About 100 firefighters from the U.S. and Canada assembled at Northbrook's Underwriters Laboratories on March 18 to find out if they have more, and safer, choices than they might think as they pull up to a residential fire. Steve Kerber, director of UL's Firefighter Safety Research Institute, said the traditional way to extinguish a house fire has been to immediately carry hoses in and aggressively attack from room to room, forcing the fire against the outside walls with water. The accepted wisdom finds that attacking through windows from the outside can essentially push the fire into other rooms, and the water, becoming superheated, can "steam the occupants" to death, he said. A combination method, however, involves attacking quickly through windows before moving to the inside. That "transitional attack" – still shunned in many departments, Kerber said, because it involves exterior firefighting -- was demonstrated Friday in a test house at UL, festooned with hundreds of sensors.
"We're not trying to tell you how to fight a fire," Kerber said. "We're trying to give you more choices." Underwriters has tested the transitional method about two dozen times in the past month as part of a three-year study of transitional attack, funded by a $3.5 million U.S. Department of Homeland Security grant, which will culminate in a report next year, Kerber said.