TORRINGTON – Just as the Torrington City Council meeting concluded on the evening of Tuesday, August 6 a handful of members of the Torrington Volunteer Fire Department began to quickly pressurize the water lines of the large engine parked in the street near Jirdon Park as the department prepared to provide a demonstration for the community in attendance of the town’s National Night Out festivities. 

“On behalf of the Torrington Volunteer Fire Department and the City of Torrington, I just want to thank the state fire marshal’s office for bringing out their demonstration trailer,” Matt Schuler of the fire department said. “We are pretty excited to have it here and show it off to you guys. Get some training done and get some needed knowledge out to get you guys thinking about opportune things in the world of fire.”

“Welcome out to our National Night Out event. What a great event you guys have here,” Nick Hudson of the Wyoming State Fire Marshal’s Office said. “This is awesome. Really happy to be here. The main thing that we want to try to show everybody tonight is how much fire has changed in 30 years.”

Hudson quickly began explaining to the large group of spectators who gathered in front of the demonstration trailer the differences in homes manufactured and built 30 years ago and those homes today really isn’t much. It is the items in our homes which have changed, increasing fire dangers. 

“I know that that probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but 30 to 40 years ago, the construction on our homes really wasn’t much different,” Hudson said. “We had steel. We had wooded studs. We had sheetrock. We had steps. We had contents. The differences in our contents are a lot different than what they are now. We live in a synthetic environment.”

The demonstration trailer was divided into two nearly identical living spaces. Each space contained a couch, chair, wooden dresser, a stuffed animal and a painted photo on the wall. One of those spaces was equipped with nothing more than a common smoke detector, while the other living area had a common smoke detector and a home sprinkler system. 

“Thirty years ago, a room and contents fire, similar to what you’re going to see, with what we call ‘legacy furnishings,’ which were burning natural products, a fire department would have in upwards of 20 minutes to get to there to put out the fire before it got to the point of what’s called, ‘flashover (where everything in the room has been consumed).’ With today’s contents, we have about four minutes in our average room and contents,” Hudson explained. “I have been a volunteer fireman for 25 years and I know that when my pager goes off, I am really happy if I get out of my house in two minutes.”

Hudson explained there isn’t much time for people to gather their loved ones and exit the house before the fire becomes dangerous. 

“If you put the timeline with that, that’s not a lot of time to get up and try to get our families out of our house. So, residential sprinklers are kind of like having a fireman, an iron fireman in your house at all times,” Hudson said. 

Before the demonstration began, Hudson gave a few fire safety tips to the crowd.

“One of the things we talk about is we want to have early notification, so our smoke alarms will provide that. We want to have an escape plan so we can make sure to get out of our home quickly. We want to make sure we have a couple of ways out. We want to make sure we have early suppression,” Hudson explained. “The residential sprinkler will do that for you.”

During the demonstration, a small fire was started in a wastepaper basket in the room with one sprinkler for a residential system. The fire slowly climbed up the trash can wall and the crowd could see flames in the corner of the sprinkler room. As the smoke began to build, the smoke detector signaled. Hudson explained to the crowd, the smoke alarm took about 15 seconds to sound. Once the sprinkler deployed, the fire began to dissipate.

“A residential sprinkler puts out about seven to 13 gallons a minute. That’s all it’s putting out, but it is controlling the fire,” Hudson said as the crowd stood by watching. “Normal time for a fire department to respond after being notified and putting water on the fire is about ten minutes. This sprinkler activated in about 30 seconds to control the fire and now we have time to get out of our house.”

Firemen Matt Cearns and Dale Mundt Jr. used the attack line from the nearby fire engine to “attack” the demonstration fire for the audience.

“As you can see, there’s very little damage to the room at all,” Hudson explained to the crowd as the firemen finished spraying the fire. “We burned a little bit of our curtain. We burned our trash can. We saved our stuffed animal. We saved our artwork. We even saved our furnishings, and we kept the fire to a single room. We have also made it a lot safer for our local firefighters to come in and fight that fire because all they have to do is go into a cool room and make sure we didn’t have any more fire,” Hudson said. “If you have a residential sprinkler system in your house the average time for you to actually be back in your home is two to three days.”

The demonstration continued with another fire started in the trash can of the room without sprinklers which was quickly engulfed by flames.