Are You Prepared for the Big One?
Proactive Planning Necessary to Manage Risks of Fire, Terrorism
If your building were to experience a major disaster, how high is your comfort level that you did everything possible both to prevent and react to the catastrophe? Preparing, for example, a high-rise building for a significant event is like putting a puzzle together. All the important pieces have to be in place, or the program simply will not work when the emergency occurs.
There is a tremendous misconception throughout the real estate community that their local fire departments are well prepared to deal with this type of event in their buildings. This is most certainly not the case. The Canadian fire service is, of course, a well-trained and highly skilled group of individuals.
However, they face the same problems we do here in the U.S. They know how to fight fires and handle emergencies, but they have little understanding of the fire and life safety systems built into your property. Knowing how to get around, cut things off or interface with the various systems is largely based on guesswork.
Regardless of how many times they walk through the building doing on-site inspections and surveys, they typically retain only about 5 per cent of what you tell and show them. After looking at 20 other buildings in a three-month time frame and then getting the alarm at 2:00 in the morning, you are lucky if they remember you even have sprinklers!
Pre-Plans
Fire departments need building pre-plans in order to operate smoothly and efficiently during a given emergency. A pre-plan is a word in the fire service community meaning information about a particular structure. What they carry on their fire apparatus is extremely skeletal and rudimentary. It is enough data to get them in the front door and not much further.
A true disaster pre-plan, or fire department resource plan, needs to be much more thorough and detailed. The plan must contain information pertaining to the building and its systems only, including floor plans of every level of the building. The floor plans should only show key information data, such as pull stations, fire extinguisher locations, etc.
This plan should also include a site plan (showing fire hydrants, fire department connections, utility feeds, surrounding streets and exposures) and the four essential primary riser diagrams: elevator, standpipe, ventilation and stairwell.
It needs to be in a format that is geared toward their way thinking and should be standardized with other properties in the community. That way, every building has the same type of plan, laid out in the same manner. Uniformity is the key.
Another thing that the plan should not include is life safety information, tenant procedures or evacuation plans, as this data is irrelevant to a fire department emergency operation. That should be in the next part of your disaster preparedness puzzle — the building’s life safety plan. Most of you should already have this in place, because it is usually required by local fire codes. The difference is that the life safety plan is designed to help tenants during an emergency, while the disaster plan provides information needed by firefighters. These plans must be separate and distinct, because they relate to two different entities and their needs.
Fire Warden Programs
You should also already have in place a fire warden program for your tenants, with ongoing training. Every floor should have at least four searchers, two stairwell monitors and one floor warden, with trained designated alternates as back-ups.
Everyone should be capable of reacting to virtually any emergency and, if necessary, performing a rapid evacuation and follow-up search of their floors or tenant spaces. Fire safety teams should practice with fire drills on a regular basis, at least once or twice a year.
Staff Emergency Training
Another vital part of this puzzle is staff training. Most building staffs are not properly trained to deal with emergencies. More often than not, they either do not know what to do, or even worse, they do the wrong things before the firefighters arrive to take charge of a given emergency. Building engineering, security and management personnel must be trained to deal with various incidents, including fires, bombings and other forms of terrorism, gas leaks, hazardous materials emergencies, or natural disasters.
They must know what to do and, more importantly, what NOT to do prior to fire department arrival. They should have set procedures, with periodic refamiliarization and training to ensure full understanding of their given individual responsibilities.
They should also possess a basic, yet thorough understanding of fire department emergency operations, so when fire personnel arrive on the scene of an incident, they know what the firefighters are going to do and why. That way, everyone can work together to bring the emergency under control instead of against one another, which is usually the case.
Also, always remember to test fire pumps at least once a year and emergency generators on a quarterly basis, under realistic conditions, with a full load. Ensure that standpipe valves are easily accessible and not frozen through lack of use or manipulation.
Firefighter-Friendly Buildings
Another big problem for fire departments is the fact that most properties are not yet up for a fire department operation. In order for a building to be firefighter-friendly, it must have certain things properly labeled. For example, on every landing within each stairwell, you should have three pieces of information clearly identified adjacent to each door: what floor you are on, what shaft you are in and whether you can get to the roof. It should read, “Floor 10 - Stairwell B - No Roof Access.”
Another important item usually overlooked is labeling electrical rooms throughout the building. This will allow firefighters to quickly access the floor’s disconnects during a fire, reducing their risk of electrocution when opening walls and pulling down ceilings when looking for fire extensions.
All main utility valves, such as gas and water mains feeding the building, should be labeled as well. This speeds up the operations and minimizes damage to the building and its contents. Also be sure that your non-computerized fire alarm panels are properly labeled, so that the firefighters know what device has been activated. This dictates how they will respond to the emergency.
