Wake-up call: Fire at the U.S. Treasury Building

NFPA Journal, Nov/Dec 1996 by Wolf, Alisa

The roof fire at the U.S. Treasury Building called attention to life safety deficiencies that, if left uncorrected, could result in significant losses to the Capitol's oldest department building and those who work there.

At 11:30 on the night of June 26, Ed Comeau, NFPA's chief fire investigator, answered a call from Gerald Haynes , fire protection engineer at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (AT). That's how he learned of the roof fire at the U.S. Treasury building, which had been detected and extinguished earlier that day.

"He told me that water was just pouring down the stairs, cascading down like a waterfall," Comeau says.

On the scene at the five-story, historic federal building the day after extinguishment, Comeau reviewed the damage firsthand.

"The water damage was tremendous," he reports. "There was a real concern about water and smoke damage to old artwork and the building itself. In a very ornate room called the Cash Room, there was water damage galore."

The walls of this room, in which government checks could be cashed as late as 1976, are of seven varieties of American and imported marble. And that's just a hint of the imposing granite building's value, in terms of both money and historical significance. It's important in terms of national security, as well. From the Treasury Building's roof, Comeau could wave to the uniformed Secret Security agents on the adjacent White House roof.

By the time Corneau had arrived, the origin of the Treasury fire had been traced by ATF investigator Ed Garrison, special agent and certified fire investigator (CFI), to a roofing operation. What had started as a relatively minor blaze in the north section of the roof had burned undetected in a void between the roof and the fifth-floor ceiling for some time. In the end, 8,300 square feet of roof burned. And though flames, smoke, and water jeopardized this Greek Revival-style building and its historic contents, the real significance of the fire, according to Comeau, was the attention it called to life safety deficiencies throughout the building.

"It was fortunate that it was a roof fire that didn't endanger a lot of people," says Comeau. "If this fire had occurred inside the structure, it would have been a totally different story."

Cause and origin, other dage

"As I understand it," says ATF's Garrison, "a group of government contractors was replacing the existing roof on the Treasury Building for some time."

The actual roof of the five-story building at the time of the fire was steel ladder truss with a wood deck and a rubberized membrane laid on top of a vaulted, concrete flat roof-a previous roof that had been covered with newer construction in 1921. Roofing contractors had been pulling up the old, rotted wood decking and the old insulation over the steel truss, and putting in new insulation and a heat-sealed rolled membrane. The ceiling between the fifth floor and the void was composed of remnants of older construction left from the original structure, built over the 33-year period from 1836 to 1869, and from numerous renovations over the years.

On the morning of June 26, contractors opened the roof around two drains they were planning to relocate. However, they saw that they couldn't move the drains without using cutting torches. Contractors decided to close the roof temporarily, until engineers could examine the problem the next day.

At 2:00 that afternoon, a supervisor for the roofing contractor began making a temporary enclosure, covering the drains with plywood, rigid foam insulation board, and an elastic membrane.

Then, says Garrison, He took a propane torch to the two drains and sealed the roofing material to the flashing of the existing parapet wall. What he actually ignited, whether insulation or old rotten wood, there was no way to tell."

The supervisor finished his work at 3:20. By 4:30, all roof work for the day was completed, and all contract employees, Treasury inspectors, and security people left the roof. Contractors didn't perform a latent heat assessment, stating afterward that they only did so when working in critical areas.

Shortly afterward, at 4:40, employees on the top floor of the five-story building smelled smoke, and one occupant called the building's internal security command center. Security officers responded a minute later. At 4:42, a manual pull station on the northwest corner of the fifth floor was activated, transmitting a presignal to the building's first-floor command center. Staff activated the building's fire alarm system and started evacuation. At 4:45, a member of the Secret Service, Uniform Division (UD), radioed that, from the adjacent White House roof, he could see smoke coming from the roof of the Treasury Building. Minutes after reports of the fire came in, UD members responded from throughout the Treasury Building, grabbing fire extinguishers on their way up a southeast staircase to the roof. Their efforts helped contain the fire spread, but not enough to keep the flames from creeping into the void beneath them. Arriving firefighters were forced into a defensive operation, advancing hoselines from a standpipe located in one of the stairwells and trying to reach the void through scuttles in the ceiling above the fifth floor. However, these openings were too small, and some were partially blocked. "They had to put master streams on the roof and cut ventilation holes. Water went everywhere," Comeau says. In large part, Garrison credits the old concrete roof with the lack of fire spread into the occupied space.