By Jay Price
The News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina)
Copyright 2007 The News and Observer
Raleigh, N.C — The design and materials used in the 38 townhouses destroyed or damaged Thursday in one of the biggest fires in Raleigh history apparently met state fire codes, city officials said.
And that may be the troubling part, they said, given all the townhouses being built in the Triangle and the startling destruction as the wind-driven blaze quickly spread among rows of connected homes.
It’s also no comfort to residents of the estimated 130,000 similar apartments, townhouses and condominiums in the Triangle who saw images of destruction that looked like the aftermath of war.
“I don’t think the concern was there was something improper done there,” Mayor Charles Meeker said at a news conference Friday. “I guess the question is, should the standard be different in the future since we’ve now been shown there is certainly an issue on a windy day, that once a fire gets going it can spread like that.”
It would be a good idea to study whether tighter regulations are needed, Meeker said.
“That’s one of the things we’re going to take a look at, are we having the right building materials here,” he said.
Assistant Fire Chief Larry Stanford agreed, referring to current standards as “a minimum.”
“There are a lot of things I’d like to see in place, ... but we are here to enforce the codes and not to give our personal opinions,” he said, declining to say what he’d change.
What’s required?
According to state regulations, walls designed to resist fire are required between townhouses, apartment and condominiums. Each townhouse is considered a separate building, and the walls between them are designed to resist flames about two hours, double the requirement for condominiums and apartments, said Barry Gupton, the chief code consultant for the N.C. Department of Insurance’s engineering division.
The homes at Pine Knoll Townes had fire walls, Stanford said. That didn’t matter, though, because the fire, which he called the largest he had seen in 26 years with the city, spread between outside walls and roofs, rather than from the inside.
Indeed, the flames were blown so hard that they reached across the roads to bathe the next row until it, too, ignited. One firefighter, Capt. Keith Wilder, said that at one point he noticed a column of fire 120 feet long blown sideways from a burning building into a line of trees like a giant blowtorch.
Likewise, sprinklers wouldn’t have helped, Stanford said, because they’re inside. Sprinklers aren’t required for townhouses at all, nor for apartment buildings or condominium buildings with fewer than 17 units and two stories.
No perfect protection
While fire walls or different construction materials may not have slowed this fire much, they can be effective in more typical blazes. Older buildings, though, may not have good fire walls, said Bob Kochan, a fire expert and owner of Forensic Analysis & Engineering of Raleigh.
A typical fire wall is built of concrete blocks or layers of drywall and reaches to the underside of the roof, he said. The best ones continue through the roof and are visible between each unit.
The vinyl siding at Pine Knoll Townes wouldn’t have slowed the fire, but it wouldn’t have added much power either, Kochan said. Brick siding and fiberglass shingles or metal roofing can slow the spread of exterior fires but don’t prevent them from destroying interiors.
In short, Kochan said, no material is perfect, and fire powered by Thursday’s winds would have destroyed just about any structure.
“I feel for the fire department, because you know they were trying their best,” he said. “But about all they could do with a fire like that is do their best to protect the rest of the community.”