Firefighter Research Papers

This tragic fire demonstrated how the fire inspections and precautions were noticeably lacking safety for these workers even though “a little more than five months before the tragedy Firemen Edward F. O’Conner made a routine inspection and said the Asch Building was ‘good’ and the building was ‘fireproof’”(28). The fire finally died down with over one hundred dead bodies piled along the streets. Sunday morning “thousands of people began to form into a slowly moving parade around the city blocks”(89). The people were walking in honor of these workers and would go around trying to identify the bodies and confiscate any items the bodies my have possessed for reminiscences. On the other hand, the departments felt immediate quilt for not stepping in to fix the Asch building before, because the departments knew of the horrible safety and health precautions the Asch building had but nobody emphasized the problems. “But who was to blame?” (113). Chief Croker was quick to blame

We are the most technically advanced nation in the free world but yet we have not been able to reduce the number of firefighter fatalities over the years. Its one of the great mysteries of the world today. Our gear is better than what they wore thirty years ago, its better than what they wore ten years ago and we still lose an average of one hundred firefighters every year. I know that not all are dying in structure fires but just one is one too many.

One man saw the fire and tried to get someone to use the fire box to get the fire department to send a fire truck. Sadly he had no such luck in notifying them. Fire boxes were boxes located on the street corner for people to use to alert the closest fire department, because telephones were not commonly available at that time. The other man just insisted that a fire truck had probably already been called and was on its way. The fire was so destructive because there were many mistakes and dangerous

Three members were attending to the apparatus and wading in the foam-water-petroleum mixture which was accumulating on the ground. Commissioner Rizzo and Gulf Refinery manager Jack Burk were on an overhead catwalk nearby observing the fire fighting operation. Without warning the accumulating liquid surrounding Engine 133 ignited, immediately trapping the three firefighters working at Engine 133. Instinctively and without hesitation other nearby firefighters dove into the burning liquid to rescue their comrades, not aware of the danger to themselves. Five more firefighters would be consumed by the advancing fire. The flames just engulfed them," said Commissioner Joseph Rizzo, describing how he escaped the first of dozens of explosions but looked back to see three of his men sealed in flames.

The crew was not prepared for the fire when it suddenly arrived. A wave of fire, heat, and smoke over took them by surprise, Eight of the crew deployed their shelters on the road and the two civilians took shelter with one of the crew members. The squad boss was high above the road in the rock scree watching the fire. He ran down towards the road but couldn’t get there before the fire arrived, He turned around and ran back up the slope were the other four crew members and the crew boss was.

This alone would have help suppress and extinguish the fire before it got out of control. The only other suppression and detection systems to stop the fire either failed or were not present. There were only seven exits, four elevators with only one of them fully functional, two stairways down to the street but one the doors were locked, and one fire escape which was too narrow for a safe exit. The only elevator that was fully functional failed just after a few trips up and down. The one door to the stairway that was not locked was already engulfed in flames. Some of the workers were able to get to the roof but others who were trapped to extreme measure to get out of the fire. As the firefighters arrived, they watched as workers jumped form the eighth floor crashing on the concrete below. They attempted to put out a safety net but it quickly ripped under the weight and force of the falling workers. It only took 18 minutes for the fire to take all 145 workers. This incident caused an outbreak and forced safety measures to be enforced.

On the night of October 8, 1871 at 9:00pm, a horrible fire broke loose. Very dry weather, leaving the ground dry, the wooden city vulnerable. The abundance of wooden buildings a fire started in a barn, outside in Chicago behind the home of Patrick and Catherine O’Leary at 13 Dekoven street. The Great Chicago Fire people are saying was caused by the cow of Patrick and Catherine O’Leary kicked a lantern. No one really doesn’t know how this great fire was started but some theories say humans or a matador caused this fire.

