[GSBN] Fire case studies

[August Hasz]

My bale house burned while in construction. All bales up, windows just set, a tarp around the house due to approach bad weather— perfect recipe for a fast fire. The general contractor was cleaning straw up from the trimming going on as windows were set. Inexplicably he used a halogen construction light on a 6” stand. The cord got pushed by the broom, pulled the light into a pile of loose straw…. 7 minutes to total structural collapse. 

In typical fashion many in the area wanted to point to the fact that it was a bale house. In reality this was a really bad use of halogen light and a silly accident. The bales themselves did not really burn (60 dump trucks of debris to haul away… ugh), but the unflustered fine straws protruding out did provide a rapid means to spread the fire to the floor and roof systems.

Not sure that really helps, but there is my ‘case study.’

August

August Hasz, P.E., LEED AP
President + Principal Engineer
REG
Resource Engineering Group
Direct: 970.713.0984
Office: 970.349.1216
Cell: 970.275.3603
hasz at reginc.com <mailto:hasz at reginc.com> 
www.reginc.com <http://www.reginc.com/>

> On May 29, 2018, at 11:34 AM, Bob Theis <bob at bobtheis.net> wrote:
> 
> 
>  I’ve been mentioned twice in this thread, so I feel obliged to  recap the summary of field reports of SB fires I gathered  for Bruce King’s  2006 book, Design of Straw Bale Buildings ( Each of you DOES  have a copy, right?? ) 
> 
> There were fourteen fires in the survey, and it will surprise no one on this list that the best correlation of fire to damage was whether the bales were plastered. 
> 
>  Six fires occurred after plastering;  of them, five had only local damage and one was a total loss ( in which the fire began with an electrical short in the roof framing, and the fire department felt obliged to demolish the bale walls, even though they were only smoldering )
> 
> Eight fires occurred before plastering; of them, two had local damage and six were a total loss.  
> 
> As mentioned in David Arkin’s post, the biggest fire liability to bale walls are those damn sticks of wood we put up near them. 
> 
> Bob
> 
> 
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