Photographs by: Allan Shire
This was a "good fire", just as a "good landing" is any landing in an aircraft that you can walk away from is a good landing. In this case the husband and wife were awakened near midnight two weeks ago by the house's fire alarm system. They are alive to tell about this event and that makes it a good fire.
In an age where we have seen things continue to improve and technology constantly making things better, this house fire is a rude awakening. This very modern and nearly new home occupies almost the entire lot on which it is located, it might be described as an "open area" home with no basement and advanced under floor heating. How could such a modern structure built to the essential fire safety codes of this era
burst into
flames?On the right is a picture of what once was the sauna A faulty control system in the electrical circuitry failed and this couple escaped in their night clothes.
The fire department were on the scene as soon as they were summoned and within thirty minutes the smoke had cleared. Using foam to snuff out the fire that had embedded itself in the ceiling and roof meant that by poking a hole or two the fire crew were able to put out the blaze almost immediately.
Even though this house insured for over $400,000 and its contents were pretty much destroyed, its owners lost no irreplaceable personal belongings and suffered no injury. That makes it a good fire. The owner who was awakened by the alarms says she is ready for commercial endorsements of fire alarms because they worked.
The fire began here in this small room then penetrated the walls and ceilings to spread outward from this location in the sequence of pictures shown below. The Jacuzzi just outside the sauna all but vanished as its plastics vapourised into the heat of the rapidly expanding fire. In this portion of the house the floor's ceramic tiles have crumbled indicating that the heat in this part of the building reached a very high level.
The immediate response of the awakened couple was for the husband to dash over to this part of the house to see what was happening and he barely made it back out of the extreme heat and
discovered
his wife dressing,gasping for breath he urged her to consider immediate evacuation and they left the house. From this bit of information we can tell that they were extremely lucky. The plastics, paint, electrical wiring and construction materials are all composed of solid material that when heated turns to a vapour. The flames you see in a fire are gaseous material that was solid now vapourised and combining with oxygen creating heat and light. In a closed environment those gases will absorb all of the available oxygen while the temperature increases those gases continue to expand. If they make contact with fresh air they will instantaneously change from hot gases to
explosive
rapidly expandingflames.
Next to the room containing the sauna is this the dining room where the heat had broken through into the area between the ceiling and the roof. This area immediately became engulfed in fire producing huge quantities of superheated gases that moved downward depositing partial combusted soot on the walls down to the mixing area that is a clearly defined line around this room and everywhere throughout the house. The original Michael Longchild painting can be seen on the wall in this room.
This is the adjoining open kitchen where the paper towelling on the counter remains untouched telling you that the temperature at that level did not reach the kindling temperature for paper.
When discussing this topic it is so important to make sure that you understand these super heated gases that form at the ceiling during a fire are very toxic. Because they are composed of hydrocarbons that have a very similar molecular size as the oxygen molecule a few breathes of these gases are often the last breathes a victim will take.
The fire
alarm senses the presence of ionised gases that occur in the burning process and is set off. That means that those dangerous gases are in the house's atmosphere and it is time to leave. If your fire alarm goes off in the night, it is not caused by burnt toast so get up and get out, don't go looking to see what might be the cause. The man on the right was just plain lucky because so many people exposed to those gases are found dead in their homes by fireman. (This picture was taken at Christmas in that kitchen)
It should also be noted that these high temperature unburned hydrocarbons when contacting a supply of oxygen as happens when a window breaks or a door is opened will "flash" into the
oxygen source
with explosiveforce. This phenomena is referred to as a "back draft".
This couple are alive and well, their insurance will replace the furniture and by summer this house will have been essentially torn down and rebuilt. They are amazingly fortunate for so many people become statistics in an incident of this kind.
Might be a good idea to check your fire alarms and see that they are in good working order. Map out an emergency exit plan for you and your family and rehearse the essential rules about a house fire. Upon an alarm get out, don't even think about going back in and close the doors behind you. Closed interior doors in a building fire can detain and slow the progress of a fire considerably giving you and others a chance to get out and improving the fire department's ability to knock that fire down quickly. Large open area buildings like this modern house have few doors and fire can spread through them quickly. When you consider the value of such a building a sprinkler system would add so little to its construction cost, it seems hard to imaging why that was not part of the original plan.
Look at this picture carefully, this is the large living room that stretches out almost eighty feet from the source of the fire and yet notice the smoke band around the room. This picture tells the story of this fire, It shows the hot gas level as it built up at the ceiling and descended without enough oxygen for complete combustion, explosive superheated gases. Killer gases, no place to be for an oxygen breathing human.
