- Title:
-
Modern House Fires are Changing: What does this mean for fire services
- Date:
- September 2008
- Organisations
- FRNSW
- Authors:
- C. Lewis, V. Dowling
- Location:
- Australia, Australia
Overview
The International Bushfire Research Conference 2008 - incorporating The 15th annual AFAC Conference, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
The first step in empowering communities is to identify and then work with them to address the fire risks they face. As part of a strategy of identifying emergent fire trends, NSW Fire Brigades has entered into a collaborative project with CSIRO to research changes in the residential environment in Class 1a dwellings (houses), looking in particular at changes over the last three decades that may affect life safety outcomes for residents and firefighters exposed to residential fires. Stage one of this project involved a literature review, statistical analysis and a firefighters survey. The results of this stage were reported on at the Hobart AFAC conference in 2007.
This paper will discuss the findings and outcomes of stage two of this research. This involved a series of four full scale experimental burns involving older style room contents and modern room contents and furnishings. The outcome of these burns was that modern style rooms achieved flashover in 2 to 4 minutes while the older style rooms went to flashover in 20 minutes or not at all. This series of experiments confirmed the hypothesis that modern domestic fires have the potential to flashover in minutes with a far greater heat release rate than was previously the case. This changing fire environment has serious ramifications for how fire services work to reduce the likelihood of such fires occurring and of how fire services manage the consequences when they do.
