Fire hazards of exterior wall assemblies containing combustible components

The Fire Protection Research Foundation has funded a research project on “fire hazards of exterior wall assemblies containing combustible composites”. This paper presents preliminary findings from the project. In particular, statistics relating to exterior wall fires have been reviewed. Exterior wall fires appear to account for somewhere between 1.3% and 3% of structure fires in the selected property types investigated. Fires involving combustible exterior wall assemblies are low frequency events however the resulting consequences in terms of extent of fire spread and injuries and fatalities can be large as demonstrated by selected fire incident case studies. An overview of this project and it's further work is provided