Article Review:
Construction Concerns for Firefighters
The article Construction Concerns for Firefighters by Gregory Havel is about how structural collapse happens to different types of construction. This article goes over how each type of building construction has its own way of breaking down and leading to structural collapse. Havel also goes over certain ways collapses happen that are not normally looked at by firefighters. At the end of the article Havel talks about questions to ask yourself while doing an ongoing size up to help yourself understand if what action is best to take in which situation. I want to go over some of these points that Havel talked about and how I found them useful. In the first part of the article Havel explains the construction of buildings type one through five and the downfalls to the construction, and how they suffer collapse. In type five construction, all of the construction members are made of wood which makes it easy to collapse because all parts of the building are completely combustible. In type four building construction, he says that although it is also made of all wood construction it is harder to ignite. In type three construction, there are masonry walls but with all other parts burning down the masonry walls are then free standing and set up for possible collapse. In type two construction, Havel states that the light weight construction can be easily weakened by the flames, and in type one he states that a content fire that has no sprinkler system can cause the building to collapse because it would weaken the conjoining members. After explaining each type of building constructions weakness to fire and how it can collapse Havel then goes over how loads can redistribute themselves and the loads can shift from being an axial load to an eccentric or torsional load. The structure, not being able to hold those types of loads can then cause the structure to collapse. Havel then explains how buildings are like systems and how each component of building acts with another component of the building which makes the component serve more than one function. Which also means when one component gives out then the rest are soon to follow, resulting in a system completely malfunctioning, which means as for the building structural collapse. In the end of the article Havel then brings us to questions to ask yourself during an ongoing size up, so that you evaluate the structure of the building. During this time he says to ask yourself things such as are the effects of the incident confined to one room? One floor? “Has the incident compromised
