Latest / Fire Engineering Podcast / Using Big Water at Fires: Deck Guns, Master Streams, and Fire Attack

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Using Big Water at Fires: Deck Guns, Master Streams, and Fire Attack · Fire Engineering Podcast

• Nat Kapustin: From MSA helmets and streamlight flashlights to seek thermal imaging cameras and so much more, the firestore.com has everything you need to serve your community safely and effectively. Hey everybody, it's Eric Dryman coming to you from my office at the fire department. I'm here recording this month's Hooks and Hoses podcast, real quick, trying to get it in. things have been a little hectic lately. So want to welcome everybody. thanks to Fire Engineering for giving me this platform and offering me the opportunity to present on different topics over the course of the last several years. this month I want to talk about the importance of big water early. I've had a rash of incidents lately, both that I've been on and that I've seen on social media and in the news and things like that, where I think fire de some fire departments are overlooking or forgetting the value of a master stream operation and what I would refer to as an offensive. strategy. In other words, you roll up, first due engine, you've got a house going or a structure going extensively. And rather than using that deck gun that's pre piped on so many fire apparatus these days, crews either skip it because they don't think about it or they're they're hesitant to use it because of their tank water, whatever the case might be. and then it ultimately results in the fire growing even much larger than it already is, potentially extending to other structures and creating more problems for us. So we know today that our fires are growing at a faster rate than they've ever grown before. You know, the old adage the fire doubles every minute is out the window. because of the products that are being consumed now, when things burn, the the fires are are growing at a much faster rate. We have lighter weight construction, which means that the the low surface to mass ratio means that the products that are catching fire are are being consumed faster and we're getting to collapse sooner and things like that. So as I mentioned earlier I've had I've had a handful handful of these fires over the last year, year and a half or so. some where engine companies took it upon themselves to use their their deck gun initially in order to give the fire a quick hit and then turned around and deployed either two and a half inch hand lines or stretched inch and three quarter hand lines depending upon how much fire the engine crew could knock down with the tank water they had or if they hadn't established a water supply, that obviously benefits that engine company because they don't have to worry about running out of tank water before they do get a supply line. So what does big water mean? Well big water to me means a large caliber stream. Now that could come in the form of a two and a half inch hand line that's flowing upper high two hundreds, low three hundreds. that could be in the form of a portable master stream that's being fed by a single two and a half or a single three inch line, a blitz fire or stinger outfit, something like that. Or it could mean the pre pipe deck gun on on an engine company. So those that would be quick, fast water. Another option that I don't think fire departments oftentimes think about is the value of potentially using an aerial stream in order to flow large quantities of water in a more offensive pattern rather than just flowing water from on high and letting it rain down onto the building like we see in so many so many videos and probably most of you have experienced over your career when you're fighting a defensive fire. So certainly the the aerial operation is gonna take longer. It's not gonna be quick and fast, quick water in a fast manner. so I'll I'll brush up or touch on some of that stuff, but but predominantly I'm gonna be talking about engine-based operations. So the one of the first things I get or here is well, we don't have an established water supply, so we can't flow the big water, right? We don't we don't have a a supply line coming into the engine. So we can't flow the deck gun because we're gonna run out of water. I don't disagree that you're gonna y consume your water much faster using a deck gun than you would if you were using a smaller diameter hand line. I it's fully fully reasonable and and and and understood. The thing I always tell people is would you rather take your your deck gun, for example, with an inch and three eighths tip, which is the smallest orifice on the s on the stack tips on your on your deck gun and flow it for approximately twenty seconds. That's going to get you somewhere under two hundred gallons. It's going to be between 150 and 200 gallons up o in about 20 seconds. Because that small tip flows five hundred gallons a minute at eighty pounds per square inch if you were going to flow it for the full minute. So you can throw a couple of hundred gallons on a fire very quickly, even with a five hundred gallon booster tank, and you've still got three hundred gallons of water left, which I realize isn't a lot, but when you think about flowing a hand line, that's basically two minutes worth of water, which allows the time for someone else to lay in a supply line to you, or if you laid a supply line in coming into the incident, having that hydrant connected and getting that line charged. the other option would be to have a second engine come in and nurse to you while a supply line's being established if that were the case. I'm not saying you're gonna do this all the time. I'm not saying that it's something that is gonna be your go to automatically, but I do believe that it has its place and it and it's a valuable tool that people are not utilizing to the best of their ability. I can remember when I first got into the f to the fire department back in the nineteen ninety when I started using the deck gun was f fairly common. particularly it for the organization