INVESTIGATION ON THE PONTINE TOWER FIRE

摘要

This work deals with the reconstruction through modelling of a fire developed during the night in a balconyrnon the 25th floor level of a skyscraper in the middle of Latina (town near Rome) and is based on therninvestigation carried out by the Sezione Investigativa Antincendi Provinciale (SIAP), the Fire Brigade ofrnLatina specialist unit for fire investigation. The Pontine Tower, unusual building in Italy, consisting of fortyrnfloors of which two underground floors containing garages and thirty-eight floors above ground with flatsrnand offices. The fire, started inside a balcony of a lawyer's office on twenty-five floor, where it was storedrnwork papers, involved the whole office but not the whole floor (only a part of this), because each floor arerndivided into four fire compartments as Italian law require for high buildings. Nevertheless, during the firstrnfire extinction, the fireplug, fire prevention measures, was out of order.rnThe most probable cause of the fire was an ignition of work paper due to arson because where the fire startedrn-the balcony- there wasn’t other primer source but the tests result on samples taken on fire scene had beenrnnegative.rnThe aim of this study is to illustrate how a synergic action among all the components available to thernfire investigator – such as on-site investigation, laboratory analyses, fire dynamics modelling – is a keyrncontribution to a reliable reconstruction of the event dynamics and to demonstrating that the fire preventionrnmeasures have reduced the fire propagation.