The factory normally employed 500-600 employees mostly immigrants, in which most worked nine hours a day. The fire began around 4:40 in the afternoon in a scrap bin under a cutters tables on the eighth floor. It is suspected that a match or a cigarette in the scrap bin caused the fire. The first alarm was set off buy a passerby at 4:45 who saw smoke coming from the building (Wikipedia Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, n.d.). A bookkeeper on the eighth floor was able to call and warn the tenth floor of the fire and those people along with the owners were able to escape via the roof. The means of egress were very sparse and most were locked. The man with the key to unlock the doors escaped the fire without unlocking most doors. At the time of the fire the only safety measures available for the workers were 27 buckets of water and a fire escape that would collapse when people tried to use them (The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911, n.d.). Most of the doors were locked and those that were not locked only opened inwards and were effectively held shut by the onrush of workers escaping the fire (The

One of the main reasons why so many people died in the fire was because of the lack of regulations for buildings. For instance, the fire escape was too weak to hold large amounts of people and it collapsed, killing everyone on it. Some were even impaled by a metal fence down below. In addition to the weakness of the fire escape, it wasn’t even long enough to reach the ground safely. Regulations

There was no sprinkler system inside this building but could have stopped the fire within a minute or seconds after the system turned on. This is another way that the fire could have been easily stopped before it turned into the massive tragedy that has been talked about as one of the deadliest catastrophes in New York City before 911. The New York Fire Department did everything they could to help extinguish the fire, but their ladders only went to the 6th floor, and the fire hoses didn’t reach past the 7th floor. This department had the most advanced equipment in the country and still wasn’t enough technology to save these women from burning to death. Some women chose to jump 80 feet to their death to avoid being burned to death, which is no way to die. “Within 18 minutes, it was all over. Forty-nine workers had burned to death or been suffocated by smoke, 36 were dead in the elevator shaft and 58 died from jumping to the sidewalks. With two more dying later from their injuries, a total of 145 people was killed by the fire. The workers union set up a march on April 5 on New York’s Fifth Avenue to protest the conditions that had led to the fire; it was attended by 80,000 people.” (History.com Staff, "Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire,"

To investigate this question to its fullest, it is important to look into sources that help shed light on what happened after the fire. An article from the New York Times titled MANY NOW TELL OF FIRE TRAPS, has many subheadings that go into depth about what was going on after the fire. The newspaper detailed that a civic committee was organized to collect factory workers testimonies

At one point before the fire there were as many as 20 fires in one week. With how many fires there were, the fire department was exhausted daily. There also was a limited amount of paid firefighters and it was becoming harder to keep up with the extinguishment of fires in the city. The end results of this fire were about “300 people dead 100,000 others homeless.

For years if not decades, firefighters have responded to a reported structure fire that turned out to be a fully involved single room. This fire scenario requires a core set of fire tactics and skills to control and extinguished the fire, but is it this simple? Perhaps twenty years it may have been, but new dangers are lurking in every scenario and may have detrimental outcomes for unsuspecting and unaware firefighters and victims. The National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) agency along with the Underwriters Laboratory (UL) have been conducting research to understand fire behavior and fire dynamics. This research is providing firefighters with new information about how and why

The sheer physical nature of fire is to consume all fuel that lay in its path. That is exactly what happened in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911. The building itself was reported to be fire proof, but what about its contents? The amount of unused cotton and other fabric scraps that were piled up were ample amounts of fuel just waiting to be consumed by a spark. The business owners kept what little exits and escape routes the building had locked for fear of a thieving employee. The employees mostly took the elevators up and down the building, limiting their knowledge of possible escape routes. Given those three factors combined, it was only a matter of time before disaster would strike.

Much like all events and natural phenomena that pose a threat to civilization, humans have learned to cope with and prevent the loss of human life and destruction of property in devastating blazes that can break out seemingly at random. Fighting fires was not always the science it is today, but due to the use of new technologies and the fundamental understanding of what fire is, how it spreads, how it can kill, and how it is stopped, our protocol when dealing with fires has increased our success rate and continues to grow with applications of engineering, chemistry, and meteorology.