Fire Safety via a Geometry Lesson | SERVPRO® of Henderson/Boulder City

3/3/2022 (Permalink)

If your home or business has any damage, SERVPRO of Henderson/Boulder City is ready around the clock to help you recover.

Fire can seem to be a source of limitless destruction, and truly, sometimes its power is so immense that it takes herculean effort to contain or extinguish. But the truth is that every fire is limited by the presence and activity of the same four things that start it. How? We’ll show you.

The fire tetrahedron is a 3D model, representing the things that start and control every fire—shockingly, there are only four, shown in the model as connected equilateral triangles. It is the discovery of these four common elements that we know how fires start, and inversely, how any fire can be stopped.

Let’s see what the tetrahedron has to teach us.

The 4 Things a Fire Needs to Live

Fuel. A fuel source may not be the only thing a fire needs, but a fire certainly can’t happen without one. Every fire has to consume a material, or else there’s nothing to burn anyway.

Heat. Fires don’t happen unless a fuel source is present, and unless that fuel source gets heated to a level that creates a combustion reaction. Of course, for that combustion reaction to happen, there needs to be plenty of…

Oxygen. Oxygen isn’t the fuel source, but it does fuel the fire in a different sense. The consumption and conversion of oxygen is crucial to fire origination and continuation.

Chemical Chain Reaction. All these things have to happen both simultaneously and repeatedly. The chain reaction, which is the most recent addition to the tetrahedron, is described as the cycle by which the pyro-automatic process is maintained.

The 4 Ways to Stop a Fire

Cool it. We know how this works, don’t we? Water meet fire, fire goes out. But it’s important to note that the water doesn’t cool the fire itself—it cools the fuel source, bringing about a thermal balance, which keeps the fuel’s temperature under the combustion threshold.

Smother it. That oxygen the fire desperately craves is a definite weakness that can be exploited to a firefighter’s advantage. If the fire can be adequately smothered or covered by a substance or object that keeps it from breathing fresh oxygen, the fire can’t survive.

Starve it. Once there’s nothing left to burn, the fire is over; plain and simple. Thus removing fuel from an active fire or from the path of the fire is an effective firefighting strategy.

Interrupt the chain reaction. Like your car’s engine, a fire can’t merely crank once and be done—the process has to continue. And there is a family of gases called halons that are adept at making that cycle “miss,” to stick with the car analogy. Some of these halons have been proven unsafe for the environment and are no longer produced, but some newer types have been developed which leave no residue and are safe for the ozone layer.

If the fire tetrahedron makes a wreck of your home or business, we’re ready around the clock to help you recover. Contact SERVPRO anytime for fast, thorough cleanup and recovery after a fire.