The results of a landmark study on high-rise fires and the best ways to battle them were released at the 2013 Metropolitan Fire Chiefs Conference in Phoenix, Ariz. last week, prompting many fire departments throughout the United States to re-examine the ways they deal with fires in tall buildings.
The study – conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) – worked with 13 Washington, D.C.-area fire departments to determine ways to improve the fire-fighting process for high-rise incidents. The results indicated that crew size plays the biggest role in the ability to extinguish fires quickly; simply adding two additional members to a three- or four-person team of firefighters can have a drastic impact on the time it takes to extinguish a fire, the study found.