Responsibility, products boost home fire safety

Making sure fire detectors are functioning – and choosing fire-resistant or fire-retardant products when remodeling – can increase a home’s safety.

Barry Rowell, assistant fire chief-operations for the Springfield Fire Department, said the department tries to educate people to accept a certain amount of personal responsibility regarding fire safety.

“We can encourage them to buy smoke alarms, we can man fire stations and we have public education programs, but it comes down to individual responsibility – changing the battery, leaving the battery in, testing the smoke alarm to make sure it’s correct, taking care of unsafe conditions around the house that might lead to a fire,” he said.

Lack of concern

Whether a building product is fire-resistant or fire-retardant often isn’t addressed when homeowners shop locally.

Paul Steele of Burton Building Products in Ozark has been selling building products in the area for 10 years. Homeowners, he said, don’t usually ask if products are fire-resistant or fire-retardant. “Not until their house burns down or the neighborhood’s on fire,” he said.

Materials in the home

Fire Free 88, a fire-retardant and fire-resistant paint, was developed by International Fire Resistant Systems Inc. of San Rafael, Calif. It’s designed to withstand temperatures of more than 2000 F.

The number of coats applied determines the product’s strength. “We do all the

calculations for you,” said Steve Beck,

president of International Fire Resistant Systems.

One coating with Fire Free 88 equals the thickness of three coats of latex paint. “When it’s on the wall, you can’t tell the difference whether it’s been coated with the Fire Free or regular paint,” Beck said. A surface painted with the product will resist fire and keep fire from spreading for 15 minutes to one hour, he said, depending on what lies under the coating.

Fire Free 88 is not available in retail stores, but information about it is available at www.firefree.com.

David Knetzer, estimator for Oak Grove Construction, said he isn’t familiar with fire-resistant paint, but he commonly uses other fire-resistant building products.

“It’s possible to get lumber that’s fire-rated. It’s possible to get wood shingles that are fire-rated. A lot of the products that we use already, like drywall, are very good fire-resistant products,” Knetzer said.

“There’s also fire doors that, for all appearances seem to be wood, but they have basically sheetrock between the panels of wood, and you can get a 20-minute fire-rated door or an hour fire-rated door,” Knetzer added.

Vinyl siding isn’t fireproof, but “it will melt and fall off the house, usually, before it will catch fire,” Steele said. “But it puts off poisonous gas. That’s the downside to that.”

Do the research

Sometimes, all it might take is a little extra research when choosing products to use in the home.

Carpet made with olefin fiber, for example, is commonly used in residential basements because it’s inexpensive and durable. “But it burns easily,” said Joyce Buxton, interior designer for Buxton-Kubik-Dodd Interior Inc. “It’s something that for commercial use I wouldn’t be allowed to use.”

Draperies are a big concern for Buxton, who said the rules are very different between commercial and residential use. Fabric for draperies must pass specific tests to be used for commercial projects, “but the same does not hold true in your home, because there’s nobody checking. That’s the difference.

“You certainly could use those same fabrics in your home, and if your concern was to make your home safer, you would. I think people don’t often think about that.”

Detect and extinguish

“I’m a firm believer that every home should have at least one extinguisher and at least one smoke detector,” said Tim Garrett, supervisor with Ozark Fire Extinguisher Co.

Manufacturers, he said, recommend one detector per sleeping area.

Some smoke detectors are linked so that if one goes off, they all go off, “which is much better because if you have one in the living room that goes off and you’re in the back bedroom, you can’t hear it,” Garrett said.

David Hall, battalion chief for the Springfield Fire Department, said that the Fire Department canvasses neighborhoods following fires to see how many homes lack fire detectors. It then offers free detectors and installation.

“We were finding that over 50 percent of the homes that we were able to talk with don’t have working smoke alarms,” Hall said. “A lot of (people) will have them in their homes but they don’t have working batteries.”

Each floor of a multilevel home should have its own extinguisher, Garrett said. He also recommends mounting an extinguisher under the kitchen sink, and keeping one in the garage.

Garrett recommends purchasing a fire extinguisher no smaller than five pounds. “If you get excited when you see the fire and you miss the fire (with the first extinguisher blast), you’ve wasted some of your chemical before you can get to the fire,” he said. “That’s why I like the larger one. You’ve got a little bit extra chemical to deal with.”

Home sprinklers

The city of Springfield doesn’t require residential sprinklers, but Ken Decker, designer and estimator with Atlantic Fire Protection said, “I would say that anybody who’s built over a 2,500-square-foot home would want it, just for the safety of getting people out and saving their homes.”

Decker estimates adding a sprinkler system to a home under construction – 2,000 square feet or larger – would cost $2.50 to $3.50 per square foot. Pipes are run through the walls, and heads can be set in ceilings or walls, covered by decorative plates.

Usually just one head is required per room and, when designed correctly, only the heads that are in the fire area go off. “It’s not like on TV where they all go off,” he said.

Decker said that many residential sprinklers go off when they detect a fire of 135 F.

In the case of a grease fire in the kitchen, he said, “By the time you got yourself together and ran over to the pantry and got the fire extinguisher, the head would be going off.

[[In-content Ad]]