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The Facebook page QI - Quite Interesting has approximately 390 thousand followers. It posted a claim in December 2022 about the time available to escape a house on fire.

It claims a dramatic decrease due to the "flammability of modern furniture" but provides no references to support the statement.

Has modern furniture significantly decreased the time available to escape a house fire?

In the 1980s you had 17 minutes to escape a house fire in the average American home, but because of the flammability of modern furniture, it's now closer to 3 minutes.

While the claim to limited to "American" houses, information on the phenomenon from other regions is of interest and would tend to support or reject the claim in general.

cjs
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Nij
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2 Answers2

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This statement appears to be partially true.

The source of the claim is research conducted by Underwriters Laboratories. Underwriters Laboratories is approved by OSHA to perform safety testing, so they're likely at least somewhat trustworthy. It may be worth noting, however, that since 2012, Underwriters Laboratories has been part of the for-profit company UL LLC. The research that produced this claim was conducted in 2012.

The first thing that makes this claim only partially true is that furniture was only one variable in the experiments.

In 2012, scientists at UL (Underwriters Laboratory) designed a series of experiments that focused on the size and geometry of modern homes as well as current furnishings and building materials. The experiments tested three modern home configurations against three so-called “legacy” configurations containing furniture UL described as being similar to furniture made in the 1950s.

"Newer homes and furniture burn faster, giving you less time to escape a fire" - Today

"The backing of your carpet is synthetic, your drapes are synthetic, the couch, the pillows are synthetic," explained John Drengenberg, consumer safety director for UL. "They burn hotter and faster than natural materials do."

Time

So, the claim's veracity could be easily improved - though perhaps only slightly - if it was changed to "...because of the flammability of modern home furnishings..."

It does not appear in-dispute that certain synthetic home furnishings can burn more quickly and hotter, when exposed to open flames; and it's likely the case that "newer" homes contain more of these kinds of furnishings.

However, the more we dig into this research, the shakier the broad conclusions seem.

We must note that the source of UL's claims is experimental data, not observations of real home fires.

One important thing to note about real house fires is that, according to "all available data from the 1970s through today, the vast majority of home fires that involve upholstered furniture are ignited by a smoldering source" (Time).

This is very important, because,

although “legacy” furniture made around the 1950s may ignite more slowly than “modern” furniture when exposed to an open flame, it ignites faster than “modern” furniture containing polyurethane foam when exposed to a smoldering source – which, again, is the most common ignition source in home fires involving upholstered furniture.

Time

What this suggests is that, if you, for instance, drop a lit cigarette on your "modern" couch, it will take a long time to ignite, and may never do so. Whereas, if you dropped that cigarette on an chair with a hair and cotton seat pad, it might ignite quickly. After those fires have ignited, you might get different outcomes based on the kind of furnishings. But this raises the question:

You have 2-3 minutes to escape starting when? This question is proving strangely difficult to answer. Not only does UL not specify, many other sources give similarly vague warnings:

Ready.gov: "A fire can become life-threatening in just two minutes. A residence can be engulfed in flames in five minutes."

American Red Cross: "Two minutes is the amount of time that fire experts say you may have to safely escape a home fire before it’s too late."

SF-Fire.org: "In only 3 1/2 minutes, the heat from a house fire can reach over 1100 degrees Fahrenheit."

Building codes have been getting more strict and more sophisticated, and newer homes will have more and better placed smoke detectors, better wiring, and construction that's aimed to control the spread of fire.

FULL STATEMENT FROM THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF HOME BUILDERS:

"According to the National Fire Protection Association, the leading causes of unintentional, nonconfined home fires are older heating and lighting equipment along with antiquated electrical distribution.

All data show that fatalities decrease when older, less safe homes are replaced with new homes that include safer construction based on newer building codes. These improvements include draft stopping in concealed spaces, safer appliances, changes to the electrical code and requiring hardwired, interconnected smoke alarms."

