Dry timber
A heritage fire safety expert has said his heart sinks and he fears for the worst every time he sees scaffolding on a historic building.
Stewart Kidd said all construction sites were inherently dangerous places, but the danger was so much higher in a heritage building.
“We’re talking about timber, we’re talking about very dry buildings because they are old, we’re talking about nooks and crannies, we’re talking about voids and ducts where fire can spread unseen and pop out a long way from where it started.”
He said data from Scotland suggested that about 8-12% of fires in heritage buildings occured when contractors were present.
“What we know is that any kind of hot work, effectively any form of heat application during construction, is dangerous. So not just welding, not just brazing, it is also cutting, it is also grinding, it is also soldering and it is particularly lead work on roofs.”
Kidd, a consultant who has written numerous books on fire risks in heritage buildings, pointed to the loss of the National Trust country house Uppark in 1989 which occurred while contractors were putting a new roof on after the 1987 gales. “They applied too much heat and set fire to the timber under the lead which smouldered and then burst into flames.”
I bet the people who were working on Notre Dame are feeling like crap today.
That happened here in Iowa City in 2001 — a worker carelessly using a torch to remove paint in the cupola of our Old Capitol building set the place on fire. The it was the original capitol building of the Iowa Territory, before statehood, built in the wilderness in 1840. It became a landmark at the center of the U of I campus and is now a wonderful history museum. The fire was devastating but the building was restored “better than ever”, as I’m sure Nôtre Dame will be.
I went to that university; passed the Old Capitol every day.
Happened in New Orleans, the first year I moved there:
https://www.nola.com/300/2017/11/1988_the_cabildo_fire.html
You’d think we have enough evidence by now that this is a serious risk, no?
[…] Of course he has “grounds” for suspicion. Five tweets from three authors, each of whom is quickly identifiable as Islamophobic simply by skimming the first pages of their accounts. Meanwhile, some sanity from the refreshingly godless Ophelia Benson: […]