The Fire Rebels describes new 3-D firefighting techniques that handle extreme fire behavior — backdrafts, flashovers, and gas explosions — by taking into account the gases that fill a room, not just the surfaces on fire:
Over the last three decades, building materials have changed dramatically. Plumbing, flooring, siding, roofing — most are now made from synthetics. The same goes for the stuff inside the building, like foam rubber seat cushions, plastic computer cases, and nylon carpet fibers. As a result, today’s blazes produce two to three times as much energy as a typical fire did in 1980, and most of that energy emerges as flammable gases. Those gases don’t escape from newer buildings, which are well insulated and tightly sealed. Fires now project their energy much farther from their cores, making them more dangerous and more difficult to extinguish.Krister Giselsson and Mats Rosander, two Swedish fire engineers, predicted this problem in the late 1970s and began developing new methods to address it. They realized that just approaching the fire — getting close enough to put the wet stuff on the red stuff — was going to be the defining challenge of 21st-century firefighting.
Their solution contradicted one of the oldest rules in the business: Don’t put water on smoke, particularly when there are firefighters nearby. The water will turn to steam and cook everyone. But the Swedes argued that if the water is broken into tiny droplets and deployed in extremely brief bursts, the moisture’s expanded surface area will cool the gases in the smoke without turning to steam. So instead of simply ducking, firefighters could continue to push forward to the source of a blaze.