The narration here is read aloud by a speech synthesizer, not by a person.
Self-paced course · First responders
How Buildings Burn: Fire Behaviour by Construction Type
FirePrevented
The chemistry of fire is the same everywhere. The building decides where it goes, how fast, and what fails first.
AboutWhat this class covers
Two houses on the same street can burn in completely different ways. This class explains why. It covers heat transfer and flashover, the difference between balloon and platform framing, why lightweight trusses and engineered joists fail suddenly while heavy timber does not, how masonry, steel and concrete behave under fire, and why a modern living room reaches flashover in a fraction of the time one from 1975 did. It closes with a practical method for reading a building from the outside and predicting what a fire inside it will do. Written for firefighters and fire-safety educators, and usable by anyone who inspects, designs, renovates, or simply wants to understand the building they live in. Every slide carries instructor notes, so the deck can be taught in a classroom as well as taken self-paced.
Prerequisites
None. Basic familiarity with fire behaviour helps but is not assumed.
What to bring
Optional: photographs of buildings on your own streets, for the reading exercise in Lesson 06.
Outline6 lessons
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Lesson 1:The Physics Does Not Change. The Building Does.
Heat transfer, fire growth, and flashover - the constants - and why the structure around them is the variable that matters.
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Lesson 2:Wood Frame: Balloon and Platform
Two ways of stacking wood, one of which hands the fire an uninterrupted vertical path from cellar to attic.
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Lesson 3:Lightweight and Engineered Assemblies
Why a modern floor can fail in minutes while a hundred-year-old one is still holding, and why mass buys time.
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Lesson 4:Ordinary, Steel, and Concrete
Non-combustible does not mean fire-resistant. What masonry, steel and concrete each do when the temperature climbs.
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Lesson 5:Voids, Openings, and the Modern Home
Hidden paths, open plans, sealed envelopes, and a fire load that reaches flashover in a fraction of the time it used to.
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Lesson 6:Reading a Building From the Outside
Putting the five lessons together into a sixty-second read that predicts what a fire inside will do.
OfflineWatch anywhere
The full course is pre-rendered as a single MP4 with all slides and narration audio, plus a ZIP bundle that contains one MP4 per lesson and an HTML index for offline browsing.