John Tyler Whitley
FIP 132-01SW Building Construction
Module Four Writing Assignment

The FDNY Father’s Day Fire
In module four of this course, the main topic of this chapter is dealing with Ordinary Construction buildings or Type III Construction. Ordinary Construction buildings are in our everyday lives. We have plenty of them in our fire districts and we readily take the time to get the know the buildings like we should. The topic I will be discussing is a well known fire in the fire service and that is the “Father’s Day Fire” that occuried June 17th, 2001. After reading about this fire and the effects after the fire, I would say that this could have been a prevented fire, but instead, it was a tragic fire that led to a few fatalities in …show more content…
For nearly 80 years, the supply store was the center for contractors to receive their hardware needs and that also housed propane tanks and other flammable liquids. Not only was it just one building, there was another building that was attached to it at the time of the incident and shared a party wall and were interconnected on the first floor. The roof division consisted for a flat roof with 5/8-inch plywood covered by felt paper and rubber roof membrane. The construction of the building were mainly stone and mortar and support system was a combination of steel masonry posts/lolly columns and wooden support beams. It was believed that the fire door at the hardware store was blocked open to allow free movement around and also storage. There were numerous of hazardous materials that were located in the building. Some of the hazardous materials included Propane (142 cylinders), Mapp Gas (27 cylinders) and oxygen (3 cylinders). Building 2 also had a lot of hazardous materials inside the structure at the time of the incident also. Some of them included spray paint, acetone, paint thinner and minteral