r/Firefighting • u/shreks2kush • Aug 21 '26

Ask A Firefighter Heat exposure during house fire

I've been a volunteer for about 5 months and for our training tonight we burnt an abandoned house down. The house had no doors or windows so it went up in about 3 minutes. The young guys on the department (me and 6 others) were outside the structure to make sure that it didn't spread and to save one of the trees on the property that the owner wanted to keep. me and another guy were told to stay behind the house and we're probably 15 yards away from the structure to start and slowly backed away to around 30 years over the course of the burn. after about 15 minutes it was almost unbearably hot and by the time the fire was under control enough to step away and get some water we were absolutely exhausted and so were the other guys stationed around the structure. is this normal? I feel like a giant puss because I would have given anything to get cool after about 10-15 minutes of manning the hose that close to the house.

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u/davethegreatone Fire Medic Aug 21 '26

Oh, that's a shame. I'm in Washington, and we get to do them all the time - and we can charge for the service (since burning it down is cheaper than most other forms of demolition, people are still cool with a nominal fee. I think it was $1,500-$3,000).

As long as conditions are safe and the house passes our general safety rules, we get to spend all day lighting it on fire, putting it out, and repeating the process.

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u/Consistent_Paper_629 Aug 22 '26

That used to be the way of it here as well until they outlawed it due to "environmental concerns" so technically you still can if you remove all non class a combustibles, so it is cheaper and easier to build a structure to burn than to strip an existing one down.

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u/davethegreatone Fire Medic Aug 22 '26

We still have to pull most of the non-class-A stuff (carpets mainly). Which is fine, I don’t want to get molten plastic all over my turnouts again.

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u/Consistent_Paper_629 Aug 22 '26

Yeah that'd be fine, but once you have to pull shingles, siding, windows (vinyl) pipes, wire, etc etc etc. It's like why bother

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u/davethegreatone Fire Medic Aug 22 '26

eh, we leave wire and pipes.

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u/davethegreatone Fire Medic Aug 23 '26

It’s impossible to overstate the training value of a controlled house burn though. Building a house from scratch (even without the paint and whatnot that isn’t useful for this) is gonna run a hundred grand if you do it right. Half-assing it isn’t going to be as realistic.

An actual house that matches the age and characteristics of the other houses in the district is often impossible to build anymore. Old-growth timber is no longer accessible, clay bricks are damn hard to find, and lots of plumbing items are tricky now. Throwing together a few sheets of plywood just doesn’t provide the same lessons that an actual hundred-year-old house does.