Fire Safety – a reminder of the basics!

In general there are two main types of fire issues: fires emanating from the interior of a building and fires emanating from the exterior of a building.

The single most important design considerations for fire safety relating to interior fires is discovery of the fire and getting out of the home quickly and safely. Smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors, and egress are central to this approach. This is a huge, huge, big deal. It is obvious…and we are not going to address it here.

The single most important design considerations for fire safety relating to exterior fires is the prevention of the spread of fire by vegetation toa building (“wildfires”) and the spread of fire from the exterior of one structure to another. Again this is a huge, huge, big deal…and obvious…and we are going to focus on it….particularly focusing on wildfires.

With respect to wildfires, the issue is burning embers. Roofs are particularly vulnerable to burning embers – both from the perspective of the roof covering and from the perspective of roof venting. If we could build roofs that are not vented in wildfire areas we would all be better off. We are going to cover this…but there are still places where we have to vent because we do not have a better way of dealing with the “confounding” issue even though we are in a wildfire risk area. More on that later.

We also have to deal with burning embers and walls…particularly walls with vented claddings. Again, more on that later. Seems to me that this venting thing can be a fire thing…yup…just ask the Brits (we were here before… BSI-098 Great Fire of London, August 2017).

Read the entire article at buildingscience.com.