Trial by Fire : Santa Ana Torches Home to Show Danger of Tenant Crowding

Inside a three-bedroom home crammed from floor to ceiling with clothes and furniture, firefighter Jim Albers sparked his lighter Thursday and set fire to a small trash can filled with paper.

Spreading rapidly through the cluttered room, the fire gave off so much heat that, within two minutes, even items not directly in contact with it exploded into flames. Soon, the windows shattered and spewed out inky, black smoke so dense it completely obscured the fire inside.

It was all a test as firefighters burned the vacant two-story Bristol Street home to demonstrate how swiftly fires can sweep through overcrowded residences.

“That was a hell of lot faster than it should have been,” Albers said afterward. “These fires spread extremely fast.”

If anyone had been living inside when the blaze started, he said, “after two minutes and eight seconds, they either got outside by themselves or they’re dead.”

The large amount of clothing and belongings from multiple families found in overcrowded homes provides more fuel for a fire than in homes where fewer people live. As a result, fires spread faster and are potentially deadlier, according to Fire Chief Allen (Bud) Carter.

However, information on precisely how fires spread in a home remains scarce because such tests are done rarely, and then usually only on commercial or industrial buildings.

“That’s ironic, because 80% of fire deaths occur in a residential setting,” Carter said.

Further, much of the information that modern firefighters rely on comes from studies in the 1920s and 1940s. Up-to-date information is crucial to save the lives of residents and protect the safety of firefighters, he said.

The Santa Ana Fire Department conducted the test burn with help from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a division of the U.S. Department of Commerce. The data will be used to create a computer model describing how fire spreads, enabling firefighters across the nation to improve their training and permit architects to design safer buildings.

Predicting how fires behave also will make public education and fire-prevention programs more successful, virtually assuring that the information from the test will eventually save lives, Carter said.

Before the test, technicians placed in each room several sophisticated temperature probes on copper wires strung from floor to ceiling. Every three seconds, each probe relayed data to a central computer which recorded the temperature, direction and spread of the fire as it moved through the house.

The home used in the test previously housed 15 residents with only three bedrooms. Before the test, it was stocked with hundreds of pairs of pants, shirts and other clothing as well as beds and couches to simulate overcrowded conditions that are found routinely in local residences.

Once Albers started the fire, it took just over two minutes before the living room became impassable, blocking off potential escape routes for anyone who would have been in the bedrooms.

If 15 people had been inside the home, the adults might have been able to break a window and escape if they had sufficient warning, but the thick black smoke and heat would have hampered their efforts.

In that situation, “children, the infirm and people looking for their children are going to die,” even if firefighters arrive within the ideal four-minute response time, Albers said.

City officials are especially interested in the test results because in a recent 13-month period in Santa Ana, nine people were killed and 10 others were injured in fires in overcrowded homes.

State law permits as many as 10 people to live in a one-bedroom home, and city officials have lobbied the Legislature unsuccessfully for years to reduce that number.

Critics argue that tighter occupancy standards would discriminate against low-income residents and minorities, and could leave many families homeless.

However, City Councilman Miguel A. Pulido Jr. rejected that view, saying that permitting low-income families to live in potentially lethal overcrowded conditions is discriminatory.

“The current state ordinance is a dangerous code,” he said. “Overcrowding means a greater incidence of fires, but also if a fire starts, its spread is so quick that by the time people are aware of it, they’re dead.”

Nodding toward the charred house, he added, “this is just an illustration of how quickly death can come.”