that I started out with. We had light staffing. oftentimes the personnel were not readily available to pull hand lines and things as quickly as the department I work at now here in Indianapolis. So it was important to get the biggest bang for your buck and and throw that water. We used to call it a blitz attack. Blitz that fire real quick with that deck gun. Knock the fire back. You're not gonna put it out but you are going to knock the wind out of it and put it back on its heels and that buys you the time you need to get your line stretched, get your people in place, and then proceed with a standard offensive fire attack using hand lines. For whatever reason over the years, whether it's the advent of all these new hose packages and a greater emphasis on hand line management, which is all good, I would say that we're probably as the American as an American Fire Service, better at stretching and moving hand lines now than we have ever been, at least in my my career, because there's been such a gr great emphasis put on getting better at managing hand lines flowing, having these hose and nozzle packages that are compatible, you know, lower pressure nozzles, which which certainly diminishes the fatigue on the firefighters and the reaction force and all of those things. I think those are all good things. But because there's been such a huge emphasis placed on handline management. I think that we've kind of forgotten some of the tools that we have at our disposal. You know, it's it it's not because those tools aren't available to us, it's just that for whatever reason we've gotten away from it. And I think that it we it would do us good to review and reconsider the value of the master stream. I will tell you that I recently had a fire earlier this year where the first arriving engine company pulled up with the primary house going. It was a one-story residence with a converted attic space. And the entire attic space, converted space, had fire blowing out the the alpha side cable. It was a wind-driven fire, and we had fire that had taken over, started to take over the first floor. As those crews pulled up. They had houses on both sides of the initial firehouse also starting to ignite. They were both exposures probably within ten feet, fifteen feet of the initial structure. And with approximately twenty to twenty-five seconds of water application, that first dew engine was able to knock that fire back and completely change the course of action. We went from having three houses on fire, one very s you know, over fifty percent involved, and the houses on either side. the siding burning and and the eave starting to take off and the fire get into the attic. We went from three structures burning to essentially one structure still burning with some hot spots to mop up on the two exposure structures. So I've seen it work in person and it it's extremely valuable from a fire application standpoint. And we operate here in town with five hundred gallon tanks, booster tanks on our engines. I know a lot of departments are running much larger tanks, you know, upwards of s of a thousand, fifteen hundred gallons, maybe more, depending upon your jurisdiction and your available water supply and those sorts of things. If you're not running anything if you're running more than five hundred gallons a minute, then this this concept should be even easier for you to absorb and digest. You know, if you've got seven hundred and fifty or a thousand or more gallons, you have the luxury of having that additional time to establish more water supply. in order to supplement what you use initially in your big knockdown with your big water. And we have to remember that a lot of these structures, even these well involved structures, if we knock down really, really well with that initial blast of water from a master stream, we're probably gonna put be able to put out the remainder of that structure with with a few hundred gallons of water. It's not gonna be a prolonged, protracted firefight like it would be if we went in there initially and we tried to use an undersized handline like an inch and three quarter on a house that's fifty percent involved, we're probably gonna run through those five hundred gallons before we can generate enough water put putting enough water on that fire to overcome the BTUs that are being produced by by the fire itself. So, you know, there's there's a trade-off, you're using more water, but you're using more water in a much heavier application in a much shorter period of time, which allows you to overcome the BTU production. And it also allows you to overwhelm that fire and knock it back to the point where it's no longer as big a threat to you. So part of that and part of being capable of doing this is you have to practice it, you have to prepare for it, and you have to train for it. You have to understand how your deck gun works. Certainly, you know, everybody probably is aware that they pivot and they swivel, operate with the crank and all those sorts of things. That's all, you know, pretty straightforward and basic. But you also need to understand how you can drop the angle of that master stream down below. preset stop that that the deck gun is set to to stop lowering at because there are going to be situations where you're gonna need to get the tip of that that deck gun down lower than what the factory preset on the ladder or on the deck gun will allow you to do and most most master stream most deck guns like that there's it's just a matter of pulling the pin that's located on the on the handle there's a little pin with a with a ring through it lift up on that pin and then it allows you to drop the tip of that deck gun down below the the preset angle that it's set at from the factory. that can be a big help for you. Going out and timing also is a big help for you. you know go out sometime on a training scenario, training day, with a full tank of water and time how long it takes for you to empty your tank using the master stream. You know, you can watch the the tank gauge on your pump panel, which they aren't perfect but but they're