Case 1: Bow string truss roofs are unpredictable during a fire. The bottom chord has a significant design deficiency with the tensile strength. The reason it has a deficiency is because of the bend that is put on the wood. When a straight grain piece of lumber is bent it causes some stress factors that can weaken the lumber. Even though more wood is added to it to make the truss, the damage has already be done. Now when you build on top of it an add dead load to the truss it is putting more stress to the lumber. When you add fire to the mix of all the stress that the truss has it cause the lumber to fail and collapse. In the case of the fallen fire fighter, it doesn’t seem that they had a pre-fire plan for that building. When the ventilation hole were made it added fuel to the fire in the form of oxygen and that how the fire reached the trusses in the building. The fire fighter enter the building …show more content…
One reason it is built is for fire protection. The parapet wall prevents flames coming up the exterior of a building from the igniting combustible roofing membranes. A way fire fighters can identify parapet walls is by doing a pre-fire plan check. By walking around the exterior of the building you should notice if the building has a parapet wall. If you cannot tell from the base of the building a roof examine from the top would be the best way to find out if the building has a parapet wall. Now if a fire was to breakout in a building with a parapet walls the lead man on the scene should identify and then establish a collapse zone for all structures and parapet walls that may be susceptible to collapse. This would be the best way to prevent injuries in the fire emergency field. A fire fighter should never be sure that the parapet wall was engineered to take the weight and forces being applied by additional dead and live loads, wind loads, and the structure is being compromised by