Anapol Schwartz

Date:

Duration: 14:59

Information about the flammability of home furnishings, including video of a real couch fire.

Video Transcript

Reporter 1: The fire in Levittown has taken four lives, a mother and three daughters have died.

Damant: My name is Gordon Damant and for 30 years I was head of fire research for the state of California and during that time I was responsible for writing all of California's standards for furnishing flammability, I conducted thousands of full scale fire tests of furnishings.

Almost from day one when urethane foam started to be used in furniture in the United States, which was probably in the early 1970s it was recognized as being a very, very flammable material. In fact, some people have referred to polyurethane foam as solid gasoline because of it's extreme flammability properties. It ignites extremely easily, certainly the non-fire retardant varieties will ignite very easily. You can take a flame as small as a match and ignite it. Once it's ignited, it burns very rapidly, gives off huge quantities of heat and smog, and toxic combustion products while all it burns, and it is a very hazardous material once ignition occurs.

Going back many, many years probably 30 years or more, 'Furniture Today' has been publishing articles relating to the flammability of a upholstered furniture and there have been a number of articles that speak to the flammability of polyurethane foams. So at a basic level, this is not something which is hidden.

[break]

Reporter 2: You were aware that sometime that this foam- the flammability of the foam became an issue in the industry, were you not?

Man: I am aware that flammability of foam is an issue.

Reporter 2: During the time you worked for a Washington manufacturing company, were you aware that when urethane foam burns, once ignited, it burns very rapidly?

Man: Yes.

Reporter 2: Were you aware that when urethane foam burns it has a high rate of heat release?

Man: Yes.

Reporter 2: Were you aware that when urethane foam burns, it emits large quantities of smoke and toxic combustion products?

Man: Yes.

Reporter 2: And were you aware that the combination of heat, smoke, and toxic gases is incapacitating enough to be fatal?

Man: Yes.

[break]

Reporter 3: Watch the dramatic difference when we try to burn this chair identical to the one in the previous test, except that this one is filled with flame retardant foam. It took six tries before the chair would even ignite and after three minutes it was still a very small fire. Contrast that with the first chair with standard foam which, after three minutes, was a fiery inferno.

Damant: What's happening is that the fabric is just burning across the surface of the foam.

Reporter 3: In fact, we stayed in that room close to 10 minutes and the fire never burned deeply into the flame-retardant foam and there was no problem extinguishing these flames.

Another person: That was it, pretty easy to put out.

Reporter 3: Look at the huge difference between the two chairs when we put them side by side after the burn tests. The flame retardant foam works, says Damant, who credits it for California's low rate of deaths and injuries from furniture fires.

[break]

Male Reporter: A short in an electric baseboard heater is believed to have caused the tragic Bucks County fire.

Female Reporter: Preliminarily authorities believed the fire was accidental, it appears that an electric baseboard behind the sofa ignited the blaze.

Man 1: Started on or near a couch which explains why the fire accelerated so quickly.

Man 2: Why would a manufacturer not want to make all of their furniture flame-resistant or retardant? The way this is as opposed to this.

Man 3: Well that's a good question and I think it's a question a number of people who are interested in consumer products safety are asking themselves.

Man 4: Basically all of house fire fatalities that I deal with, you find evidence that the people have reacted to the presence of the fire particularly when it begins in a point source and they happen to wake up and respond when it's not yet fully started. They'll try and put it out, particularly in furniture fires.

Man 5: Typically people think that a growing fire is something they can deal with and very frequently it leads to tragic consequences. An uninitiated person who doesn't know about the fire performance of these kinds of furniture items, they would think that I can go into the kitchen and get a pot of water and throw it on that growing fire and put that out. But the fire isn't just spreading up the back fabric it was also spreading internally and by throwing water on the fire they had no effect on that internal fire where the fuels were actually more dangerous because they were shredded urethane foam.

Man 4: Quite often the fire marshal will find bodies in positions that clearly indicate along with witness statements, if there are any, that they, in fact, had tried to put out the fire. And you find them right next to where the fire began with evidence of materials they have around them, that they were trying to put the fire out.

Man 5: Laypeople have no idea how fast these things burn and it will threaten their lives in just a few minutes.

Man 6: The smoke plays a number of rolls concerning the people involved. It disorientates the people exposing your visual faculties to the disorienting effect of smoke is one thing. Then we get into the biochemical effects of the smoke like carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide, which are generated by the couch in question here.

Man 4: Tremendous amounts of smoke, you cannot open your eyes, you can't see, every breath you take is doing damage to your internal mucus membranes. We know that these people from the carbon monoxide levels they achieved were doing that for at least a couple of minutes, until their lungs became so damaged they couldn't exchange gas any more.

Every breath they take is just horrendously painful because you are breathing air that is literally cooking the lining in your airways, it's laden with soot so it's extraordinarily irritant and, of course, it's filled with poisons.

Once the sofa erupted within a minute the entire house, I'm certain, below the ground floor, would've been in flames and producing tremendous amounts of the kind of gases that are going to kill.