Time

Oddthinking
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Juhasz
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  • Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been [moved to chat](https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/141513/discussion-on-answer-by-juhasz-has-the-time-available-to-escape-a-house-fire-dec). – tim Dec 24 '22 at 09:05
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    Too much was moved to chat. This comment by @CareyGregory is something worth noting: "*Lots of talk about flammability, but the reality is if your furniture is actually in flames, you're likely already dead. Smoke and carbon monoxide are what kill people in structure fires, not flames. … .*". That is, modern furniture is more likely to kill before the real fire actually starts. By the time one can notice signs that there is a fire, it's too late. – Ray Butterworth Dec 25 '22 at 14:45
  • This answer is simply wrong at many levels. Sorry. – Harper - Reinstate Monica Dec 25 '22 at 18:33
  • Good point on the "starting when?" The claim seems to be designed purposely vague in order to drive a narrative. – Chris_abc Dec 28 '22 at 13:40
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TLDR: Not quite accurate, since the canonical source was referring to furnishings, or all the possessions in a home not just furniture.

Understanding how the USA crafts fire-safety rules

This may seem a non-sequitr but it'll make sense later. Bear with me.

When a fire is investigated, the reports go to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) and Underwriter's Laboratories (UL). They craft USA standards for [facilities1 and products, respectively. Being non-profit organizations* gives them more freedom of action. When accident/fire data is revealing a problem, they can revise codes, or do direct public education/outreach.

The claim

The unsupported Facebook claim is memetic - but it's a vaguely accurate repeat of claims which are definitely notable, and which I regularly cite. That's why I know how to answer this question :) One should also note that many repeating the claim are reasonably considered authorities in the subject, such as this Fire Department.

enter image description here

In almost every case that cites a source for this claim, the source is UL - the aforementioned standards author. This most likely flows from public outreach which UL did for this cause. That includes building mock living rooms and starting ignition (open-flame) fires and burning them on TV, such as this TODAY show presentation. Such public outreach is well within their remit.

However, this has been independently repeated, with similar results. This is not a surprise as UL is competent, and UL's testing was likely driven by patterns of data they saw in fire reports.

It would be difficult to characterize UL as a non-reliable source, since this is absolutely within their remit, and they are the US's official standards-making body.

This corresponds to what is known about plastics and foam

A prior epidemic of fires was smoldering sources from dropped cigarettes (usually from the smoker falling asleep). Great effort was placed into reducing those, and this oddly favored synthetic (plastic or foam) products. It's easy to make plastic resist a cigarette; just mix in borates. Natural materials can be treated with borate but it may not survive repeated washing. So, smoldering-source tests paradoxically favored synthetic materials.

However, these materials are made of petroleum and must burn exothermically if ignited with a sufficiently persistent source. Unfortunately the smolder resistance leads people to grossly underestimate the overall flammability. "They told us it wouldn't burn!" is frequently heard at accident investigations such as Grenfell Towers, Sunshine Mine, Browns Ferry Nuclear plant etc.

The furniture and products industries, having worked so hard on the "smoldering source" problem, can be forgiven for having "sour grapes" ** for this "open flame source" problem that UL now raises.

The unspoken matter: Toxicity

One thing never discussed in UL's presentation, since the open flames make the point alone, is the relative toxicity of the synthetic materials versus the traditional materials. The synthetics are typically built around cyanates or similar compounds used in 2-part in-situ formation of long-chain molecules (think: epoxy but with other formulations which behave similarly).

When these synthetics burn, the smoke is much more toxic to humans than smoke from traditional materials, and impede brain and motor function, making escape more difficult and further shortening the time to escape. This isn't discussed in any of the material, but it probably is a factor in the "3-minute escape".

Separately, building construction too

Also widely reported. This is because of differing materials (foam again, plus glues in laminated materials being flammable or simply the glues weakening in the high temperature).

End of answer. The rest is footnotes.

Because if you don't, people go "prove it". You might not, but others would. In particular there are actors who would like to discredit UL, because they want to market products in the US that do not meet UL standards.

* NFPA and UL are nonprofits. Really.

"If I'm a Cylon, you're really fracked." - Cmdr. Adama

NFPA's EIN is 04-1653090. UL's EIN is 36-1892375. (sorry for the signupwall; Guidestar is perfectly respectable; search those EINs on IRS.GOV if you prefer). As a taint check, Tesla's EIN is 91-2197729. ***

UL has two major roles: writing product standards, and as a testing laboratory to certify products to standards. Once, each country had their own UL equivalent which held a monopoly on testing. Free trade treaties opened testing to competition; for instance:

enter image description here enter image description here enter image description here

Are three different testing labs certifying a product as complying with both the USA standard authored by UL, and the Canada standard authored by CSA. USA OSHA curates the list of these qualified Nationally Recognized Testing Labs. For tax reasons, UL has "spun off" its testing lab division into UL LLC, a for-profit subsidiary wholly owned by the nonprofit (so lack of corrupting profit motive). **** Due to the 100% ownership of the LLC, the "profit motive" does not take over (as there are no minority shareholders entitled to best effort to profit).

