By John M. Stofa ©
It was right there in my mailbox one day; a magazine that I’ve never picked up in my life. It was a publication that catered to the professional architectural industry. I figured; why not browse it real quick and see what it is all about? I’m in the construction industry so to speak so maybe I will find something relevant or useful that I can use to educate my customers. As I’m going through the pages, this picture stops me dead in my tracks…
It doesn’t matter where these buildings are located, or who the builders are. It also doesn’t matter if these buildings are protected with fire sprinklers or not. Of course it needs to be said that fire sprinklers are extremely important to protecting people and property and should be installed in every building. However due to the tremendous amount of wood used to construct these buildings, most fire sprinkler systems would be overpowered quite quickly during a fire, thus rendering them useless.
What does matters is that this is a series of buildings that are being built to be used as college dormitories. You got it, housing for a large group of people. How does this happen? How does a large university build a mid/high-rise building completely out of combustible (wood) building materials in this day and age? With everything that we know about non-combustible building construction and fire protection systems, why would we allow these large footprints combustible buildings to be built in order to house so many people? Haven’t we learned anything from the past?
It has been well documented that the trend in fire deaths has gone down significantly in modern times. This can be directly related to many factors including better building construction using non-combustible materials and quick response fire detection and suppression systems. This is not to mention better fire prevention education; quality manufactured safer appliances and better electronic furnishings that require less wattage. But let’s not be fooled into thinking that buildings do not burn anymore and then start to take shortcuts and find alternative materials that simply should not be used anymore no matter how good the technology looks on paper or the positive effect to the bottom line.
Now, we are going completely backwards and not only constructing the buildings with completely combustible materials, but also loading the buildings with materials that ignite and burn more readily and with a vigor that we’ve never seen before. It is also well documented that the modern dead load we see in a building today is very much a solid form of gasoline if you will that is masked as furniture, and thus when superheated it becomes and acts very much like a liquid petroleum product and it burns with the exact same intensity.
So how does this affect the occupant? You guessed it, just by changing the dead load to petroleum based products; we have shortened the amount of allowable escape time when a building is on fire. Then add the fact that the building is constructed entirely of lightweight wood products that are engineered to weigh less and fail sooner under fire conditions than traditional wood building materials and you have a perfect storm. Large masses of people, faster fires, more smoke generation and a quicker fail time all lead to a major loss of life.
In conclusion, this type of building construction in my opinion is criminal and has no place in modern America. If this is okay, why not go back to the lap belts that most cars had until the 1970’s, or maybe NFL football players should bring back leather helmets, better yet, why not allow for asbestos tiles or lead lined water pipes to roar back into fashion. Let’s continue to move forward and learn, and never allow ourselves to take that one giant step backwards.
