New Jersey Fire

[conarb]

I thought I'd seen this fire posted before but can't find it so am posting this:

The building's sprinklers were working, but the lightweight, wooden structure fueled the flames and made fighting the fire difficult, the fire chief said.The building complied with construction and fire codes, the fire chief said, but he added: "If it was made out of cinder block and concrete, we wouldn't have this problem."

In 2000, a fire started at the same location where a five-story condominium complex was under construction, destroying nine homes and damaging several others. The cause was never determined, although investigators ruled out arson.

The problem here is the fire chief's statement "If it was made out of cinder block and concrete, we wouldn't have this problem." The problem is "lightweight" construction, the usage of lightweight roof and floor trusses and I joists, we don't know from the reports but the usage of other manufactured products like OSB and styrene foams also greatly contribute to fast moving fires.

If the fire service had spent 1/10th the money fighting lightweight construction that they spent promoting sprinklers we wouldn't be having these problems and they would have had "good" builders on their side, but the course taken had the money of the sprinkler industry behind it; furthermore, it was a lot easier to get the NAHB (a tract/production builder association) to acquiesce to sprinklers than to get them to give up their cheap building materials.