Innovative Building Techniques

"Thirty seconds went by and then the whole top was up in flames. It seemed kind of out of control at that point, by the time the first fire truck got there."
"He [the crane operator] had to sit on the edge of the crane, and about fifteen minutes later the flames were so big they were going up above the crane."
"Especially when the helicopter guy was rescuing him from the crane, everyone was like, 'Oh my God! I can't believe this is happening. It's just so surreal."
John Ashie, Kingston, Ontario

Photo Lars Hagberg/Canadian Press

One assumes that the Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing, under the Building Code Act dating from 1992, felt that it was entirely feasible and appropriate that a five-story, city-block wide multiple-dwelling structure be built entirely of wood. Steel be damned. Canada has an abundance of wood stock from our magnificent forests and there is no reason, it might seem, not to use that lumber for the bones of large, multiple-purpose buildings with platform-frame construction.

Wood is a highly volatile building material. A simple fact known to anyone who might give it second thought. John Ashie, 22, stepped outside his family's car dealership in response to his father's remark about black smoke rising nearby. He was just in time to witness an amazing and frightening sight as huge orange flames licked through the roof of the five-storey apartment complex taking up an entire city block being constructed on Princess Street, Kingston.

That was at 2:15 p.m. Fire fighters were on the scene quite expeditiously, and the from among the gathering crowd of onlookers it was noticed that there was someone sitting atop a construction crane reaching up and out of the burning complex. "He actually had to get out of the little booth he was in and walk across the entire length of the crane, which would have been frightening enough", Ashie related after the event of the crane operator's rescue.

"As the flames started to get bigger and bigger and bigger, it started to get pretty worrisome. He must have been going through hell up there." In fact it was a full hour and twenty minutes after the fire began when a Griffon helicopter flying out from CFB Trenton managed to rescue the crane operator and deliver him to a waiting ambulance. Police were satisfied that all the other workers at the construction site were accounted for.

A search and rescue helicopter rescues a crane operator during a fire in downtown Kingston, Ont., on Dec.17, 2013. (Lars Hagberg / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

But that didn't end the situation; the flames leaped to one home close by and caught fire there. Police walked door-to-door in the area to inform residents of a general evacuation. The crane had sustained burn damages, and it wasn't clear whether it might soon collapse. Another crane would have to be brought in in an attempt to disassemble the damaged crane, in an effort to forestall an eventual collapse.

Kingston's mayor, for one, felt unease, he said, every time he walked by the building site, observing its wood construction, fearing the potential of a fire and the devastation that would ensue. Well, that fire did eventuate, and perhaps it's just as well it happened before the apartment building was completed and being lived in.

As an alternative to steel girder construction of large buildings, it doesn't seem very intelligent to imagine wood replacement to be reasonable.