The tests aired on the TODAY show fetured John Drengenberg who works for UL Proper, not the LLC. LinkedIn and UL's own pages.

UL's motivation is primarily their mission: safety; but also promoting their standards, "softening the battlefield" for standards changes, and possibly a clap-back to foreign mail-order products which do not meet those standards. But I'm speculating.

The claim is also repeated by a definitely nonprofit arm of UL proper, the Firefighter Safety Research Institute.

**

The American Home Furnishings Alliance represents manufacturers. Their statement, from today.com:

In the 1970s, much of the upholstered furniture manufactured in the United States transitioned to polyurethane foam and other synthetic materials for cushions. Polyurethane foam is valued for its durability, affordability and hypoallergenic qualities. Furthermore, as the industry began researching ways to make upholstered furniture more fire-safe, polyurethane foam was found to help reduce the chance of ignition from a smoldering source.

This was important, because in all available data from the 1970s through today, the vast majority of home fires that involve upholstered furniture are ignited by a smoldering source.

But not a word about non-smoldering sources. This sounds to me like sour grapes that they worked so hard to deal with the cigarette problem and did not think about the open-flame source problem (or regulators didn't require them to).

*** I also went into my Donor Advised Fund console, which only permits me to re-donate to true non-profits. They permitted donations to UL and NFPA, but not Tesla.

**** And here is UL's Form 990 showing UL LLC as a 100% owned subsidiary.

enter image description here

Harper - Reinstate Monica
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    This is already a wall of text, and I didn't even get past the irrelevant meta commentary. If we wanted to throw shade, we'd have umbrellas everywhere. – Nij Dec 24 '22 at 01:44
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    @Nij okay, I see your point. I see where I made the entire answer supporting information and did not simply state the point up top. Edited. – Harper - Reinstate Monica Dec 24 '22 at 05:02
  • Another major factor which could affect escape time of today's families compared to those of the 1940s is increased popularity of "open floor plans". If a staircase has a door at the top or bottom which is normally kept closed to control ventilation, and there's a fire on the first floor, people on the second floor would have to exit via window or fire escape, but they'd have a long time available to to do so. – supercat Dec 24 '22 at 20:05
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    The claim still does not involve UL, either a non-profit or a limited liability company, at all. The claimant is a Facebook page as stated and linked in the question. If you have a problem with another answer, downvote it, and put your critique there. If you are responding to the claim in question, please do that directly. There is still a huge amount of text here that is irrelevant to the question. – Nij Dec 24 '22 at 22:44
  • The UL is the closet thing that can be involved. Is there some other consumer protection agency? only one left out is the EPA.... "The claimant is a Facebook page" - then the claim isn't worth the paper it *isn't* printed on. - This can be split into two questions, the first of which, no one afaik has the authority to answer : *Has the time available to escape a house fire decreased?* And no one will ever answer the second (w/o at least having defined 'significant'): *if so, is that due significantly to "modern furniture"?* – Mazura Dec 25 '22 at 06:14
  • @Nij OK, major reorg is up. And the rabbit hole goes deeper now. It's not any shorter but the meat is near the top. UL cannot be avoided as they are the originator of the trope, as well they should be, since it's literally their job. – Harper - Reinstate Monica Dec 25 '22 at 22:34
  • @Harper-ReinstateMonica Someone doing their job or an organization being the authority in a field does not shield them from skepticism. Why do you see the claim as a trope? It seems to be a literal, testable claim to me. – Chris_abc Dec 28 '22 at 13:37
  • @Chris_abc Well, perhaps I'm using the word "trope" incorrectly, I thought it was for things widely repeated, without judgment toward their accuracy (the other being "myth"). Being good at skepticism is literally UL's job. *Vranyo* is not really a thing in the US safety community. Also there is broad, almost universal agreement from people who actually fight fires and have experienced the changes firsthand. (and who have tested the claim). It's like when Neil DeGrasse-Tyson says "yeah, this physics thing is so" and all the physicists say "yeah, that is so". – Harper - Reinstate Monica Dec 28 '22 at 21:36