By John McCallum
Managing Editor 

Understanding how things burn

Former Cheney motel serves as classroom for local firefighters, fire science researcher

 

Last updated 3/14/2019 at 9:34pm

Rich Freier has a favorite saying.

Actually, the veteran Spokane Valley Fire Department fire investigator and commissioned law enforcement officer has a lot of them — to talk with Freier is to talk with a walking quote machine. But of those, the 20-year veteran has one that should resonate with everyone.

“The best fire call we go on are the ones we don’t,” Freier said Monday, March 4, while installing material and equipment for a series of test burns at Cheney’s Rosebrook Motel.

Freier has been devoted to producing fire science as part of his work as an investigator, using the information to train fellow firefighters on aspects of fire behavior and fire prevention. That’s how he ended up at the Rosebrook preparing for a series of burns last Thursday and Friday, March 7 and 8, that involved firefighters from Cheney, city of Spokane and Spokane Valley, along with investigators from other agencies.

How Freier came to the Rosebrook, and how the 1950s-era motel, turned into low-income housing in recent decades, came to be used in fire science begins with the motel’s owners, Cheney’s Fellowship Baptist Church.

The church, located currently on 1st Street across from Yoke’s, has owned the property for years and recently filed paperwork with the city’s building department to have the two parcels of land at 304 and 316 W. 1st St. recombined into one in order to build a new church building. The parcel was split in two in March 2007, with the church operating the motel as a ministry to the low-income population.

Fellowship Baptist’s moderator of business meetings, Roy Combs, said the congregation has always viewed itself as civic-minded, with Combs having a personal attachment to the fire department.

“I have a warm spot for the fire department, they saved my bacon when I had a heart attack,” Combs said.

The church needed to demolish the former motel in order to make way for the new building. Combs said they were able to successfully find new low-income housing for seven of the 10 residents living there while two others didn’t need any help.

“They were only living there because they wanted to and it was inexpensive,” he said.

The 10th didn’t want to relocate to other low-income housing, ostensibly because she didn’t want to follow rules sometimes associated with such housing, Combs said. The church fixed her car and gave her some cash to find new housing, and she left.

“We didn’t have to evict anybody,” Combs said.

In the meantime, Combs and others thought the motel could provide some training use for the fire or police departments. He first approached fire Battalion Chief Ken Johnson, who had an idea.

Johnson had been in contact with Freier about teaching some fire investigation classes to Cheney firefighters. After talking to Combs, he now had a place to offer Freier for some hands-on work, and the two met Combs one day at the Rosebrook.

“He (Freier) was like a kid in a candy store,” Combs said.

For Freier, the motel offered a couple opportunities to conduct some experiments because six of the 13 units were identical to each other. That meant that fires could be set using different combustion materials and styles with reasonable assurances that the outcomes would result from those elements and not conditions in the rooms.

Freier records his work with a camera-device he designed himself through experience with fire investigations. The units consist of GoPro video cameras installed in boxes made of three-quarter inch plywood surrounded by gypsum wood, aluminum foil and three layers of glass installed in the camera opening.

Each unit — what Freier refers to as version 3.0 — has a steal cable attached in order to remove the camera should things get dicey inside the fire and the unit face possible destruction. Freier added the cable after earlier versions failed.

“Version 1.0 had a rope. That didn’t work,” Freier deadpanned.

Placed inside the unit, Freier then uses different accelerants and materials to ignite the fire and engage in filming, using thermocouple devices to monitor temperature conditions at various locations in the rooms. At the Rosebrook, one of those experiments involved starting a fire in a room with atmospheric oxygen, and another in a similar room, but this time increasing the oxygen saturation, something that might be found in rooms where residents must use oxygen tanks to help them with breathing.

At the Rosebrook, Freier said he was able to increase the oxygen levels in one room to over 27 percent, something that resulted in a hot fire which destroyed most of a queen-sized bed placed in the room. But while the fire burned more efficiently in this room than one in another unit with atmospheric oxygen, the damage wasn’t as different as Freier hypothesized it would be from the oxygen-saturated unit, leading Freier to think that more work needs to be done.

“Oxygen is like Velcro, it sticks to everything,” he said. “Looking at the data, it’s not just about the level in the air, but what’s on a person’s clothing, or on bedding. How we set that up is another level.”

One burn that made a huge impression on firefighters getting training last Thursday, and possibly on others who will see Freier’s footage, was one conducted in unit A. Freier started a fire near a couch in a living room, with the half-inch thick, hollow-core door to the one bedroom next to it closed.

Freier said his data indicated that temperatures in the living room reached 1,000 degrees near the ceiling and 500-600 degrees near the floor. Inside the bedroom, however, temperatures remained at 60 degrees for the entire time it took firefighters to extinguish the blaze and enter the room.

“This is nuts,” Cheney Lt. Jeff Anderson said upon seeing the difference between the charred living room and virtually pristine bedroom.

“You’ve just got to shut the door,” Freier said, then holding the thumb and forefinger on his right hand about a half inch apart. “It’s not a good door, the door’s this thick.”

Johnson noted that the burned portion of the living room also offered some training material, pointing to the condition of the couch where burn patterns serve as indicators of where the fire might have started, while patterns on the floor and bedroom door might reveal it how it started.

“That’s the beauty of this kind of training,” Johnson said. “You can see how they build up.”

For Freier, fire investigation is about following the same rules used by Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective Sherlock Holmes: “Once you eliminate the impossible, no matter how improbable, what’s left is the truth.”

Freier hopes his videos help people understand some truths about fire behavior, prevention and individual response. He is looking forward not only to teaching some more classes to Cheney firefighters, but also working with other agencies to get personnel and the public better informed.

“Keeping it a secret doesn’t help anybody,” Freier said.

The final chapter in the Rosebrook’s involvement in teaching ended Saturday when the entire interior was used for a controlled practice burn.

John McCallum can be reached at jmac@cheneyfreepress.com.

Author Bio

John McCallum, Retired editor

John McCallum is an award-winning journalist who retired from Cheney Free Press after more than 20 years. He received 10 Washington Newspaper Publisher Association awards for journalism and photography, including first place awards for Best Investigative, Best News and back-to-back awards in Best Breaking News categories.

 

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