Rural Mindset: Are You Using Residential Tactics on a ‘Rural’ Industrial Building?

I RECENTLY SAW a discussion on social media that was based around what departments are doing differently at barn/shed fires. Some of the points mentioned were kind of alarming but with validity. “Make sure you have an excavator to tear apart the pile” and “Only worry about exposures; you can’t save a barn.” These statements are sometimes true and should be based on circumstances. I must ask rural fire departments: “What is your mindset?” Do you look at barns and large storage structures as “losers” from the beginning, ready to call in the excavator for the rubble pile?

Fire VS. Geography

Location of the incident and travel time for responders are big factors—not just the distance from the fire station to the burning building but the travel time for responders to get to the station to get the apparatus. The roads you must travel are not exactly high-speed freeways. Access into many rural settings may be single-lane driveways with considerable distances from the main road. These factors do not bode well for positive outcomes.

Weather plays a factor as well. Rural settings are in the “wide open,” and whether in an open plain or in a valley, wind can be a prevalent factor. After a snowstorm in an urban setting, the streets may be plowed within hours. A country road may not be cleared for days or weeks. In some cases, rural roads are snow covered for months.

In the rural setting, you also don’t have a neighbor or heavy traffic near your property at all hours of the night. Police patrols do not exist or are few and far between. In many cases, fires are advanced when they are finally discovered in these remote or lightly traveled locations. The fires are often discovered by family members. All these factors are robbing you of valuable time in responding and starting operations.

Building Construction and Contents

Large, open-air structures (such as barns and storage sheds) are designed to ventilate with natural air currents and sometimes mechanical systems, so fire propagation is going to be intensified. You are already fighting against a building in which it is very hard to control the flow path. The whole building is a flow path. In many cases, the buildings are generations old, with Type IV and Type V construction that has also been drying out for the duration of its life, so it is in the prime state to combust (another strike against you). The sheer size of some modern barns/ sheds is equal to or greater than warehouses in an urban setting.

Many people not familiar with rural operations may think of rural buildings with dry goods in the form of hay/straw and with cows, chickens, and pigs as the residents. In reality, many modern and upgraded barns have complex mechanical systems for the operations, sublevels, confined spaces, chemical storage, refrigeration systems, computer systems, manufacturing/repair shops, and multimillion-dollar equipment used in modern agricultural production—along with hay/ straw, cows, chickens, and pigs.

Some of the most modern agricultural buildings may have some type of monitoring system in place, but for many operations it is not required by code. And with such a tight bottom line, the agricultural industry does not use it. Suppression systems such as sprinklers are almost nonexistent in the agricultural community as well. But there are exceptions, so get out there and preplan.

Changing the Mindset

How do you change the mindset that barns/sheds in the rural setting are all going to be rubble piles? By changing how you look at these operations. You need to look at these farms as industrial facilities located in rural settings. They are businesses—not just businesses owned by large corporations, which is sometimes the case, but family-owned operations that have been in existence for generations. One report estimates that a single-family farm operation generates between $500,000 and $1 million in revenue spent on either goods or services within the community in which it is located.

These rurally located industrial facilities present many challenges. How do you turn these incidents into viable operations and potential saves in the rural setting?

Preresponse/Response Mindset

It would always agitate me when I would hear a department dispatched to a reported barn/shed fire with the same response package as it would have for a three-bedroom ranch-style home. Sometimes the response is the department responsible for the area and maybe a neighboring department—with several engines, a tanker/tender or two, and some support vehicles at best.

Let’s play a numbers/time game with the “way things are.” The dispatch comes in for the rural department and the clock starts. One to two minutes go by, and people are responding. Maybe an officer comes up on air. These units generally have a three- to five-minute response time to the station. If you are lucky, maybe an officer or other responder radios that there is a “header.” Usually there is no change to the response assignment. I have even heard officers say on secondary reports like that, “OK, let me get on scene to confirm.”

Now people are staffing the engine/ tender or whatever the first-due piece is and responding. You are looking at five to seven minutes to the scene. It is eight to 12 minutes into the initial report of the fire, working unchecked. At this time, the first officer with apparatus gets on scene, confirms a working/extensive fire, and calls for additional apparatus.

Start the clock over for additional units coming as mutual aid but usually with extended response times because of distance. It’s not hard to understand why some look at these fires as unwinnable situations when it is 15 to 20 minutes before an adequate attempt at water supply is started.

High-Rise
1. Rural “high-rise” packs. (Photos by author.)
Rural big water
2. Rural big water operations.

How can you fix this? There are a couple of ways in the rural setting that you can shorten the time curve. One is with the advent of the modern 911 dispatching systems, CAD assistance, and computer-aided dispatch. Also, you can plan ahead.

