Fire Safety
September 28, 2009 | Filed under: Roofing Help Podcasts
Let’s talk about fire safety today…fire safety and your roofing system.
We all take steps inside of our house to make our house and make sure that our family is as fire safe as possible. However, all it really takes a lot of times is my neighbor not being fire safe, doing something either in their yard or whatever, and they’ve created a situation for me where my house has to be extra fire safe in order resist whatever might be going on.
Roofing is a great way to do that because if you have a fire in the neighborhood, often times it sends burning embers into the air, and if those embers land on my roof, well I want to make sure my roof is going to be fire safe and not burst into flames. Metal is a great way to do that.
Metal is widely recognized by fire departments and by building codes across the country for its extreme fire safety to help protect homes and keep them fire resistant in the event of a fire within the neighborhood. Also if someone is shooting off bottle rockets or some other type of fireworks, and those start to land on the roof, metal roofs provides great protection against those as well.
Now the other thing that sometimes happens- a lot of times in the southwestern part of the country will use tile roofs because they are also very fire-resistant from exterior fires. However, one of the issues with tile roofing is it’s a very heavy roof system. If you have a fire that actually originates inside of your home, gets up in your attic and starts to weaken the structure of your home, firefighters know very quickly that if there’s a tile roof on that house, they do not want to go inside and fight that fire. Because as soon as the structure starts to weaken, that heavy tile roof is eventually going to collapse, and if it comes down on them while they’re inside of the house trying to fight the fire, there probably unfortunately not going to come out. So a metal roof also helps protect your home from an interior fire, in that gives firefighters a wider window of opportunity to go in and fight the fire from the inside, rather than just have to fight it and try to contain it from the outside.
So, think about a metal roof because it will give you a lot of extra fire safety and fire resistance for your home as well.
Todd Miller has spent his entire career in the metal building products manufacturing industry. He is president of Isaiah Industries, an organization recognized as one of the world’s leading metal roofing manufacturers. Todd is currently Vice President of the MRA (Metal Roofing Association) and a Past Chair of MCA (Metal Construction Association). Through his website, he strives to raise the bar on standards and practices to provide property owners with the best possible products for successful roofing projects.
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