If, for example, the alarm is a smoke detector or pull station activation, they will most likely stay with the initial response units and investigate. It will usually end up being a false alarm. If, however, the alarm is a sprinkler flow device, they will probably call for additional resources, as they may well have a working fire on their hands.
One last point to make here is that most people assume that firefighters know how to make their elevators work in Fireman’s Phase 2/In-Car Override, because they are the only people who use it. That also is not true.
Depending upon the manufacturer of the elevator and the model of the car, the steps to make the car move vary greatly. More often that not, the firefighters waste precious time trying to figure out the four- or five-step procedure for that given car while it sits motionless in the lobby.
Of course, the fire continues to rage on with possible victims trapped awaiting rescue. Label these important step-by-step procedures inside each car, just above the elevator control panel. The end result of these efforts is increased efficiency for firefighters and reduced losses for the building. Help the fire department become a more effective operational force when functioning within your building by addressing these vital areas of concern.
Interesting Firefighting Facts
Going forward to general educational issues, how many of you know that if you have even one fully occupied floor that is completely engulfed in fire in a typical high-rise structure, that it cannot be extinguished from within the building, regardless of the amount of resources deployed? Scary, but true. Few people realize, including firefighters, that the fire load, or combustibles in high-rise buildings — office, hotel or residential — has tripled over the last 30 years. The massive increase in fire loading has not come from bringing more items into these buildings, but instead is due to what these items are made of.
Thirty years ago the average fire load was eight pounds per cubic foot. Today it is 23 pounds per cubic foot. This compelling data is based on the gradual transition to plastic-based fire load. What used to be a setting of wood and metal office furniture, wood floors, metal typewriters and office machines, has now become a setting of plastic telephones, personal computers, modular furniture, synthetic wall coverings, and carpeting with foam backing.
The majority of the materials are now made from petroleum, in essence a solid form of gasoline. For example, using established formulas, a fully furnished 20,000-square foot floor fully involved in fire requires a fire flow of approximately 5,000 gallons of water per minute to extinguish the blaze.
The most water you can get from any standpipe in a high-rise building is 1,500 gallons per minute, or about 1/3 of the water necessary to overcome the heat, or British Thermal Units (BTUs) being generated by the fire. If the fire is not on a lower floor where it can be reached by fire department aerial master streams in the street, then the fire will most likely consume the building from that floor up.
Toxic Gases
Another overlooked fact is the toxicity of the gases being generated from these products when they decompose in a fire. They give off highly toxic nerve agents, such as hydrogen cyanide, vinyl chloride and phosgene.
That is the same stuff that was used in World War I trench warfare and in gas chambers. The majority of these gases are odorless, colorless and tasteless, so relying on human sensory perception is useless. In concentration they attack the central nervous system, bringing about rapid incapacitation and probable death in a matter of moments. Your buildings are loaded with these products. The only reason you are not dying is because they are not burning.
Simply put, you cannot take fire lightly in the first few minutes. Be prepared. Have a game plan before the emergency occurs and move swiftly and decisively when reacting to the situation.
Terrorism
One last point to touch upon is terrorism. It is here to stay. Both domestic and international terrorism have become a very real threat in today’s society and should be taken seriously. There are many terrorist groups with an agenda, just dying, sometimes literally, to make a point. Although to date Canada has escaped the wrath of these outfits, you have one thing going against you: you are an American ally. A few of these groups have now declared a holy war on both the United States and our allies. Canada makes for a much easier target than the U.S. in the near term. Although we both have free and open societies, leaving us quite vulnerable to a terrorist attack, Canada has even less stringent security measures than we do.
Ask yourself: what you would do if a bomb went off in your building? What if a toxic agent, such as sarin gas, VX gas or anthrax was released into your ventilation system by terrorists? Are you confident of being able to minimize your losses by being able to quickly and effectively react to the event? You cannot make your building a fortress, but within reason, have you done all you can do to make your building as prepared as possible?
Here in the U.S., there is a massive build-up occurring behind the scenes, with the military and fire service working together to initially get all the major metropolitan fire departments trained and equipped to deal with a terrorist attack. They are expecting an incident to take place in a highly populated high-rise district within the next three to five years.
This attack could involve the use of chemical or biological warfare agents being released on a large concentration of people, either inside or outside a building, for maximum effect. We have clearly entered into an era of terrorism that will eventually become part of our lives, so we had better get used to the idea and plan accordingly. We need to be proactive, not reactive!
Curtis S. D. Massey is president and CEO of Massey Enterprises, Inc. His Massey Disaster Plans are supported in 65 cities in the U.S. and Canada. Massey Enterprises, Inc., pre-plans office buildings, hotels, residential buildings, regional shopping malls, major data centres for banking and trading institutions, and train stations. The Plan has become a part of the regular training curriculum at several fire training institutions, including the Toronto Fire Academy, the largest fire department in Canada and soon to become second largest in North America.