Article CityPlace blaze raises questions about wood framed construction

March 24Drive around the Kansas City area and they're hard to miss: The woodframed apartment buildings under construction, hulking skeletons of twobyfours and plywood. Last Monday, a halfconstructed woodframed apartment building at CityPlace in Overland Park was set on fire by a welding torch. The blaze rapidly turned into an inferno, flattening the building and spreading burning cinders onto the roofs of nearby homes. "It's almost a building with toothpicks that's what it is," said Richard Flory, president of the Kansas State Firefighters Association, about the multifamily wooden structures. "It's a lot of fire load in there." The Overland Park fire was the third huge under construction apartment blaze around the country since February.

The sudden frequency of these midconstruction, wood framed apartment fires has fire safety experts exploring whether to revisit fire and safety standards during construction, a phase when these woodframed buildings are particularly vulnerable. "Is it the wood framing construction?" asked Robert Solomon, division manager for building fire protection for the National Fire Protection Association, a nonprofit organization that develops codes and standards for fire protection. "Is it a process thing? Do we need to look at the distance between structures while they're vulnerable, those are all questions people are going to be asking.

The developer of CityPlace has said it worked with the general contractor on fire safety programs. The Star has requested documents from Overland Park City Hall about the fire safety program, construction inspections, and permits at City Place, but had not received the records as of Friday afternoon. Of course, the risks of building wood compared to steel, concrete or masonry have been longknown. But builders and developers tend to prefer wood because it's inexpensive, lightweight, and is a renewable resource. In February, a luxury apartment building under construction in Maplewood, N.J., was consumed by fire. In downtown Raleigh, N.C., firefighters scrambled to douse a raging apartment fire there on March 17 that put surrounding properties at risk. The images of the Raleigh blaze were not unlike those captured of the CityPlace fire, where flames shot into the sky during the eightalarm fire. National Fire Protection Association lists several standards and precautions to follow while doing "hot work" like welding at a construction site. They include an onsite fire brigade a team of workers trained on how to respond to the initial stages of a fire fire protection systems while construction progresses and a fire watch team that looks for possible ignition during work such as welding and for up to two hours afterward. Laurie Roberts, a spokeswoman for CityPlace developer Block Multifamily Group, said the company worked with general contractor Titan Built on fire safety. "As an owner, we work with the general contractor on all fire safety programs for all of our construction sites. Titan is ultimately responsible to manage and maintain all appropriate safety protocols," Roberts said in an email to The Star. "As it relates to fire safety they have live fire hydrants, fire watch programs, and 3rd party observation services in place at all times while performing any type of 'hot' work. They have safety programs in place and train all personnel to handle all-natural disasters or accidental incidents that may occur. We work side by side Titan to fully understand these procedures." Flory, the president of the Kansas State Firefighters Association, said the trend of largescale construction made primarily of wood has increased. He remembers when it was rare to see a predominantly wooden structure larger than a duplex or fourplex.

But in recent years he's seen a rise large apartment complexes and other structures built with wood and not steel or concrete.

These wooden structures "lightweight" construction in which beams are sometimes fastened with glue instead of nails create specific fire risks.

Wooden structures have void spaces between floors and ceilings where fire can spread quickly and undetected, Flory said. Other materials are not as combustible and can sometimes slow the spread of fire.

In CityPlace's case, the one building that was destroyed was mostly wood frame, according to the Overland Park Fire Department. A second building sustained severe damage, but to a lesser extent because drywall had been installed, which limited the fire's proliferation. That risk is also exacerbated in the construction phase when sprinklers systems are unlikely to be completed or activated and it's unclear to firefighters how stable or complete the building is.

"As a fire service we're lucky to have 10 minutes of burn time on a building before it gets into collapse," Flory said. "It's difficult to get ahead of fires like that," Flory said residents were in some ways lucky that the fire occurred in a metropolitan area with fire departments from other jurisdictions able to provide help and resources.

Water, equipment, and manpower are essential to quickly controlling a rapidlyburning fire such as the one in Overland Park. "Hats off to them," Flory said of the Overland Park Fire Department and the other agencies that responded. "It showed what the mutual aid system is all about." Solomon, the building fire expert with NFPA, said blazes like CityPlace can occur even with the best preparation but was concerned about the three big fires occurring so soon.

"It's like anything else, these things are going to happen periodically," Solomon said. "The thing is the frequency. A major fire in February and two major fires in 10 days in March." Ken Block, managing principal of Block Real Estate Services, said conditions on Monday amounted to a "perfect storm" that consumed a portion of his $450 million CityPlace development.

"High winds, very dry conditions, we've been in a drought, hot conditions unusually hot," Block said. "Everything that could have possibly added to the situation did and turned into a very, very unfortunate accident."

please read the above article and answer the following question

a. Identify the peril in the article. (1 point) 

b. Identify a hazard provided in the article (or one you can plausibly infer) associated with the above peril. (1 point)

 

c. Is the peril being discussed in the article static or dynamic? Explain? (1 point) 

d. Is the risk being discussed in the article pure or speculative? Explain? (1 point) 

e. Is the risk being discussed in the article diversifiable or non- diversifiable? (1 point) 

f. Assume that the Fire Marshal's Office determined that the fire was caused by the owner of the property on purpose to collect insurance. Would this be considered an example of a moral hazard or a morale hazard? Why? (1 point)

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

a The peril in the article is the risk of fires in woodframed construction buildings b A hazard prov... View the full answer