The department I started with had alarms established on the 911 dispatch system. They were based on rural operations, and the first alarm was a basic response package of two engines, three 2,500-plus-gallon tenders, two rescue companies (one would act as a truck company if needed), and a basic life support ambulance response. The second alarm assignment was two additional engine companies, one truck company, and roughly 12,000 gallons of tanker response. All the assignments were based on distance and time. The third alarm, which was seldom used, just augmented further. This was a residential-based package and progression.

But what happened when Farmer Smith called 911 and said, “My barn is on fire”? It was built into our “response cards” as a note for dispatch that if that occurred or the address returned an agricultural address (farm), the dispatch would automatically “lump” first and second alarms to one “barn box” for lack of a better term. This really didn’t do anything to shorten that initial eight- to 12-minute curve you had with the initial units, but it did shorten the curve on the second-alarm units by already having them moving. Now there was the potential for having 20,000 gallons of water and the support system in place in about the first eight to 12 minutes vs. 15 to 20 minutes.

This may not seem like much, but minutes definitely count. As an incident commander (IC), you could be more aggressive with your attack posture. You could implement master stream operations knowing water was already coming, and adequate water could match up to the attack and give you the option for a more powerful punch before the fire was completely out of hand.

Modes of Attack

In my opinion, if the world was on fire, in many cases the first-due engine would pull a 1¾-inch line regardless of what was burning. We have been lulled into complacency that the 1¾-inch line is the fix of the fire service. Why? Because it is what all basic classes do—they pull the “bread and butter” line all the time. In many residential fires, a couple of these hoselines, properly placed, handle the bulk of the work.

Many times, in the rural/agricultural setting, you are overmatched with this mindset before you pull the first line. I have heard seasoned fire personnel say, “We pull the 1¾-inch line to conserve water and just protect exposures on barn fires.” The only thing you are doing is burning down the structure in a slower manner and wasting water supply. If you aren’t pulling a 2½-inch line or larger (three-inch portable master stream) where you are applying 300-plus gallons per minute (gpm), you are performing firefighting theater. This means you are acting like you are going to put a fire out but aren’t.

I can hear the masses screaming that you will use up limited water supplies even quicker with this mindset. I disagree. With proper placement and an educated/aggressive posture, you will put adequate gpm on the seat of the fire and change the dynamics of British thermal unit (Btu) production (aka extinguishment). But, you have to know your limitations.

I had the luxury of 8,000 gallons of water showing up on the closest apparatus (five- to 10-minute response), so I knew as an IC that a 500-gpm master stream and a 328-gpm 2½-inch handline could last for roughly eight to 10 minutes of direct water application. This gave secondary units time to arrive to augment attack. You have to figure this out ahead of time—not at 2 a.m. during a fire.

Another argument I commonly heard was, “We only have so many people showing up” or “It takes too many people to set up those ‘big’ lines.” My response was, “When was the last time you practiced a two- or three-person deployment of a portable master stream?” Even better, “Where is your portable master stream?” Shockingly, many were stored away in compartments for the “Big One” or not set up as quick attack lines, so of course they would take time to set up if you weren’t familiar with them. There are many techniques for handling larger-caliber lines that take minimum personnel, but you must practice them.

Rural tanker
3. A rural tanker.
Typical Rural
4. A typical rural setting with typical access problems.

Thinking Outside Your Box

We carried something on a rural pumper that a lot of people questioned: high-rise packs. I would get the occasional comment, “Why does a rural department have high-rise setups?” Many modern agricultural buildings are approximately 60 x 80 feet wide and more than 200 feet long: They are mid-rises or high-rises on their side. You are going to need to extend lines.

Here is the scenario: You have made a quick attack with the portable master stream, darkened the fire down, and reduced the production of Btus. More personnel and water are arriving on scene. You will need to extend the attack. Do not pull another preconnect. Shut down the portable master stream, remove the stack tips, attach a water thief or wye, add on your high-rise packs, and extend your attack to finish things off. You just created a standpipe laying on the ground for the mid-rise on its side. Once again, you need to practice this.

The buildings you encounter in the rural setting many times will be greater square footage, with more intricate challenges. Don’t think, “It’s just a barn.” If you change your mindset and look at them as rural industrial production facilities and plan and train for them, they don’t have to always be the “losers.” You are dealing with family-owned businesses that, in many cases, were built over generations. They are the heart and soul of communities you serve, with a significant financial impact if they are no longer there. The challenges are real, but if you just take a little different all-around approach, you will be setting yourself up for success.


ROBERT ULRICH is a 30-plus-year veteran of the fire service and a lieutenant with the Georgetown (SC) Fire Department. He is an instructor for the South Carolina State Fire Academy. He has worked as an adjunct instructor for the Pennsylvania State Fire Academy, Bucks County (PA) Community College, and Penn State University’s Agricultural Rescue Program.

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