they're a relatively good estimate of how much water is left in your tank. And you can kind of time it and say, Okay, well it took ten seconds to get to three quarters, it took twenty seconds to get to half or or whatever it is, and it took me a minute and fifteen to get all the way empty where I have no more water left. So Doing that kind of training and preparation ahead of time will give you a better feel for how long you can flow that master stream when the time comes and know that you can get away with it. you know, if you're if you're fortunate enough to work in an area with hydrants, this makes it a lot easier. If you're working in an area where you're gonna be doing tanker shuttle operations or you're gonna require somebody to bring additional water to you, whether it's nursing or dump tanks or whatever it is. Those things certainly create additional challenges. But I would still argue that most places if you're doing if you're operating in an area where you have limited water supply, you don't have hydrants on every corner, you're more used to operating in a rural water supply environment, then you probably already have a larger booster tank on your engine than a larger urban inner city engine would have because you don't have the access to those hydrants, so you have to bring the water with you. I think most departments are They're ordering their engines with bigger tanks, particularly in in more rural areas. Timing all that stuff out is very important. Also, you know, practicing not only with the deck gun, which is if it's prepiped, it's pretty straightforward. It's put the pump in gear, open tank to pump, and you pull a lever, and now you've got water coming out of the master stream, right? Pretty straightforward. But if you want to practice some of these other big water techniques like using a portable monitor, that is is fed with just one supply line, then you have to practice that as well and see how long it takes you to get that deployed. You know, in many instances, taking a little bit more time to get that thing deployed is going to pay dividends. even though there's going to be a little bit of potentially a little bit of a delay getting water on the fire, it's going to pay the return on the investment is going to be much greater because you're going to be able to flow a much greater volume of of water with just a single firefighter. If I tried to flow the same amount of water through a portable monitor not monitor nozzle and through a two and a half, I'm not going to be able to do that simply because not because they aren't both capable of flowing a significant amount of water, but if I've only got one firefighter, one firefighter is not going to typically be able to man and flake out and loop and do all the other things that need to be done to a two and a half inch handline and control it. easily. Whereas the portable monitor nozzle is much easier to manage. You can still get significant even greater flow rates than you can with the two and a half inch hand line and you can knock down a a lot more fire than you could with just an inch and three quarter or an under pumped two and a half because you've only got one or two people there to help manage that hand line. So practicing getting out, getting comfortable with these things is is one of the most important parts that you need to do when you start considering doing these kinds of techniques. For those of you who are chief officers and company officers, I always say that, you know, we we default to what we know best. And most of the time when we go to incidents, when we go to fires, the overwhelming majority of them are going to be residential fires and they're gonna normally be one or two rooms of material burning. Sometimes just the the contents themselves and then sometimes we get into the structure as well as the contents. But they're relatively They're fires that are relatively easy to manage with an engine three-quarter hand line. And because of that, we default to that out of muscle memory and habit. And it's certainly important for firefighters to recognize these things and be cognizant of them. But it's also even more important for company officers and chief officers to not get stuck in that standard operating mode of, hey, we pull inch and three quarter hand lines when we pull up in front of fires, because there are going to be instances where that's not going to work. And it'll end up putting you behind the eight ball, and you'll either burn the place down or it's going to take a lot more manpower and a lot more effort to get that fire under control. Or you end up with the house next door going or the house on either side going, depending upon how close together neighboring exposures are. So practice that, time it. you know, look at look at how your sit how your rigs are set up, and then practice pumping it because it's important that you're pumping it. at the right pressure too. We're used to pumping smooth bore nozzles at fifty pounds, but our master stream nozzles get get pumped at eighty pounds. So understanding that you're gonna have to use higher pump discharge pressure as well. And one thing I'll I'll say when it comes to pump discharge pressure, you don't want to over pump these master streams. If you start when you start to overpump them and think, well I'm just gonna pump it up ten, fifteen, twenty pounds, you might get away with it or you might not, depending upon how the orifice is are in the in the deck gun, whether or not it's got a stream shaper on it, what tit size you're using and those sorts of things, you can actually cause the stream to start to break up almost like you've got your thumb over the end of it because there's just so much turbulence being created by that water being pushed so fast through that deck gun that it actually takes away from the the stream shape and the ability of that stream to penetrate. So all those things have to be trained on and practiced on. and reviewed in order to make this work well. The other thing I'll say about ma master streams when it comes to aerials is I see a lot of fire departments