Six people have died in house fires in Cincinnati this year, compared with one this time a year ago.
Cincinnati Fire Chief Frank McKinley says most of the fires had been burning for a while before they were reported, and had a big head start.
“In some of the incidents, we saw the roof burned completely down,” he says.
McKinley says the sooner firefighters get on the scene, the better.
The current president of the Hamilton County Fire Chiefs Association, Tom McCabe, also is Norwood's fire chief. He says modern living is a big factor in why the blazes are burning more intensely.
“Your average sofa is five gallons of manufactured gasoline, when you break it down into a chemical piece," he says. "Those things burn fast and they burn hot. Whereas back in the late '60s and '70s you had natural cotton, wool furniture with legacy lumber. It didn't burn as fast. It didn't put out the amount of heat.”
McCabe says the toxic smoke can easily overcome someone trying to get out.
"It's very rare that you find people dying from the initial heat of the incident. Largely they're dying from smoke inhalation," he says. "The toxicity of those products, when they burn and release chemicals in the air, it's pretty bad."
He says Norwood's response time is around three minutes.
“Three minutes of live fire, and who knows how long it's been burning before. When it's really rocking, it's everything we've got to get this thing out quickly,” McCabe says.
The nonprofit National Fire Protection Association has set standards for response times:
- Alarm processing: 64 seconds
- Turnout time (how long it takes to put on gear and get in a truck): 60 seconds (EMS), 80 seconds (fire)
- First engine travel time: 4 minutes (240 seconds)
- Full alarm assignment for a structure fire: 8 minutes (480 seconds)
- Advanced life support (paramedic) arrival: 8 minutes
Cincinnati Chief McKinley says he is proud of his department's response time. He says even under adverse conditions, the first trucks can be on the scene within four minutes. He says in one of the fatal fires, at Winton Place, the nearest station was less than half a mile away, and the first engine arrived 42 seconds after getting dispatched.
At another fatal fire, this time in Mt. Airy, the response time was five minutes, 10 seconds. McKinley says that blaze was overnight, and the weather wasn’t the best.
“One thing that we can’t control as a fire department is how advanced the fire is when we get there,” he says. “But what we can do is educate the public.”
McKinley says that education needs to be targeted to be the most effective.
“We try to identify what communities are at the greatest risk of property loss or death,” he says. “We look at heat maps from previous years and we try to target those areas.”
McKinley says department members go door-to-door, handing out info on smoke detectors, inspections and other fire prevention tools.
He says some of the homes where people died had smoke detectors, the rest were still under investigation.
Read more:
