On Wednesday, Dec. 1, 2010, a four-alarm fire destroyed the Harvard Plaza office building in Southfield, MI. Early recognition of possible backdraft conditions prevented injuries to firefighters when ...

In my first article on this topic, “The Art of “Reading Fire,” I discussed a new mnemonic for fire behavior indicators, B-SAHF, which stands for Smoke, Air, Heat and Flame, all in the context of ...

Greg Gorbett spends unmeasured hours building scale-model rooms, complete with furniture and fixtures. He then judiciously stacks wood cribbing inside and burns his creations. More often than not, he ...

It was a cool November night in the fall of 1988. I was a battalion chief for a large suburban fire department in the Sacramento, Calif., area. My battalion was very urbanized and the largest in the ...