her beauty, 10 hours of plane are nothing.
I'm still giving course in Europe but we're working to have a school in Brasilia, for FF all around the world. Weather is fine, cost of life is low, and we have a school for about 100 students with rooms, barbeuce, swimming pool and so on. I hope we will have our first flashover instructor course here in a few month and we will be pleased to have FF from USA and other countries.
Thanks for you message
Pierre-Louis
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