What can we learn from the damage? Is there a design flaw?

What's up Peeps!

After waking up from my couch nap by chocking in toxic smoke and looking out the window to see what in my head was the worse case scenario happening. One I had hoped would never happen, well we all never want any homes or anything to burn down, or at least we shouldn't if we are human. The different arson incidents lead me to believe we might not all be. OMG. Despite the worse happening, it wasn't still quite the worse. Lets get into that a little later as we analyze the charred remains, how the fire likely spread and additional risks. This building always freaked me out since I moved here.

Sometimes I don't know what to think of myself that I keep looking at tragedies and analyzing them. Maybe I have just seen that many strange things starting with a plane crash/nose dive into my friend's neighbor's backyard when I was like 10 or 12...Talk about a weird sleepover. The plane exploded everywhere in a 1000 pieces and pieces flew all the way up to the roof of the house who's backyard it crashed in. I was staying across the street from it. Was the freakiest thing I ever saw for a long time. I'm probably still afraid to get on an airplane although if necessary, I will begrudgingly get on one. About a decade ago, a real bad storm hit Edmonton, a giant tornado cloud was forming over the city but luckily never touched down but still created over 3 million dollars in damages with trees everywhere where they shouldn't have been like on home's rooftops and clogging streets or in the back of pick-up trucks ready for haul. I hid in the basement for that one...OMG.

A couple of photos from the giant funnel cloud that didn't touch down from about a decade ago, I went for a walk across the neighborhood I lived in at the time, just a few blocks was damage everywhere. Early in my photography and I had a Nikon D-40x at the time...The most basics of basics!

Having to protect myself from woman hunters/ human traffickers since I was 14 hasn't been easy either and can even be pretty dangerous especially when some of them hide and hunt on worksites like it's a victim catalogue. The work I do is also full of tragedy in itself. Many of them we call "incidents". Sometimes people die crushed by crane equipment, the lucky ones loose a few fingers. You open a flange that was permitted and you get there the equipment is still full of harmful product and it self ignites/ burns workers in flash fires...some has has burns up to 80% of their bodies as a result, people fall down a tower and breaks their legs and has to climb back up to self rescue. Toxic gas release that knocks down workers in confine spaces and then the inattentive would be rescuers that rush in especially in the cases of h2s. Pyrophoric towers collapse like in the Sarnia incident of a few years ago. As the personnel that goes into the equipment, it doesn't have to happen on our own sites for us to analyze it. Our lives as workers rely on it in the end as each one we learn to take additional safety measures or correct any blind spots we may have had.

I could go on there are so many tragedies. Some are caused by carelessness, some are caused by other things. Either way, there is a saying that every rule is written in blood. We work under strict worker rules and protocols because something went really wrong at some point. When the something really wrong happens, regardless of the cause, we are all forced to collectively look at the "train wreck" regardless of how messy it is, fill out reports and further analyze. What went wrong? Why? COULD IT HAVE BEEN PREVENTED? if so...how? The story Shit happens is never a good enough one. Could it have gone worse? If so how? Something else we learn, safety and critical analytical skills should follow you home. Naturally, it makes sense anyway.

Why does this building freak me out? Lets take the long way around like usual with some useless information first because it's my blog and I can. When I first moved here, it was an overwhelming super condensed neighborhood. I had been in the city for a few years already at that point but I still came from a small Catholic community Parish nestled in the Appalachians, this neighborhood had more homes then my entire village and everything LOOKS THE SAME like ticky-tacky-little-boxes. A mass built blueprint probably replicated all over the city as it is a good usage of space and maximize rental profits with many condensed multi unit buildings.

As I was getting used to the bus system in the area, I got off at the wrong stop by accident. I landed in the middle of that building. I knew I needed to access the lot right behind it so I had the smart idea to just cut thru their courtyard and walk around the building. Well that proved to be a bad idea. I kept walking and walking and at every corner, there was another, and another...into infinity. The building seemed like it never ended. That's because it didn't.

It takes at least half a city block long or more and it wraps around an entire community of town homes right smack in the middle of it. By community, I mean probably 100 or more additional homes surrounded by a burning building. Sharing a parking lot. When I looked out the window to figure out where the smoke was coming from, all I saw was a parking lot on fire behind the trees. The flame and black smoke was getting bigger and bigger by the second. Should I evacuate myself? I was probably safer where I was taking photos anyway. Well the smoke itself was pretty toxic to breathe and I was right in the wind direction.

If I was in the wind enough to get smoke, ambers can also get carried over and catch spread the fire. I went there to analyze if I should start packing up my place in case we have to evacuate ourselves. The saving grace that day, the wind was calm. Real calm. Enough to carry smoke over but the likelihood of it spreading given there was a few firetrucks already on it despite not being quite under control, they did attack each flare up quickly. It's still really dangerous to adjacent buildings. There is no way I would even been able to go to sleep that night not knowing when it was contained within the walls of the building and under control, not burning loose on the roof like the initial view.

Had it been windier that day, it could have been catastrophic. The wind was blowing in the right direction to blow flaming debris on that entire community that it wraps around. I already think a building with 100's of unit is questionable as it is in the event of a fire, why does it wrap around 100's more like a fiery death trap waiting to happen?