that think that when you're flowing big water that you have to have your ladder com fully extended. So in other words, I've got a one story commercial warehouse that with twenty foot ceilings and I've got a hundred foot aerial, so I have to extend my ladder a hundred feet in the air and then let the water spray down, you know, in a in a defensive operation. And that's just strictly not the case. You don't want to have to have your aerial any higher above the building that you're fighting the fire in than absolutely necessary. because when you do that and you're raining the water down, the longer the water is in the air, the more the stream's going to break up. And the more the stream breaks up, then the less heat absorbing ability it'll have because those droplets that come off that stream as it breaks up are going to hit the convected currents coming off of the fire and that water's going to evaporate before it ever makes contact with the burning material or the not the non-burning material around the burning material to cool everything down. So keep your master streams low to the ground or lower to the structure when you're using them. If you have the ability, particularly with tower ladders and platforms, these things are awesome if when you get them below grade and you can use that master stream to blow through a building. Say you've got a strip mall or a deep warehouse. or a grocery store or something like that with large picture windows. One master stream pumped correctly with the right water supply, you can easily flow a thousand gallons a minute, which is the equivalent of three or four two and a half inch hand lines. And not only can you flow more water, but moving that master stream around, whether it's it's electronically operated by motors or it's manually operated by hand wheels, you're gonna be able to move that that nozzle back and forth much easier and get it where you want it, much faster than if you've got two and a halves and you have to, you know, lug and drag around or pick up the tip and and try and bend it and move it and everything else. So utilizing your aerials not only for defensive operations, as I mentioned previously, for spraying on high, but also s consider start to use them in limited situations where that it makes sense. this is probably not something that you're going to typically do on a residential fire or even a maybe an apartment fire. But it's certainly something that's realistic and valuable when you're dealing with a commercial fire. And when we get these commercial building fires, particularly with the number of warehouses that are going up around the country and the and the size of of many of those warehouses, you know, five hundred a million, million and a half square feet, to stretch that much hose line or to get peop put people into position to flow water with two and a half inch handlines or even portable master streams. is gonna be a huge challenge. Whereas if we have that aerial device and we can lower it down or possibly even use our deck gun as well and get the water where we want it, not only can we flow a lot more water, but we can also limit the exposure we're putting our people in. if I've got people that are gonna have to move three or four hundred feet inside of a building on a hand line with low or zero visibility, that's a that's a significant risk that I'm taking with those people. even though they might be trained for it and they're properly equipped for it. That's an additional risk that I'm assuming as a company officer or an incident commander that I could potentially eliminate by using the master stream from an aerial device or a deck gun to get the penetration that I need. it requires apparatus positioning of course, you've got to have the the engine of the ladder in the right place. if you think that particularly with the aerials, if you're gonna be using an aerial to do something like this, then you need to make sure that you get that aerial into position before it's ever needed, which was gonna require foresight on company officers' parts as they s as they arrive at a scene and they start dropping hose on the ground and things like that. And then it's also gonna require the incident commander to be thinking two and three and four steps ahead to consider bringing in aerial devices that may be arriving a little bit later. maybe having an engine stop short or pull past an area or leave an area open, park farther away from the building than they may otherwise do, or something like that, in order to leave that prime space for the aerial, particularly if you're using an aerial with a with a some sort of basket or platform on it. This can still be done with a straight ladder with a waterway on it, but it's more challenging simply because of the articulation and the way that the the straight ladders Bill, you know, if you've got a ladder pipe, it's a different animal. If you're if you're still one of those departments that's stretching three inch line up your aerial ladder and strapping a ladder pipe onto the tip, you've got a little bit more flexibility and a little bit a few more options than you do if you're a ladder company where your waterway's pre piped and the master stream itself is underneath the ladder. That's gonna create challenges for you to do some of these things. But getting out and training on it, practicing, drilling. looking at your options, figuring out how you can get your aerial closer to the ground by doing things like shortjacking it and and manipulating the outriggers and the position of the apparatus. You're gonna set yourself up s for success when we have these low frequency, high risk or or high fire volume type incidents. So it's a pretty short and sweet podcast that month that this month I said a lot. Hope everybody has a good remainder of October when you listen to this and I'm looking forward to the holidays coming up. They'll be here before we know it. we'll see you in November on behalf of Fire Engineering and Fire Engineering Network, Chief Dave Rhodes, Diane Rothschild. I want to thank everybody for tuning in and be safe.