T he news reported a fatal fire in a neighboring county tonight. The cause of this fire has not yet been determined. The house was an older home, which tells us some things about construction features. I am going to try to do a breakdown of a house fire in an older structure.
No matter when your house was built, it must be properly protected by an adequate number of smoke alarms. I do not know if this house had any smoke alarms, but when a person dies in a fire, it causes a flag to go up for me. Smoke alarms may be present, but they could have dead batteries or no batteries.
Smoke alarms increase the chances of survival exponentially, which means by a large number of percentage points. Smoke alarms, if an adequate number are properly placed, should activate in the beginning or incipient stage of a fire, giving occupants the opportunity to escape.
Older homes are built stronger and can take a bit more fire than houses built with lightweight construction. Do not get me wrong, an older home will burn and the fire may be tough to extinguish due to the number of void spaces. The roof is stick-built, which handles fire better than truss construction. The walls may be gypsum, wood-sided, or plaster and lathe. The last two make a fire in the walls more difficult to deal with for firefighters. These are fires that require power tools instead of hand tools.
Why couldn’t this person escape a relatively small home? The fire and the occupant could have been in close proximity to each other. In other words, if a person smokes in bed and falls asleep while smoking, the person’s clothing and the bed may catch fire. A person who tries to fight a fire in their home is in danger of being overcome by the smoke or overtaken by the flames. It is your job to get out and stay out. The occupant could have been physically impaired and unable to self-rescue. If the house was not protected by smoke alarms, the smoke could have overcome the occupant before they were able to escape. Many people attempting to escape their house on fire who succumbed to that fire were found at the doorway.
There is another reason that prevents a person from being able to escape a fire. If a crime against a person has occurred, this could be the cause of a person not being able to escape. A person that tries to cover up a crime may start a fire. Investigators would have to put all the pieces together to come up with these findings.
Whatever prevented this person from being able to self-rescue led to their tragic death. A fire in your home is a life-threatening emergency that must be prevented at all costs. Older homes have older wiring that may cause a fire. Some fires are hard to prevent, so you must put every safety item possible in place. Smoke alarms are the most inexpensive protection available. If you can afford to put in a retrofitted sprinkler system, then do so. Where smoke alarms have an 85 percent survival rate for occupants, smoke alarms plus a residential sprinkler system have about a 98 to 100 percent survival rate. I did not speak about it in this article, but a practiced home escape plan helps when visibility is obscured by smoke and your house doesn’t look the same. We assume far too often that this will never happen to us, hence another fire fatality.
