By Joseph O’Leary
NEW YORK, July 3 (Reuters) – Firefighters will spend the
next two weeks setting homes ablaze on a small island in New
York Harbor for one purpose: Saving lives.
Eighteen abandoned townhouses on New York City’s Governor’s
Island, formerly housing for members of the Coast Guard, have
been turned into a setting for roaring fires in experiments
aimed to develop new strategies firefighters can use to save
lives.
In one on Tuesday, a match was lit near newspaper in the
basement of a fully-furnished home. Within five minutes thick
black smoke began to billow from the rear door; before ten
minutes had passed, dark red flames licked around the basement
windows.
Firefighters gradually broke open the windows to change air
flow, seeing how the flames reacted to different ventilation.
Under real-life circumstances, air is added as soon as possible
from immediately opening roofs, windows and doors.
“They are bringing the lab out to the firefighters,” said
Dan Madryzkowsky, a fire protection engineer from the National
Institute of Standards and Technology, which conducted the tests
with the FDNY and Underwriters Laboratories, a non-profit group.
The idea behind this and other experiments taking place on
Governor’s Island is to find flaws in fire-fighting techniques
that, in many cases, haven’t changed in decades.
At the same time, modern households have undergone dramatic
shifts, with organic materials, such as cotton and feathers,
largely replaced by more affordable synthetic materials
introduced in the 1970s.
With the change came a disturbing trend, said Fire
Department deputy assistant chief Robert Maynes. The new
materials have shortened the time it takes a house to burn, and
cause fire to burn even hotter. Where more natural homes would
take 17 to 20 minutes to burn, modern homes can be engulfed in
five minutes.
As a result, Maynes said, an increase in burns and
fatalities started to show up in fire department statistics in
1983.
The researchers performing the experiments on Governor’s
Island hope that each home, outfitted with more than 100 sensors
which measure oxygen, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, airflow
through the houses and heat levels, would give them valuable
information in fighting fires.
Though an official report is set to be released in a year,
important information could be known minutes after the tests and
would be taught as soon as possible, said Fire Department
commissioner Salvatore Cassano.
Similar experiments have been conducted elsewhere, but those
are done at testing facilities where houses are built in
laboratories and conditions such as wind and temperature are
controlled. The Governor’s Island homes, by contrast, offered a
natural environment in everyday homes, allowing researchers to
test with more real-life variables.
“This is where science meets the streets,” said John
Drengenberg, Consumer Safety Director for Underwriters
Laboratories.
(Reporting By Joseph O’Leary; Editing by Paul Thomasch and
Andrew Hay)
