Pre-Prototype Hand-Held Fire Detectors

摘要

It was determined that in an urban area exposed to a nuclear burst, the suppression of the large number of fires which will occur must necessarily include efforts of untrained personnel (self-help), and trained civilian brigades in addition to public fire departments. The effectiveness of personnel and the amount of water required to suppress fires on the level of self-help and brigades were determined from experiments performed in laboratory and in actual structures. Experiments consisted of suppression of furniture fires during various stages of developments. It was found that up to about two minutes prior to the flashover, fires can be controlled by the use of hand extinguishers, corresponding to the selfhelp effort. The effectiveness of the self-help efforts is given as a function of fire duration. It was determined that brigades can suppress single and two adjacent rooms flashover fires with single booster line spray streams using about 15 to 48 gallons of water, respectively. Fire Department operations were analyzed using data gathered on certain selected actual building fires. In general, rural and small urban fire departments were found to be using considerably less water than large urban area fire departments. Criteria are given for the number of selfhelp and brigade teams required to suppress a given number of fires initiated by the thermal pulse. Various aspects of fire department operational needs are discussed. (Author)