Taller buildings? Firefighters rise to the challenge
As more tall buildings rise across South Florida, firefighters are preparing for the prospect of having to save more residents trapped by flames at greater heights.
Battling a fire on a ground floor is different from one several stories up. Higher fires require more equipment, more technology and more firefighters.
Fort Lauderdale has more than 400 high-rises taller than five stories, and a spurt of growth has the city considering buying one more ladder truck to add to its fleet of four. The Fire Department just bought a drone, which will let firefighters better assess which stories are on fire and find people on balconies at night.
New development puts the city’s number of firefighters and equipment under “constant evaluation,” judging the population against what equipment is available, Fort Lauderdale Battalion Chief Gregory May
said.
“A high-rise is more laborhe said. “It’s a slow, methodical operation. We’re doing training on a regular basis.”
Seven new high-rises have soared between seven and12 stories inBoca Raton, and more are on the way. Boca also is evaluating what more it can do.
Carrying a heavy load of equipment up many stories can require several rotations of firefighters as they march on the fire, said Boca Raton Assistant Fire Chief Mike LaSalle said. “They’re almost spent just doing that,” LaSalle said.
Firefighters must don 40 pounds of equipment while dashing up stairwells. When firefighters’ air tanks empty, freshly supplied crews rush from a staging area to take the helm.
It is the responsibility of tenants to get down to the lower levels and out to safety, and that can be challenging for Boca’s large population of elderly residents, LaSalle said.
For Boca firefighters, raising awareness of highrise fires is key.
The city’s fire services department publishes updates on new buildings, and fire inspectors give talks to high-rise condo and apartment dwellers on how to stay safe during a fire.
One of the most recent fire deaths occurred in Deerfield Beach in 2015.
The fire killed Bart Kartman’s wife of 45 years, and he said he can’t bear the thought of others facing the same ordeal. His wife, Ellen Kartman, an invalid, lay helpless in bed in the family’s ninth-floor condominium as wiring for a fish aquarium burned.
A state fire marshal’s report and the deposition of a fire captain about the July 28, 2015, blaze at the beachside Tiara East detailed the danger of the fire.
As often happens, according to fire experts, the windows on the east side of the ninth-floor balcony blew out, making it so that the ocean breeze created a wind-tunnel effect that fed the fire.
“It was such hot, angry smoke,” said Deerfield Beach Capt. Regis Smeltz, in a court deposition. “It pushed us to the floor. ... I was onmy facewhenIwent in.”
Firefighters could not get to Ellen Kartman until 54 minutes after she first called down to the front desk to report the fire alarm going off, a report from the state fire marshal shows.
Richard Sievers, Deerfield division fire chief for the Broward Sheriff’s Office, said he thinks Kartman died because she couldn’t exitonher own. Thatwould have happened even if she had been on the ground floor, he said. “Itwas unfortunate that she was unable to vacate the apartment,” he said.
Still, the high-rise rescue attempt was challenging, records show. One firefighter’s mask malfunctioned as high heat forced him to crawl along the floor trying to reach her.
“We were fully geared ... and it was not tolerable for us,” Smeltz said in the deposition.
High-rise fires can be too high for ladder trucks, because the longest ladders are only 110 feet long and lose some height when inclined toward buildings. Unlike in movies, most rescues and attempts to quench fires with water happens inside the buildings.
Abig part of fighting fires at higher elevations depends not only on enough personnel, but also on how up-to-date a building’s safety features are.
Buildings are widely considered the safest they’ve ever been. The state building code requires buildings to have heat-activated sprinklers. Still, those are meant to tame, not stop, a serious fire. Built-in systems let firefighters tap into highpressure water from any floor.
However, dozens of buildings along South Florida’s coast built in the 1960s and 1970s are more like the one in Honolulu, where three people perished in mid-July as it burned.
Fort Lauderdale, for example, has 76 buildings taller than seven stories that don’t have sprinklers, according to data collected by the Florida Fire Marshals and Inspectors Association. In Pompano Beach, the number is 21 buildings out of 64 high rises on the beach, according to Fire Chief John Jurgle.
Greg Cahanin, a St. Petersburg fire safety consultant, is currently evaluating all buildings up and down the Atlantic Coast for how many have sprinkler systems and howmany don’t.
“It’s to determine the affordability of those residences to retrofit fire sprinklers,” he said. If sprinklers areworking, it allows firefighters to get closer to the source of the flames, he said.
Cahanin, along with the Florida Fire Marshals and Inspectors Association, are hoping to raise awareness about the need to retrofit older buildings with sprinkler systems.
Data amassed by the association from local fire marshals shows that fires in high-rise buildings with sprinklers have resulted in no fatalities in the last 17 years in Florida. But blazes in buildings without fire sprinkler systems resulted in 10 deaths.