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NIST Technical Assistance to the Illinois Governor’s Investigation of the
Oct. 17, 2003, Cook County Administration Building Fire
in Chicago

Background

  • The Oct. 17, 2003, fire started in the storage room of a large open office suite on the 12th floor of the 35-story Cook County Administration Building. A group of building occupants was trapped in a stairwell while trying to evacuate the building. There were six fatalities.
  • Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich called for an investigation of the fire shortly after the tragedy. About the same time, the Governor asked for technical assistance from the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to be provided to his investigation panel, headed by James Lee Witt, the former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). NIST is a non-regulatory federal agency within the U.S. Commerce Department’s Technology Administration.

NIST Assistance to Governor’s Investigation

  • The focus of the NIST effort was to recreate the fire using the NIST-developed Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS), a physics-based computer model. The model output included an animated visualization of the fire growth and smoke movement in the building. FDS also was used to estimate the impact a sprinkler system may have had on the fire growth and smoke movement.
  • The model input information collected by the NIST team included:

    • measurements and documentation of the areas involved in the fire;
    • the location, size and time of opening of windows and doors; and
    • the fuels (i.e., furnishings, carpeting, wall covering, etc.) that were involved in the fire.
  • In addition, information collected by the Witt Team on fire service operations, building systems and human behavior contributed to the model input.
  • NIST first sent two researchers to Chicago to collect information about the fire and evaluate the site on Monday, Oct. 20, 2003. NIST researchers returned to the scene during the following week to complete the data gathering. Documenting the fire damage provided a means of verifying the accuracy of the NIST computer model by comparing its predictions to what was physically found at the fire scene.

Heat-Release Rate Experiments

  • In February 2004, NIST conducted heat release rate experiments in order to develop input data for the FDS model that is specific to the furnishings and interior finish of the office area that was involved in the fire.
  • Two types of experiments were conducted: bench-scale and full-scale. The bench-scale experiments were conducted with a cone calorimeter. The cone calorimeter exposed material samples that are approximately 4 inches square to heat flux from a conical shaped, electric heating element. The cone calorimeter was used to measure the following for each sample: time to ignition, heat release rate, mass loss rate, carbon dioxide generation and carbon monoxide generation.
  • The full-scale experiments, though limited in number, provided insight into the impact of the geometry and the combination of the fuels on fire growth. Three full-scale heat release rate experiments measured heat release rate and heat flux.
  • The three full-scale burn tests were conducted on various materials obtained from the Cook County Administration Building, including:
    • a single chair in an unenclosed setup;
    • a single office workstation with occupant’s chair and side chair in an unenclosed setup; and
    • a group of four workstations with chairs within a 23-foot-by-24-foot enclosure with three walls and a suspended ceiling, 105 inches above the floor.

Results of the NIST Research

NIST Special Publication 1021, Cook County Administration Building Fire, 69 West Washington, Chicago, Illinois, October 17, 2003: Heat Release Rate Experiments and FDS Simulations, documents the furnishings used in the NIST heat release experiments, the conducting of those experiments, and their results. The report also details the creation, use and analysis of a computer simulation to provide insight into the fire development in Suite 1240 of the Cook County Administration Building on Oct. 17, 2003.

The NIST FDS simulation started with a small, flaming fire in the storage room and ended with the start of fire suppression activities by the fire department, 16 minutes and 30 seconds later. The simulation examined the impact of the spread of smoke into the southeast stairway with and without a functioning smoke exhaust shaft. Another simulation examined the impact of automatic fire suppression sprinklers.

The FDS simulation suggests that had automatic sprinklers been present in the storage room where the fire is believed to have originated, they likely would have controlled the fire and probably limited the fire spread to the room of fire origin.

Date created:10/12/04
Last updated: 10/12/04
Contact: inquiries@nist.gov


 
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