Fireground audio from Manassas, Virginia multi-house fire. Video as first crews arrive. Home builders group says sprinklers wouldn't have helped. FM disagrees.

 The story above includes video of the arrival of the first units. It was shot by Darryl Childress.   

NIST fact sheet on house to house fire spread

A Tale of Two Fires or A Roof and Contents (A July, 2007 look at two house fires in Leesburg, VA.)

A column on FireGeezer.com called “Suburban Slums” by Mike Ward, a retired fire/EMS captain from Fairfax County, VA

When firefighters from the City of Manassas and Prince William County arrived on the scene on Tillett Loop yesterday afternoon two, large single-family homes were already burning. Before long, a third was on fire and others were threatened. WUSA9.com reporter Peggy Fox reports a spokesman for the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) said residential sprinklers would not have made a difference in this fire because it started on the outside of a home.   

While acknowledging the difficulties presented by the fire starting on the outside, Manassas Fire Marshall Francis Teevan disagrees with NAHB. In the third video on this page Teevan says that sprinklers could have slowed the spread of this fire once it hit the interior of the first house. Teevan believes it might have given firefighters a chance to get ahead of the flames.

NAHB is the group that will also tell you about the dangers of water damage caused by sprinklers. Have of any of you seen residential sprinkler water damage to rival the destruction that occurred on Tillett Loop yesterday? Do you think NAHB will ask the residents which option they would prefer?   

As in many previous fires in similarly built neighborhoods FM Teevan cited the usual contributing factors that, taken together, account for this conflagration: lightweight construction; exterior walls of vinyl siding over particle board; houses built too close together.   

Unfortunately these homes and neighborhoods are built to code. Efforts by Virginia’s fire service to get residential sprinklers and other meaningful changes to the building code in an effort to prevent future neighborhoods from being built to burn have been unsuccessful. They have been thwarted by the building lobby, with NAHB leading the way.   

In 2004 I looked at this issue in a two-part report called Too Close for Comfort (video at the very bottom of this page). The report was inspired by a similar fire in Prince William County six miles to the west of the one yesterday. Two years after that fire at 8659 Trenton Chapel Way, history repeated itself with another multi-home fire that began at 8671 Trenton Chapel Way. Click here for video of the 2006 fire.   

The day before the Tillett Loop fire three people died in a fire in a townhouse cluster in Lorton, Virginia. One can imagine that residential sprinklers may have prevented that tragedy from occuring. But there is something else that is relevant to this discussion. As much fire as there was in the home of origin in Lorton the fire did not spread. Remember, the other homes in Lorton adjoin the one that burned and weren’t 12 or 16 feet away as in Manassas. Of course, the difference is the Lorton structure was built in 1973 and the Manassas homes were built almost 30-years later. Is that progress?  

Maybe it’s time for the victims of these firestorms to show up on the door step at NAHB headquarters and get a first hand explanation as to why residential sprinklers and improved fire barriers on outside walls are such a bad thing. There’s more below.     

Here’s more on the story from WUSA9.com:   

Firefighters could not stop the blaze from burning three houses to the ground and damaging five more in Manassas. People who live nearby watched in astonishment as the fire gained momentum.   

“It was crazy. The fire jumped from house to house, the wind just blew it,” said Renee Qura.   

The flames didn’t have very far to go.   

“They are very close. Too close together, ” Qura said.   

Angel Verdun said that several years ago, they had looked at buying a home in this neighborhood, but did because her husband felt there wasn’t enough space between the homes.   

Manassas Fire Marshal Francis Teevan says the closeness of the home contributed to the fire’s rapid spread, ” We’re looking at ten to sixteen feet between these houses. Certainly if you were on lots larger, a quarter to a half acre, you wouldn’t see the type of spread that we have here.”   

And, he says, the exterior walls are within code, but have the lowest rating for fire prevention.   

“Here you have particle board over vinyl siding, which burns very fast.”   

The homes also have no sprinklers, they’re not required to, but the issue is under heated debate. A spokesperson for the National Home Builders Association says sprinklers cannot stop fire when it comes from outside a building and would not have helped stop the spread in this care. Teevan disagrees.   

“It came from the outside, which means it went inside. So as soon as it would hit the first barrier of sprinklers, and we have water application, we probably could have held the fire in check at that point until the fire department came and extinguished it the rest of the way,” said Teevan.   

Teevan is also the president of the Virginia Fire Prevention Association.   

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