Fire Hazards of Trusses: Sample Report
Structures often play the important role when a building is on fire. Upon many reviews, there are a lot of fires claiming for lives of the inhabitants of the building, but there are also some cases, which had taken the firefighters' lives as well. Such cases should not have happened, but limited information of the building's structures and length of fire could have caused it.
Chesapeake automobile warehouse happened to be a fatal case of fire (NFPA, 2002). The 12-year-old building was constructed under lightweight wood trusses. There were two steel frames and another brick construction located at the building. The trusses were built using the combination of wood and metal plates that joined them altogether.
On Monday morning, March 18, 1996, the repair shop operated as usual. The employees were coming along to start their first day of the week, taking up service works along the arrangement of the combustible store array of auto spare parts and liquid products.
There could be not enough time to check up all apparatus available on the store, or simply that the tool was out of order. Suddenly, a little malfunction had ignited a fire on the part of the store. Upon the absence of fire detector or indoor fire sprinklers, the assortment of aerosol, paints, repair products and flammable liquids in spray cans then fed the fire exhilaratingly. Some of them were packaged in cartons and thick cellulose materials, which caused the fire to spread faster than they had thought. In a flash, the fire climbed up to wood trusses, crackling up to the roof. Unfortunately, most was hidden inside the ceiling area that nobody could have notice how bad it had spread.
The firefighter crew came at 11:30 A.M., noticing only little part of the fire taking up the back part of the store. It seemed to be a manageable fire that the incident commander sent only a group of firefighters to handle it.
What they found inside must have been worse than what it looked like. The officer asked for another back up using radio transmission to the incident commander. Eight minutes afterwards, with the hard clatter, the roof collapsed onto the ground, trapping the firefighters. The fire, on the other hand, flamed larger than before. There was another transmission from the entrapped officer, but it did not convey very well. There was nothing they could do, as the fire was too immense to defeat.
It was fifteen minutes after the unit came to the scene. The accident ended up with the deaths of two firefighters. They possibly did not make it in the gulfing smoke, which intoxicated their respiratory system and the excessive burns.
The Risks of Trusses in Fire Cases
Roofing is the whole system that covers a building, and trusses are the good choice to support it. According to Federal Alliance for Safe Homes (2001), truss system includes "the top chord or rafter (where roof sheathing is nailed), a joist or bottom chord (where the interior ceiling is nailed) and angled pieces that form a web and are used to add strength."
People had been using wood trusses. Trusses are usually designated to fit the specific roof system, produced in even shapes and sizes, and then joined together with high accuracy to eliminate gaps. This construction gives the house enough protection to shelter the walls and floors so that they would stay longer in weather exposures throughout the years.
The common materials used for trusses structures usually varied from wood to metals. The metal plates put joints for the wooden trusses. This material is chosen for its reliability holding the roofing system for years.
However, for this combination, trusses also contain the high risk within a fire. A&R Truss Company said that this construction are combined one with another into a web system, supported with the main plates and metal joints. It is considered "separate, independent structures"; they do not depend to each other. The combination structure is only put there to support certain condition (protecting walls and floors, under normal circumstances). In the case of fire, when one truss get burnt and collapse, the other portion would remain stiff. It provides the time to perform the evacuation.
On the other hand, NFPA record on trusses collapse shows that the danger remains high with this type of structure. Trusses are assembled with lightweight materials for esthetic and economical reason. With its designs - might be specifically done for each building - trusses is reliable for its "loading capability over wide spans," that requires less materials as well as...
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