The Issues Don’t Change

It’s possible to spend an incredibly depressing afternoon browsing through the technical reports of the United States Fire Administration. You will find report after report after report describing how fires spread in buildings where fire spread was supposedly taken into account. It seems as if we will never learn some simple lessons for which there has been ample supporting data for over one hundred years.

The first link above describes the Meridian Plaza fire in 1991, which was supposed to be the end of the argument about sprinklering high-rise buildings. Sprinklers do not, in general, put out fires but they can be very efficient at slowly or stopping fire spread. The fire at Meridian Plaza was spreading without hindrance until it got to the floors that had sprinklers. The laws that came out of this and subsequent fires are fine, but of course only apply in their entirety to new buildings, with existing buildings being grandfathered to varying degrees.

Grandfathering is a touchy subject. We all want the benefit of the latest research into safety; we all want to avoid the disruption and cost of ripping apart every building when the code changes. Grandfathering rules are a compromise that eases the new regulations into place and, like any compromise, they can lean too far in one direction or another. I’m one of the people who believes that basic safety systems should have limited grandfathering. It’s been 27 years since Meridian Plaza. That’s long enough for any property owner to deal with sprinklering.

Here are the most important lessons learned at the dawn of the high-rise age, based on various fires 1880-1910, with the culmination of the hard-earned knowledge coming in 1911 at the Triangle fire. Everything learned since then is helpful but less vital, or, worse, one of the old lessons learned again:

• Base building structure has to be protected from the heat of fires. All structural materials will fail if kept hot enough long enough.
• Egress paths have to be protected from heat and independent of other uses.
• Facades have to have enough fire resistance to withstand heat to prevent floor-to-floor fire spread up the exterior.
• Interior vertical openings, even ones as small as the goop around a drain pipe, have to be sealed to prevent vertical fire spread.
• Interior shafts have to be able to resist fire spread from the outside in and from the inside out. The tops of shafts are particularly critical.
• Automatic sprinklers slow or prevent horizontal fire spread more effectively than anything else. The distant runner-up is compartmentalization that includes automatic doors.
• Fire-fighters need full access to the interior and, in tall buildings, standpipes.