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A fire in the Sofa Super Store, a furniture showroom and warehouse in a Charleston SC strip mall, caused the roof to collapse, killing nine firefighters inside. All three networks unveiled computer graphics to depict the blaze. The largest death toll for American firefighters from a single incident since the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, led all three newscasts and was the Story of the Day.

The details of the blaze were vivid--but hardly had enough national implication to warrant leading the network news. CBS' Kelly Cobiella told of "fire crews smashing in windows when the glass began to blow out on its own from the intense heat and pressure." She reported that there was "no warning" that the roof was about to come crashing down. ABC's Steve Osunsami (subscription required) disagreed: firefighters told him that metal roof supports "started to glow a hot red" before the collapse. NBC's Ron Mott quoted firefighting expert Vincent Dunn: "It is the nightmare of all firefighters--being buried alive underneath a burning roof."

ABC and CBS offered follow-ups to provide the national angle. CBS' John Blackstone noted that "what is burning these days adds to the challenge" of fighting fires. A previous generation of firefighters had to douse flames from cotton, fabric and wood; contemporary petroleum-based products produce twice the energy. ABC's Jim Avila was persuaded by the National Sprinkler Association that a failure to retrofit the sofa store was at fault. He cited statistics that "fire in a sprinkler building has never killed more than one person." After a string of hotel fires in the decade of the eighties, most states required existing buildings to retrofit: "Today hotel fires rarely kill." CBS' Cobiella found Charleston's Fire Chief Rusty Thomas less definitive than Avila: he said "sprinklers would have helped slow the fire but when asked if they could have saved lives he would not answer.

UPDATE: either the study cited by Avila is misleading or Avila misreported its findings. Surely the World Trade Center had a sprinkler system and hundreds must have died from the fire on September 11th, 2001, before the twin towers collapsed. Next day, CBS' Bob Orr reported on the engineering study by Purdue University, complete with computer animation, that showed how the aviation fuel fire brought the towers down.

Andrew Tyndall 6/20/07 4:37:01 pm

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