In my home, I have a 3A,40BC extinguisher by each exit and inside the garage door (and a smaller one in each vehicle) - and nowhere else. The idea behind that placement is that there will be a clear egress, since you have to go to the exit before turning to fight the fire. All extinguishers are clearly visible. All adults in the house are trained in their use, and you can use that extinguisher on just about anything. (I don’t want to imagine a class-D fire in the home!)
If I were designing an apartment block, the extinguishers would be either just inside the doors, or ideally in the hallway just outside the flats. (Of course, if it’s a low-rent building, that invites vandalism… or so the defenders of privilege would say. I’d think that even Those People, however, would be on the whole wise enough to understand why vandalizing a fire extinguisher is a Really Bad Idea.)
An extinguisher that size is about 30 bucks if you don’t need DOT, FAA or USCG certification. Upgrade to 4A:80BC - $60 with all the certifications - if you do. I wouldn’t go to a 10A:120BC for that application, because a home user might have trouble handling one that heavy.
And yes, I know, there’s a significant cohort of people who think that spending sixty bucks for every four or six flats so that there’s an extinguisher in the hallway is too good for Those People. The lesson there is that we need to take back the building codes, and the building inspectors. Yeah, the building inspectors are likely to be unelected bureaucrats, but you do get to vote for whoever appoints them!
That’s basically what slides #46 & #47 say; perhaps better illustrated in slides #35 & #36. Gap between the insulation and the cladding creating a chimney effect, creating so much heat that the aluminium cladding started to burn. And once metal burns, it burns.
A yearly check may be enough. The company that refills your extinguishers or provides the refills for where ever you work may actually give you a chance on a difficult to put out fire. Locally, it’s done from time to time by one company. It’s never advertised, but if one asks, you may get a chance to practice something that is different than one expects it to be. The fire department also does “demonstrations”, and they often allow the public to practice.
I joined our local rural volunteer firefighting service after some big bushfires in our area, and expected most of the call-outs to be small scale grass fires and the occasional house or barn.
We’d have a weekly car fire (out of ~200 jobs per annum), of which most were stolen, dumped and then burned. The rest were either in-vehicle fires, or where a car had started a grass fire. Ever since then I’ve carried a small powder extinguisher in the car (and bought the same for the kids).``
Most jobs were “wash always” - washing the oil or coolant off the road after a minor crash and managing traffic.
From my experience, the well-off and privileged are at least as likely to muck about with fire extinguishers. It tends not to be vandalism in the sense of people damaging the extinguishers but people can’t seem to resist spraying each other with them.
Yes, no doubt windows do have design and manufacture standards to adhere to, and there is certainly some quality inspection oversight in most manufacturers, I am sure. Design/production quality makes no difference if they are badly installed. (Really not sure if you were implying agreement with that or trying to make some other point.)
None of those appear to be determined by defects in the windows themselves.
They all (with the exception perhaps of the route via the insulating panel around the extractor fan) have to do with the way the units were fitted into the building, as you say.
Bottom line of course is that windows are not expected to and can’t stand up to fire/heat in close proximity. As FGD135 says, get sufficient heat near a window and it will go.
Then you have a nice new source of oxygen for the fire and a handy route in and out of the building for it.
I gather part of the problem here is that the way the windows were fitted meant there were all these handy avenues for fire to spread around the windows and then up and across (and down) the building without necessarily being visible from the outside except where it breached the cladding.
Yes, I have! Many counties in North Carolina offer free Community Emergency Response Training (CERT) which included fire extinguisher and basic first aid training. They showed us the different types of fire extinguishers, which to use for what, and had us put out small fires with the extinguisher.
I would just add to that, since I’m on a civic responsibility kick, that everyone should get CPR/Pediatric CPR/AED training and Stop the Bleed training.
