Burn Baby Burn: Experiments with Fire Damage

It’s a Monday at the house museum, and you’ve been in the on-site storage room since six am. You’re tired, your coffee hasn’t kicked in yet, and you still have an awful lot of work to do before opening the doors for the public today. There are some new acquisitions on your desk, along with several objects you need to accession into the collection, including books, photographs, nitrate film negatives, and slides. There’s just so much to do. You’ve got several donation boxes around your desk, and you have no idea what exactly is inside some of them. You leave your desk for four whole minutes to go get a glass of water, and when you get back, the worst thing imaginable has happened--- Fire. Fire in your storage room, in the house museum you serve, and the fire is already out of your control.

For us, this small scenario was our fire set-up. Within a five by ten foot burn room located at the Austin Fire Department Training Facility, we simulated this storage room fire to understand what might happen to a small house museum, archive, or private collection if a fire were to break out.

Our room is five by ten feet. The desk is against the left wall, and to the right side of it in the back left corner of the room is a trash bin. On top of the desk are an open book, sealed books, a closed container, photos, plastic sheet, slides, and photos, along with a bookcase. Inside the book case are many books, along with some VHS tapes, nitrate film negatives, and photographs. By the back wall are two donation boxes, one a plastic crate and the other a cardboard box. The plastic crate is closer to the left where the trash bin is located and the cardboard box is two feet away from the plastic crate. To the left of the desk on the floor and along the right wall are rolled papers and various art media. A sketch hangs framed with glass on the back wall. The entire space lacks a fourth wall-- like a theater, we can watch from the outside.

For our experiments, however, we arranged our room and watched as the fire spread. In our five by ten foot burn room, we arranged a desk with shelving, filled the drawers of the desk (with one kept open on purpose), a trash bin, two open donor boxes (one cardboard, the other plastic), two closed boxes, a stack of rolled papers, a canvas sitting on the floor, and framed print hanging on the wall.

Before the Main Fire Experiment:

Pre-Experimentation: Before the burn experiments was this minor experimentation, demonstrating how difficult it is to burn a closed book.

Even with fire applied directly to the book, there was only smoke damage. This is quite easy to clean off.

The Burn Site: Before the Fire

The left side of the room contained most of our materials, including: desk with bookcase and assorted items on top, assorted rolled papers and media on either side of the desk, two donation boxes, the framed sketch.

The right side of the room was sparce, as we knew the origin of the fire would be in the far left corner of the room in the waste bin. To this side of the room was a poster, an office chair, a piece of decorative art made of wood and glass, and the remnants of previous burns from the space. This room has been used for burn experiments before.

Yours truly for scale: I'm 5'10''.

We elected to start the fire in the back, right-hand corner of the room where we had placed a diverse arrangement of objects. We did this to satisfy our curiosity about specific types and configurations of materials. Lt. Elmore lit a piece of paper in a wastebasket next to the desk and we watched. For the first few minutes there was little evidence of any combustion and several of us began to wonder if the paper had ignited. Finally the fire took hold, first producing puffs, then clouds of smoke, and then climbing  the wall, the right side of the desk, the plastic donation bin, and began severely charring the items kept at the right of the desk and the plastic donor box next to it. The shelving grew so hot that the items to the right of the bookcase caught fire.

Before the experiment began, we decided as a class that we would allow the fire to burn for twelve to fourteen minutes with time given to the usual steps of the fire detection and extinguishing process. There were three to five minutes allocated for a worker to detect the smoke from the fire then dial 911, four to five minutes for the fire department to arrive, then four minutes for the hose to get connected and begin extinguishing the fire. The times provided for the fire department’s response and hose connection are the average for the Austin Fire Department as Lt. Randy Elmore informed us. The times for your local fire department to reach your building and begin extinguishing a fire could be different.

The Burn Site: During the Burn

Four minutes in: We begin to see the fire visibly.

Ten minutes: We have backed up several feet by now from the intense heat.

Ten minutes: We asked Lt. Randy Elmoreto move the open book closer to the fire to see what would happen-- the damage was swift as soon as it entered range of the heat.

Twelve minutes and thirty seconds: Lt. Randy Elmore begins extinguishing.

Extinguishing overall takes a minute, but the room smoked for a long time after.

Our courageous assistant from the Austin Arson Department, Lt. Randy Elmore

We were working with a microcosm of a collection in a small space and the fire damaged more than half of our materials in only twelve minutes and thirty seconds. We decided to extinguish the fire before we had no materials left to salvage. Lt. Randy Elmore put out the fire in under thirty seconds, and additional small and rather hidden fires were put out as they appeared afterward. While he refrained from using an excessive amount of water in extinguishing the fire to prevent further damage to the collection, it was still necessary to drench some items in our collection to fully extinguish the flames.

The extent of the damage was beyond what we initially expected the open metal shelves grew so hot the materials combusted, and the closed drawers of the desk became small ovens for the materials inside.

• The back right leg of the desk was completely charred. The front right leg of the desk was barely left standing. It was remarkable the desk did not collapse.
• A drawer we had intentionally left open on the desk smoldered for ten minutes after the fire was put out. The closed drawers on the right side of the desk fared no better.
• The damage on the bookcase progressed from severely charred to undamaged moving across from right to left.
• All the items placed on the left side of the desk were fine. All items left on the right side of the desk or near the trash bin were decimated.
• The plastic crate half-melted away and half of the contents were burned to ash. The cardboard crate was fine.

The Burn Site: After the Burn

This was a panel painting, leaning on the desk to the right of the book case, all of a foot above the epicenter of the fire. Notice the smoke stain around where the object protected the wall.

These sealed books sat the the right bottom corner of the desk. Their plastic seal did nothing to prevent the charing.

The desk overall

Close-up of the bookcase. There's a visual gradient change of smoke damage from right to left-- a clear indicator of where the fire originated.

The heat was so intense, the glass broke in the frame. Only where the glass left the paper exposed did damage occur.

This donor box was closest to the fire.

This donor box was only two feet away from the melted plastic crate donor box-- nearly untouched.

For several minutes after the fire was put out, we were not allowed to enter the building. For a fire with less ventilation than our test site, the time would have been significantly longer. Burning plastics may emit toxic gasses, and the odors emanating from the burned materials was very strong. In the case of a real fire scenario, personnel can be withheld from a building by fire-fighter order for hours or days if necessary.

The next morning, we were allowed access again to retrieve our materials from the room, as any and all nauseous gasses were dispelled over night. I was unable to observe retrieval. Crystal Paul, however, was able to observe and assist, and here is her account:

William, Karen, and I went to the site at around 9am on Friday. We ended up discarding about 1/3 of the materials, mostly items that either hadn't been damaged and were duplicates of other items or were beyond salvage. Surprisingly, some items closest to the fire were salvageable, such as the open law book on the desk. Some pages were burnt to a crisp but most were still intact.

There was a set of slides that had been in the middle of the desk that were completely melted and destroyed, even though they were not directly affected by the fire (the fire got close to them). Items in the drawers closest to the fire were surprisingly unaffected by fire and in fact, were more damaged by the water. The waste basket was no more, and the items that were in it and next to it (papers and a couple nooks) were the only things I saw that completely crumbled.

The next exciting step in our journey is recovery-- we shall see how well the materials fared, and how much will be retrievable. The subsequent water damage from the hose could lead to molding, just as our flood experiments have molded. Before we focus more closely on specific recovery techniques for collection materials, the next blog will go into more detail about first steps to take when you are allowed back into the building after the firefighters give the “all clear.”