Post by RngrVnc33 on Jan 9, 2008 20:31:53 GMT -5
From the Bergen County Record
[glow=red,2,300]Mansions Rich in Fire Threats[/glow]
January 9, 2008
New Jersey - Modern-day mansions in towns such as Saddle River and Alpine are posing special challenges for firefighters, who face the prospect of encountering especially difficult search conditions and dragging fire hoses through home movie theaters or indoor basketball courts.
"There are more of them," Saddle River volunteer Fire Chief Brian Yates said of "extreme" mansions in the borough. "It's a lot more work, a lot more to think about."
Firefighters in several North Jersey towns must be prepared to answer the alarm at homes with as many as three full-service indoor and outdoor kitchens, multiseat theaters, multiple staircases, 25- foot open-air cathedral ceilings, elevators, open-air viewing balconies, indoor pools and ponds, cabanas the size of bi-level homes, and multicar garages that are below ground level.
"It is resource- and labor-intensive for firefighters," Englewood Fire Chief Robert Moran said. "It requires additional personnel and different strategy and tactics than it does for suppressing fires in smaller residential homes.
"You can't use the typical, normal method to search a 30,000- square-foot building," said Moran, an investigator with the Bergen County Arson Task Force and chief of the 55-member paid Englewood department. "You have to use search rope because you'd get lost in these homes in a heartbeat. They have large open areas, so you can't follow a right hand or left hand wall like we're taught at the fire academy. You'd get disoriented."
When Alpine's 25 volunteer firefighters respond to alarms, they're equipped with plenty of search rope, entering the home with it attached to them so they can more safely navigate smoky areas.
"You can take a wrong turn and fall off an indoor balcony if you're not careful," said Alpine's outgoing fire chief, John Veras. "And the indoor swimming pools ... you just don't know what's in front of you sometimes."
The first problem firefighters face can be getting access to the property. That sometimes means getting the entrance gate open.
"We're going to a mansion under the auspices that there is a fire in the home and if the gate is not open, we're going to get it open," Veras said.
Firefighters must then get water and firefighting foam to the home. It can be a long haul.
"Because of the 125-foot setbacks, Saddle River firefighters have their work cut out for them even before they begin to fight a fire," said Mayor Samuel Raia.
In a recent drill, a dozen Saddle River firefighters practiced techniques they would use to fight a fire with a winding, steep driveway on a multiacre, landscaped property. They started out with a 5-inch hose linked to hundreds of feet of 3-inch supply line to reach the door, and then 1-inch hose that they would carry into the house to suppress the fire.
"It would be a walk in the park if all we had to do was grab a 100-foot hand line off the side of the engine, walk up to the front door, go in and be able to move around and get to wherever the fire is in the house," said Yates, who heads a 40-member volunteer department.
Homes of higher square footage are equipped with four or five furnaces and multiple circuit breakers, fire chiefs say.
"Almost every single mansion" in Saddle River has cathedral entranceways, and firefighters are trained to fight those blazes as if they were church fires, Yates said.
"That means there are no fire stops, no fire breaks in some of these wide open structures," he said. "Floor to ceiling, a fire is free to go wherever it wants to and there's nothing to stop it.
"Laundry chutes and elevator shafts in these homes have served as unbroken paths for fire and heat," Yates said.
Saddle River firefighters carry a diamond bit saw to each call in the event they quickly need to ventilate a slate roof, which have come back into style as of late, Yates said.
The town's pumper truck is equipped with 5,000 feet of 5-inch hose, far more than most such engines.
There have been at least six or seven mansion fires in the borough in the past decade, most contained to kitchens, utilities, basements and garages, Yates said. During Tropical Storm Floyd in 1999, flooding in one Saddle River mansion caused the elevator transformer to catch fire.
A special challenge for Saddle River has been its lack of fire hydrants. The town is in the final phase of fire hydrant installation on its main roads, said Raia and Saddle River Administrator Charles Cuccia.
"We know we have a hydrant at the beginning of each side street," Yates said. "The plan is to ultimately have hydrants down the side streets some of which are lengthy and winding so we still need the pumper to be equipped with 5,000 feet of 5-inch hose and our tanker with 3,500 gallons of water. The tanker holds us over until we get our water supply laid in to fight a fire."
Mutual aid arrangements with other towns can also be key.
"When there is a substantial structure fire though we immediately go to mutual aid if we need additional manpower or because we need a specific piece of equipment," said Dennis Schubert, the Borough Council liaison to the Upper Saddle River Fire Department. "In the case of Upper Saddle River we are one of the 14 towns in the Northwest Bergen Mutual Aid, but there are nine mutual aid groups in Bergen County serving all 69 fire departments."
