Huff, Puff, and Burn Your House Down (Luxury Condo Fairytale)
All over Denver, San Francisco, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Washington DC, and every other fast growing city, a new type of luxury condo and apartment building is appearing. The ground floors are retail, restaurants, and parking with 3 or 4 floors of apartments on top. If you have walked around a redeveloped downtown area recently, these buildings probably look familiar.
In addition to their modern appearance and the convenience of living above restaurants and retail stores, the buildings offer an array of amenities including outdoor fireplaces, pools, dog parks, game rooms, or indoor bowling alleys.
There is one big problem…behind the faux-brick facades, these buildings are all wood and become a raging inferno within minutes when they burn.
Construction
On the exterior, these buildings have a variety of facades (exterior finishes) that give a modern, flashy appearance.
Under the facade, the buildings are constructed completely from plywood and engineered lumber.
While the buildings may appear to have brick walls, these “facades” are actually decorative features glued to the exterior.
Many of the buildings are “donut” style with the continuously connected units wrapping around a common outdoor area in the center of the building. This provides a sheltered, private area in the middle while also giving fire a continuous path to burn through the entire structure. Unlike a traditional mid-rise residential building, the courtyard facing apartments are not easily accessible to fire apparatus including ladder trucks that would rescue trapped occupants from balconies.
Larger wood-frame structures have become the industry standard due to the low-cost and light-weight of engineered lumber. The engineered wood I-beams (pictured below) have the same strength as a traditional solid lumber 2x8 floor joist while being just 40% of the weight. This allows buildings to have open floor plans with fewer load-bearing walls due to less overall weight of the building materials. Wood I-beams are also lower cost than solid 2x8 pieces of lumber because the center piece is laminated plywood pressed together from recycled or discarded wood shavings.
Unlike a piece of solid lumber, engineered wood I-beams burn very quickly. Think about starting a camp fire, you stack little pieces of wood to get the fire started so the larger logs can burn. Stack a bunch of plywood I-beams together with plenty of void space for air to circulate and you have all the ingredients for a giant bonfire.
Fires Across the Country
Buildings of all types have fire risks but not all buildings are equal. A steel and concrete high-rise with sprinklers has a very low fire risk — even if a fire starts, there isn’t anywhere for it to go or additional materials to burn. A 1950’s brick house with solid lumber construction can have a significant interior fire but remain mostly intact due to the integrity of the non-combustible components.
Wood-frame apartment buildings are completely different, due to the light-weight lumber and connected units, fire can travel quickly and engulf the entire buildings within minutes. Even though most of these buildings have interior sprinklers, a fire can start in unprotected areas without sprinklers on the exterior, in the walls, between the floors, or in a different part of the structure like the parking garage or loading dock. Once the fire spreads into occupied areas of the building, it is too intense with too large of a fireload (available fuel/wood to burn) for the sprinkler system to extinguish.
Here are some example of recent fires that occurred in wood-frame apartment buildings:
The three-alarm fire involved at least 100 Denver firefighters. There were about 50 construction workers on the site. Some of them jumped from scaffolding to save themselves from the rapidly growing flames and intense heat. (below)
A Houston apartment fire caused by multiple cars burning in the parking garage on the ground level of a 4-story wood-frame building. Multiple residents jumped off the balconies to escape the heavy smoke (video available below).
A wood-frame apartment building under construction caught fire in Houston trapping a construction worker on the balcony (video below).
Will Tragedy Drive Change?
Construction of the wood-frame apartment buildings is a new trend that has rapidly accelerated over the past 5 years. As the numbers of these structures continues to grow, the chances of a major fire in a fully occupied building also increases.
In the near future there will be a 3 AM fire that starts in the garage, ground floor restaurant, walls, void space between the floors, closet, or other area not protected by the sprinkler system. The fire will spread rapidly through the buildings, filling the hallways with smoke and trapping residents on the upper floors. These residents will go to windows and balconies but the occupants on the interior facing units will not be accessible to ladder trucks. Dozens or even hundreds of residents may be killed or injured.
Will a fire that kills more people than a year’s worth of mass shootings mobilize the citizens to demand action?
To make matters worse, Oregon has approved the first ever wood-frame 11-story high-rise building in the United States.
What Can We Do?
Wood-frame buildings are popular because residents do not demand more than what is visible on the exterior or the amenities of the unit. These fires can be mitigated with code changes and public demand for builders to use safer materials. At a minimum, local and state jurisdictions should require:
- Sprinklers in occupied and unoccupied areas of wood-frame buildings
- Spray-applied fire protection foam for all structural components including plywood I-beams
- Separate garages not attached to wood-frame structures
- Non-combustible exterior finishing
- Concrete slab floors and fire protected stairwells for structures above 3-stories
These changes would have minimal impact on the construction cost and aesthetics of buildings while exponentially increasing the safety of the occupants. We shouldn’t wait for tragedies to demand safer homes.
David Riedman is a firefighter and an expert in critical infrastructure protection, homeland security policy, and emergency management. He is a co-founder of the Center for Homeland Defense and Security’s Advanced Thinking and Experimentation (HSx) Program at the Naval Postgraduate School.
