Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

Improving either or both fire protection and fire extinction methods might be expected to reduce the fire loss, and it is necessary to discuss the balance of effort into improving one or the other. This paper only discusses extinction and a comparison of typical laboratory results with actual fires suggests that the greater part of the time taken to control a large fire is consumed in increasing the fire-fighting effort up to the minimum value, below which no extinction at all is possible. An analysis of data of actual fires gives some interesting relationships and their significance is discussed.