Photo by Mark McLees The straight fixed ladder on side 2 is a dead giveaway that there is an occupied third floor. Note that NFPA 101, Life Safety Code, does NOT recognize these fire escape ladders as a required means of egress (refer to 101:5-2.9).
Perhaps your efforts would yield greater results if you occasionally tried this concept. Instead of pre-planning a specific structure, spend your effort on pre-planning an occupancy. More than likely, you already do this when conducting a size-up drill - you pick an occupancy (i.e., single-family home) and then speak genetically about its key features. In this way, your efforts are far more reaching and chances are greater that you and your crew will benefit directly from your pre-planning activities.
One occupancy which lends itself to this type of pre-planning is college student residences. From the largest cities to the smallest country towns, college campuses are everywhere. And while the construction features and protection systems vary from campus to campus, inside these structures you will find features as generic as the bathroom in a McDonald's restaurant.
When discussing college sleeping quarters, it must be emphasized that there are three basic arrangements. They are: college dormitories, fraternity/sorority houses and off-campus housing. Of these, dormitories are the most closely regulated and supervised. While off-campus apartments have no supervision, the owner/landlords usually keep a close eye on their income property. The specific occupancies which provide the fire department with the greatest challenge are sorority and fraternity houses.
In February 1975, three people were injured in a fire at the Chi Phi house in Amherst, MA. In January 1976, two students died in a fire at the Alpha Rho Chi house at Ohio State University. In August 1976, five students perished in a blaze in the Kappa Sigma house in Baldwin City, KS. In Bloomington, IN, one person died in October 1984. In 1990, three students were killed in a fraternity house fire in Berkeley, CA. And five students were killed on graduation weekend at a blaze in the Phi Gamma Delta house in Chapel Hill, NC, on May 12, 1996.
Photo by Mark McLees Plan for the worst- a hands/knees search in zero visibility. There will be lots of furniture piled into those tiny rooms.
No matter which part of the country you are protecting, frat houses exist in a manner which almost always appears to push the limits of what is allowed by code. A frat house contains many residents who are free to come and go as they wish, all with varying stages of mental alertness.
Because the construction features and built-in fire protection systems can vary from one frat house to the next we should look at common factors in these fatal fires which occurred in all parts of the country.
According to Michael Isner, senior fire investigator for the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), "The presence of...open stairways; combustible interior finish; the lack of...automatic fire detection and alarm systems" all contributed to the life loss. Alisa Wolf, editor of the NFPA Journal, stated, "The same factors are killing young people at frat houses today as they were 20 years ago." It is interesting to note that the catastrophic fires have occurred in frat houses, not sorority residences.
The broad scope of this specific occupancy cannot be completely addressed in this article. The intent is to bring attention to this ongoing issue, and briefly represent some of the features which will make search and rescue functions unique from what transpires in single- and multiple-family dwellings.
Mark McLees is captain of the Syracuse, NY, Fire Department's Rescue Company 1.
