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Forest Fire and Grassland Danger Meters Available, cont.
The remaining four factors that contribute to the potential survival of the house are the presence of people during the fire, type of wall cladding material, roof covering material, and combustible fuel near the house. The meters are available as a Windows-compatible computer program. A free evaluation copy of the software is available at http://www.ffp.csiro.au/nfm/fbm/ fire_mts.html.	From there, you may also obtain information on how to purchase the meters that CSIRO offers. For additional information, contact the Bushfire Behaviour and Management Team, at andrew.sullivan@csiro.au. Additional information on testing of houses in the urban wildland interface (UWI), is available in FIRE.GOV’s Issue 6, Summer 2002 in the article entitled “UWI Landscaping Assisted by Fire Modeling”.	House Survivability Meter: a guide to the probability of a house surviving a bushfire.
Inside a Real House Fire
InterFIRE.org is a complete on-line resource center for fire services, fire insurers, law enforcement and others whose duties involve arson investigation, fire investigation safety and fire scene training. On their website, interFIRE.org is offering a new training module, “Inside the interFIRE VR Burn,” that allows the viewer to virtually experience a house fire. In cooperation with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), four rooms of a home were used to create an interactive training video. The rooms were furnished with typical furniture and instrumented to obtain temperature and heat flux data. Thermally protected cameras, coolcams, were used to document the progress of the fire. The coolcams were mounted inside water-cooled steel cases, with high temperature windows. This protection enables the cameras to survive a flashover environment. Coolcam 1 was positioned on the floor of the	dining room, and also provided a veiw of the living room. Coolcam 2 was located in the living room. One disposible camera was placed below the window sill on the north wall of the living room Additional cameras were also positioned outside the structure. Once the training is started, the fire development can be viewed from four different camera positions. At any time during this process the temperatures and heat flux data can be graphed to gain a better understanding of the progress of the fire. After 5:08 minutes, when no flames were observed on the display screen, the firefighters extinguish the fire. The time from ignition until the firefighters extinguished most of the fire was 7:05 minutes. (Several smaller hot spots were located by firefighters and subsequently extinguished.) Additional details about the experiment are included in the NIST Report of Test, FR 4009, “Full-Scale House Fire Experiment for interFIRE VR, May 1998.”	This exciting training exercise is one of several available from interFIRE’s web site http://www.interfire.org. Examples of other exercises on the site are: Preparing for Trial, Accelerant Detection Canine Units, and First Response from an Investigative Perspective.	InterFIRE is supported by the U. S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the American Re-Insurance Company, the National Fire Protection Association, and the U. S. Fire Administration. (See FIRE.GOV, Issue No. 10, Spring 2004, to learn more about interFIRE and some of their on-going activities.)
		InterFIRE VR house fire provides views from three interior cameras and one exterior camera.
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