Look how twisted up from heat distortion that metal rain gutter is.

What you see in the picture above, is only a small portion of the building, 1/4 of it maybe? It keeps going for a long time, where you see the burned out porches, also likely the apartments where the fire started at first glance, it was the most damaged area and appears to be the hottest point. The photo ends but on the other side, the building bends again into another corner to an additional wing/leg of the building where the fire also spread very quickly. Given that it may have initiated in the apartment with the burned out balconies all the way thru what looks like 2 other units wide, potentially in each direction of travel. It too 3 hours for firefighters to put out the roof and have the fire contained to the inside of the building walls. That's when the risk to spreading to other smaller apartment behind it is significantly reduced.

From it's potential starting point near the burned out balconies, the fire quickly started to spread on both sides of it in opposite directions working it's way towards each ends of the building on the inside. As I mentioned, the roof blew apart the second they started to spray it after extinguishing a hotter part of the fire closer to the originating point. The fire made thru 3 of the bends of the building via the attic/roof and took most of it out in a large part of the building.

I know I shared this photo in my last post, this isn't to be redundant or cash in extra, it's just to explain what I mean by it just keeps going looking like a different building but it isn't. What you see in the image above is still not even all of it, on the opposite side, it does that and keeps going for quite some time. That's the front street view. The easy to access to emergency vehicle side. What's behind the building? Lets take a look.

You see how close the other buildings are to a flaming building that wraps around everything like a court yard. Now you can see for yourselves, had it been slightly windier that day or firefighters would have showed up a minute later or not as prepared as they were. Reality is, even back there is hard to access for many emergency vehicles. Obviously enough to get the job done but a lot of what if's run thru my mind just the same. The buildings it wraps around, it takes about 15 minutes each to completely engulf in flames if the fire catches close to the middle and there are many of these smaller buildings being put at risk by the large fire. Here is a photo from the second fire that highlights the proximity of each building within the community. The building below from fire #2 post wasn't even in the fire, it just melted because it was so close the the burning set of units.

This image isn't from this fire, it's from another about a month ago , just to display the proximity of the buildings across the neighborhood and how easy it would be for fire to spread to other buildings. The fence is the backyard for the next building, the siding melted from the fence being on fire and radiant heat onto the plastic siding. This part did not catch fire, it was just that close to it.

https://peakd.com/hive-161155/@ladyrainbow/true-crime-week-endnot-just-more-events-to-observerecord

Obviously the rental company isn't exactly liable for major design flaw as a second or third hand owner, this would be engineering design flaw and permitting/zoning issues? Was it knowingly overlooked in order to build new neighborhood en masse quickly? Doesn't it have to be approved by fire department? surely they wouldn't miss how hazardous this is. If it was a blind spot in the past, perhaps one that should be visited. What's the true cost of condensed high density living and making smart use of city real estate to maximize space? It has it's advantages but clearly short comings in the event of and it's also pretty clear that it can literally happen to anyone at anytime that live in these busy neighborhoods.

I always found that aspect sketch from the moment I moved here but reality, if you want to be able to afford rent in Edmonton, you have to live in one of these poorly designed fire trap disasters waiting to happen. This was the second major apartment fire where there is several millions of dollars worth of damage so whatever could be improved from that learning experience has been re-assed by now. Like I said, everything is written in blood. Something had to happen, analyze and improve. This one building took 60 firefighters and over 15 trucks maybe 20 were on the scene, I stopped counting out of boredom there were so many leaving other parts of the city vulnerable.

Another observation during the event and truck set up and their access to fire hydrants. The truck with the pump gages that I called the water truck, I named it such because it was hooked up to fire hydrant much further down the street and it likely acted to ensure water pressure isn't lost during transport. If water is anything like welding cables and electricity flow, the longer the cable, the less juice/pressure you would get at the other end. The actual point is, as bad as this was, the fire is smaller than what it could have been and hydrants further away needed to be accessed, if the fire had been worse and caught the smaller unit? Is there even enough to accommodate such a disaster?

If it would have been windy that day and other units caught too? How many additional resources available on top of what was clearly required to cover the large building. It already took 3 ladder trucks to extinguish the middle and both ends to prevent it from spreading as best as possible but in 3 hours, despite best efforts, a lot could have happened to the surroundings and as long as the flames were coming out of the roof, all other adjacent buildings were in danger. How many more of these fire-trap neighborhoods is there across Edmonton? Alberta? Canada? North-America? Is it time to review these condensed living designs? Construction materials to be upgraded to be better fire-proofed to prevent spreading? All it would have taken is stronger winds because it was already blowing in the right direction to make a big big mess.

What do you think of large apartment buildings that wrap around an entire community of 100's close proximity lower level town house units?(4 to 5 per building)

Could it be considered a neighborhood design flaw to be revisited? A blindspot?

Is there something to learn from this incident or is it just my paranoid small village mind?

Should smaller buildings surrounded by larger buildings be equipped with a built in sprinkler system to compensate for the additional fire hazards of high density living? Can existing buildings be retrofitted? If not indoors, outdoors?