According to the National Fire Protection Association, 968 firefighters died in the line of duty in the 10-year period ending in 1999. Eighteen percent of the fatalities that occurred in structure fires were due to the collapse of the structure.                 

Creating an early warning system for firefighters that will predict structure collapse is one of the projects currently being undertaken by Ziyad (“Zee”) Durón ’81, Jude and Eileen Laspa Professor of Engineering (far left in photo). Durón also is director of the Frank and Frances De Pietro Fellowship in Civil Engineering, created by Trustee Robert De Pietro ’69 (far right in photo) and his brother Dennis, which gives students an opportunity to participate in this research.

In April, Durón and his fire research team mounted a series of monitors on an abandoned school building in Fillmore, a rural community in northern Los Angeles County, and gathered data as the building was allowed to “free burn.”

Durón and his team were pleased with the results of the Fillmore burn, the 13th since Durón began the research in 2001. The student team observed as data from sensors showed the changes in vibrations during the fire. Just like a heart rate monitor, the line on the monitor began to move downward as the fire compromised the structure. Five minutes before the collapse of an overhang, and before weighted trash cans fell through the roof, sensors detected changing vibrations.

“It’s like a heart rate monitor on a patient—in this case, a building—helping the firefighters better understand how things are changing,” Durón said. Students who worked on the project included seniors Angela Cho, Nicolas Von Gersdorff and Eric Flynn; juniors Robert Panish and Nate Yoder; and sophomores Sheri Markwardt, Rebecca Kelcher and Allison Hutchings. Juniors and seniors will work on the project this summer and during the 2005/06 academic year.

When Durón began his fire safety research seven years ago, he first focused on acoustics. “If you talk to firefighters,” Durón said, “they’ll tell you that when they’re inside a burning building, they can hear creaking and moaning and they interpret all of those noises to be signs of weakening. So my original thought was that, if they can hear that, I should be able to measure it.”

HMC Trustee William Wiesmann (second from left in photo), president and CEO of BioSTAR Group in Maryland, was instrumental in helping Durón find funding for acoustic monitoring research through the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). But Durón found that studying the sounds of a fire proved futile—there were just too many sources of sounds. So, he abandoned that approach and focused on vibration-based monitoring. He and his students are also doing vibration testing to evaluate the efficacy of proposed modifications to Folsom Dam in northern California.

Weismann’s team at Sekos Inc., one of the BioSTAR Group’s companies, is developing a wireless implementation of the sensors that Durón has developed. That project is led by L. Alex Pranger ’92, Sekos president. The goal is to make the units portable, affordable and expendable, allowing firefighters to wear them on a belt, attach them to a building upon arrival, and immediately begin monitoring the structure’s health. Durón has named the system HOBS (Health of Burning Structures), which is also a veiled reference to his love for baseball and the last name of Robert Redford’s character in the film, “The Natural.”

Durón said the research is designed “to provide firefighters with information that clearly indicates regions in a building where weakening is taking place, and to provide indicators that provide some sense of the rapidity of these changes. With this information, firefighters can proceed with informed caution and enhanced safety. Fire fighting still embodies old, dated techniques, and the high-tech era of information technology has not yet found its way into field operations.”

Fillmore Fire Department Chief Pat Askren said, “We’re steeped in tradition. You know, it’s hard for us to get into new things, but every time we can get some kind of a tool like this that might save a life, we’re all in favor, especially if we can afford it. You know an early warning system, or whatever you want to call something like that, would be a marvelous tool for us to have.”

With the help of Wiesmann, who has funded patent applications and  secured business grants, Durón aims to have a field sensor ready for beta testing by local and national fire departments in about one year.