Good evening! My name is Pete Van Dorpe.
I am a Battalion Chief with the Chicago Fire Department.
Before we go any further I want to introduce you
the Panel for tonight,
people that will be presenting.
We have Steve Kerber from NIST,
Jerry Tracy, Battalion Chief
from the Fire Department in New York
and Dan Madrzykowski, also from NIST.
I will be moderating,
I will be introducing the topic tonight
and will be moderating the program a little bit.
As was mentioned, we are going to talk about
understanding, surviving,
and then fighting wind-driven fires.
The last time we gave this presentation
was two months ago in DC
and the number that night, I believe it was 87;
the number tonight is a 107, right?
We all know what the number is, right,
line of duty deaths so far this year.
We've got to do a better job.
We all understand, I am preaching to the choir, right?
We've got to do a better job.
I had the chance to meet Ron Sernecki
a couple of weeks ago
and we were trying to figure out,
why is it that we understand, we know, right,
we can see the stats, we can parse them,
we can figure it out,
but we just can't get that number to move, right?
It's over a 100 every year, year after year after year.
We've got a lot of work to do, okay?
And again, I am preaching to the choir,
we're all part of that, making that change,
and a big part of how we make that change is the education,
what we're doing here, what you guys are doing here this week.
And it's a huge part of
what NIST is doing with us in the fire service.
Dan will tell you, he often speaks about the volumes,
volumes and volumes of research, of information,
good research, good information for the fire service
that has been conducted over the years
that is sitting on a shelf somewhere in a corner, right?
It gets published, it gets put in the article,
in the magazine, a few people read it,
and it disappears, right?
This is important stuff.
This is stuff we've got to get to the rank
and file fire fighter out on the street.
It's what Ray Orozco, our former Fire Commissioner
called when science hits the street.
That's what we've got to do,
we've got to get the science to hit the street.
We've got to get this understanding, this knowledge
to the street in a way
that fire fighters can use tonight, right,
not sometime down the road in their career, tonight,
the next fire they go to, make a difference.
And that's what NIST has done with this program
and other programs that they've put together,
and that's why we're so excited to be a part of it
and to present it here tonight, right?
Because they've found the way,
Dan and Steve in particular,
have found a way to communicate this stuff to the fire service
in a way we can understand it and appreciate it.
They don't dumb it down.
You know, we make jokes to each other all the time, right,
you've got to take a few syllables out,
you're talking to firemen.
They never do that.
They've never dumbed anything down in their lives.
They're bringing us up.
They're bringing our understanding, our knowledge,
our intelligence up to where it needs to be
so we can combat today's fires
and deal with the situation we're dealing with,
and maybe we can start bringing
that number down a little bit, right?
I know this works.
I've seen it work on my job, right?
Just with seat belts.
We had a traffic accident not two weeks ago.
Fire engine hit a building,
and I mean it, hit it like that, dead stop, right?
If the two guys in the front seat weren't belted,
they'd be dead today,
but they were belted, right?
We put on a big push, a big educational push to change that,
and we did change it,
saved two lives just in the last couple of weeks, right?
We can do this. We can make a difference.
We've got to get the information out to the fire service,
where they can use it, in a way that they can use it,
and that's what we're going to try to do with you tonight
when we're talking about these wind-driven fires.
Give you an idea why and how Chicago got involved in this.
We had some high profile fires in the City of Chicago,
and I am sure you've had yours as well, right,
the ones that get attention, right,
the ones that people start paying attention to.
In particular, 69 West Washington Street,
that was the Cook County building fire,
you may have heard of that,
six people were found in the stairwell
well after the fire was under control.
We were picking up companies,
very embarrassing kind of situation,
very high profile fire, right?
We had to stand up and pay attention, right?
In essence, we rewrote our entire high-rise SOP
because of that fire, right?
And in the course of doing that
we started to reach out to other cities;
New York, Philadelphia, LA, San Francisco,
Phoenix, Dallas, right, asking for information.
We found out that a lot of these departments,
they already had their high profile event, right?
They already had their wake-up call,
so they rewrote theirs.
Why... why didn't we see that, right,
because the information doesn't get out, it doesn't get shared.
And that's what we're going to try to change
with this kind of program that we're doing tonight.
We're going to get the information out
and get it shared
so you don't have to wait for your own high profile fire
before you make your changes.
135, South LaSalle Street,
happened about a year after the 69 West Washington Street fire,
no fatalities,
we got about 40 or 50 people out of the building safely,
sent 12 fire fighters to the hospital, right?
Certainly a big improvement,
but you can hardly call that a success, right;
sending 12 guys to the hospital.
We've got to do a better job.
We've got to understand the challenge a little better.
There's also all these incidents that we've had
that I call below the radar, right?
These are the ones that they weren't a lot of...
you know, no line of duty deaths,
there weren't a lot of deaths or injuries to civilians,
but when you look back at them,
once you've had the high profile event,
once you talk to guys like Dan and Steve and Jerry Tracy
you realize, we've been walking in a minefield
and we're lucky we just haven't stepped on one yet, right?
We want to prevent that from happening
in other jobs, in other jurisdictions,
in other departments.
Don't wait to have somebody step on that mine, right,
learn the information, get it out,
put it to use ahead of time, right,
in a way we can all put together.
Have you ever heard this statement before,
smoke spread is the biggest problem in high-rise fires?
I remember hearing that
probably the first day I came on the job.
What do we do about it?
Anybody? Could anybody tell me?
Do you ventilate?
Do you open the stairwells?
Do you open the bulkheads?
Do you take out the windows or no?
High-rise buildings are very complex buildings,
exceedingly complex buildings,
and one of the things we learned
from these projects working with NIST
was we're going to rewrite our entire ventilation operation
for operating in high-rise buildings, right?
There's a lot of good information out there
on fighting fires in high-rise buildings
and if you look at it real carefully,
most of it is talking about the water issue; water supply,
search, getting water on the fire.
All important things when it comes to the ventilation
very little is said, because very little is understood.
We've got a long way to go in the understanding of ventilation
and how smoke movement
and ventilation works in high-rise buildings
if we're going to make a difference.
And that's another part
of what this kind of research is helping us do.
And the last thing I want to leave you with
is something we all know,
but we've got to do a better job
of communicating to the general public.
We had this high profile Cook County building
fire in the City of Chicago
and one of the issues that came up
was this was an unsprinklered high-rise building, right?
It was -- it had undergone a complete renovation
just a few years ago, sprinklers weren't put in.
Why?
They weren't required, right?
I am here to tell you today
that if it hadn't been
for the LaSalle Street fire within a year,
we never would have passed an ordinance
to retrofit our buildings in the City of Chicago.
As it is, we passed that ordinance,
but only for commercial buildings,
residential high-rises are still exempt.
Those that were built before the code took effect, right?
We've got to do a better job of communicating this, all right?
Today's fires are getting to the point
where we can't fight them manually, truth, right?
The fuel loads are so big,
the buildings are so large,
with lightweight construction
the buildings are becoming so dangerous
that there is going to be situations
where it is just not possible for us to combat those fires;
we have to sprinkler the buildings.