Alpine's Veras said his department is pushing for a water tanker that would ease firefighting on the northernmost section of homes in Alpine off Route 9W, an area that does not have hydrants.
It helps when firefighters know exactly what they facing, but that's not easily done.
Blueprints are available for each home in Saddle River, Yates said, but with a multitude of large homes in the borough's five square miles, the sensible alternative is to work toward computerizing records of all the structures in town.
"To study 1,800 blueprints and remember them is virtually impossible," Yates said. "Who would remember them? To make the system truly efficient and effective, the blueprints need to be readily available in-hand and computerization is the way for us to go."
Kinnelon Mayor Glenn L. Sisco, a volunteer firefighter for 43 years, said mansions in his town have not reached the extreme size of those in Saddle River or Alpine, but it's getting close. "We're getting up there," Sisco said.
Kinnelon firefighters often learn of what's inside a home through word of mouth or at Monday night team drills, said Sisco, 78. "Bowling alleys, you name it," he said.
"Home theaters have two potentials," Sisco said of dangers to firefighters. "People being inside ... and that it's a big space. A theater setting has only one [entrance] in and one [exit] out. They don't provide two entrances and they should."
Fire chiefs recommended a range of other steps to make fighting mansion fires easier and safer:
* Siren-activated openers that will immediately swing gates open as firefighters approach.
* Sprinklers in larger square-footage homes. "The fire service as a whole believes sprinkler systems in private residences will save lives and property, especially in mansions," said Englewood's Moran. "A sprinkler system should be required if a house is over a square footage threshold," Raia agreed.
* Signs posted at an estate to identify construction type and help firefighters determine strategy and tactics before entering a building.
"The uniform fire code calls for truss identification signs on truss construction on commercial buildings," Moran said. "It would benefit the fire service and firefighters if in residential homes constructed of lightweight construction there would be some kind of identifying sign outside."
"We don't get a chance to see these buildings we're not walking through them before they're built," Moran said. "So having that identification sign on the outside will at least send a clue to firefighters who are entering that there is a safety issue."
(c) 2008 Record, The; Bergen County, N.J.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
Written by Evonne Coutros
[glow=red,2,300]Mansions Rich in Fire Threats[/glow]
January 9, 2008
New Jersey - Modern-day mansions in towns such as Saddle River and Alpine are posing special challenges for firefighters, who face the prospect of encountering especially difficult search conditions and dragging fire hoses through home movie theaters or indoor basketball courts.
"There are more of them," Saddle River volunteer Fire Chief Brian Yates said of "extreme" mansions in the borough. "It's a lot more work, a lot more to think about."
Firefighters in several North Jersey towns must be prepared to answer the alarm at homes with as many as three full-service indoor and outdoor kitchens, multiseat theaters, multiple staircases, 25- foot open-air cathedral ceilings, elevators, open-air viewing balconies, indoor pools and ponds, cabanas the size of bi-level homes, and multicar garages that are below ground level.
"It is resource- and labor-intensive for firefighters," Englewood Fire Chief Robert Moran said. "It requires additional personnel and different strategy and tactics than it does for suppressing fires in smaller residential homes.
"You can't use the typical, normal method to search a 30,000- square-foot building," said Moran, an investigator with the Bergen County Arson Task Force and chief of the 55-member paid Englewood department. "You have to use search rope because you'd get lost in these homes in a heartbeat. They have large open areas, so you can't follow a right hand or left hand wall like we're taught at the fire academy. You'd get disoriented."
When Alpine's 25 volunteer firefighters respond to alarms, they're equipped with plenty of search rope, entering the home with it attached to them so they can more safely navigate smoky areas.
"You can take a wrong turn and fall off an indoor balcony if you're not careful," said Alpine's outgoing fire chief, John Veras. "And the indoor swimming pools ... you just don't know what's in front of you sometimes."
The first problem firefighters face can be getting access to the property. That sometimes means getting the entrance gate open.
"We're going to a mansion under the auspices that there is a fire in the home and if the gate is not open, we're going to get it open," Veras said.
Firefighters must then get water and firefighting foam to the home. It can be a long haul.
"Because of the 125-foot setbacks, Saddle River firefighters have their work cut out for them even before they begin to fight a fire," said Mayor Samuel Raia.
