Well if you can't stand the heat as obviously you can't you may as well put your shields up.
After following this thread from inception, it appears neccessary to weigh in regarding High Rise fires, heat generated, and extinguishment of those fires..
I am an Operations Fire Captain assigned to a Heavy Rescue in the 5th largest fire Department in North America. I have almost 27 years of firefighting, technical rescue and HUSAR (Heavy Urban Search And Rescue) experience, and have fought thousands of fires, great and small, over my career.
My hat is off to the brave and selfless brothers of the FDNY and their sacrifice. So many have paid the ultimate price. Fellow firefighters worldwide are eternally grateful for their pioneering efforts in fire suppression over the last 180+ years.
Some basic facts regarding fires, heat, and water used to extinguish high rise fires need to be laid out. The professional fire fighters here already know this stuff, but for those of you who have never been face to face with a fire in a high rise office building, I want to give you a taste of what it's like.
Let's begin with 'fire load'. Fire Load is the amount of combustible matter present that can act as a fuel to feed a fire. This includes paint and floor covering.
For a standard office building, the NFPA Handbook, 20th edition, calculates office fire loads at around 10 lbs/sq ft. For file storage areas the load goes to almost 17 lbs/sq.ft. For our purposes we'll use 10 pounds/ sq. ft.
When that fire load burns, we get heat, so we'll use BTU's to measure it here. Everyone can relate to BTU's, since your backyard gas grill has heat output measured in BTU's. The average gas grill outputs around 50,000 btu's at full flame.
The NFPA tells us that 17,000 btu's are created when one pound of average office fireload burns. Since we already know our office has a fireload of 10 pounds per square foot, our minimum heat output will be 170,000 btu's or over 3 backyard BBQ's at full bore
per square FOOT
So, take the figure above, and multiply it by one hundred for just a 10 foot x 10 foot area of office, and you begin to understand the heat produced by even a very small office building fire. Surround that fire with a reinforced concrete box, and where do all those BTU's go?
They go into
evaporating the water directed at it by the fire hose, and turning it into steam. In my professional opinion, in an office building with a 50'x 50' area burning, it is highly unlikely that
any of the water directed at the fire from a 2 1/2 inch line will reach the seat of the fire, evaporating as it approaches the fire due to the intense heat generated.
Several 2 1/2 inch lines or a monitor with multiple 2 1/2 inlets would be needed for such an area of fire.
As you can well imagine, put 3 or 4 of these fires on any given floor, and the resources needed to fight just one floor of high rise office building fires is considerable.
As one can see from the above example, hand held fire extinguishers are not an option. If we need to delve into the actual purpose of hand held fire extinguishers, I can deal with that in a separate post.