In a recent drill, a dozen Saddle River firefighters practiced techniques they would use to fight a fire with a winding, steep driveway on a multiacre, landscaped property. They started out with a 5-inch hose linked to hundreds of feet of 3-inch supply line to reach the door, and then 1-inch hose that they would carry into the house to suppress the fire.
"It would be a walk in the park if all we had to do was grab a 100-foot hand line off the side of the engine, walk up to the front door, go in and be able to move around and get to wherever the fire is in the house," said Yates, who heads a 40-member volunteer department.
Homes of higher square footage are equipped with four or five furnaces and multiple circuit breakers, fire chiefs say.
"Almost every single mansion" in Saddle River has cathedral entranceways, and firefighters are trained to fight those blazes as if they were church fires, Yates said.
"That means there are no fire stops, no fire breaks in some of these wide open structures," he said. "Floor to ceiling, a fire is free to go wherever it wants to and there's nothing to stop it.
"Laundry chutes and elevator shafts in these homes have served as unbroken paths for fire and heat," Yates said.
Saddle River firefighters carry a diamond bit saw to each call in the event they quickly need to ventilate a slate roof, which have come back into style as of late, Yates said.
The town's pumper truck is equipped with 5,000 feet of 5-inch hose, far more than most such engines.
There have been at least six or seven mansion fires in the borough in the past decade, most contained to kitchens, utilities, basements and garages, Yates said. During Tropical Storm Floyd in 1999, flooding in one Saddle River mansion caused the elevator transformer to catch fire.
A special challenge for Saddle River has been its lack of fire hydrants. The town is in the final phase of fire hydrant installation on its main roads, said Raia and Saddle River Administrator Charles Cuccia.
"We know we have a hydrant at the beginning of each side street," Yates said. "The plan is to ultimately have hydrants down the side streets some of which are lengthy and winding so we still need the pumper to be equipped with 5,000 feet of 5-inch hose and our tanker with 3,500 gallons of water. The tanker holds us over until we get our water supply laid in to fight a fire."
Mutual aid arrangements with other towns can also be key.
"When there is a substantial structure fire though we immediately go to mutual aid if we need additional manpower or because we need a specific piece of equipment," said Dennis Schubert, the Borough Council liaison to the Upper Saddle River Fire Department. "In the case of Upper Saddle River we are one of the 14 towns in the Northwest Bergen Mutual Aid, but there are nine mutual aid groups in Bergen County serving all 69 fire departments."
Alpine's Veras said his department is pushing for a water tanker that would ease firefighting on the northernmost section of homes in Alpine off Route 9W, an area that does not have hydrants.
It helps when firefighters know exactly what they facing, but that's not easily done.
Blueprints are available for each home in Saddle River, Yates said, but with a multitude of large homes in the borough's five square miles, the sensible alternative is to work toward computerizing records of all the structures in town.
"To study 1,800 blueprints and remember them is virtually impossible," Yates said. "Who would remember them? To make the system truly efficient and effective, the blueprints need to be readily available in-hand and computerization is the way for us to go."
Kinnelon Mayor Glenn L. Sisco, a volunteer firefighter for 43 years, said mansions in his town have not reached the extreme size of those in Saddle River or Alpine, but it's getting close. "We're getting up there," Sisco said.
Kinnelon firefighters often learn of what's inside a home through word of mouth or at Monday night team drills, said Sisco, 78. "Bowling alleys, you name it," he said.
"Home theaters have two potentials," Sisco said of dangers to firefighters. "People being inside ... and that it's a big space. A theater setting has only one [entrance] in and one [exit] out. They don't provide two entrances and they should."
Fire chiefs recommended a range of other steps to make fighting mansion fires easier and safer:
* Siren-activated openers that will immediately swing gates open as firefighters approach.
* Sprinklers in larger square-footage homes. "The fire service as a whole believes sprinkler systems in private residences will save lives and property, especially in mansions," said Englewood's Moran. "A sprinkler system should be required if a house is over a square footage threshold," Raia agreed.
* Signs posted at an estate to identify construction type and help firefighters determine strategy and tactics before entering a building.
"The uniform fire code calls for truss identification signs on truss construction on commercial buildings," Moran said. "It would benefit the fire service and firefighters if in residential homes constructed of lightweight construction there would be some kind of identifying sign outside."
"We don't get a chance to see these buildings we're not walking through them before they're built," Moran said. "So having that identification sign on the outside will at least send a clue to firefighters who are entering that there is a safety issue."
(c) 2008 Record, The; Bergen County, N.J.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
Written by Evonne Coutros
