To Fight or Not to Fight. . . The presumption of vacant homes.

There has been a lot of arguments about fighting vacant house fires in the fire service. Many Departments have gone as far as to write SOP's that they will not engage in interior firefighting inside of vacant structures. I can definitely understand their concerns, but fire fighting is an inherently dangerous job and gauging whether or not to in go interior into a structure fire should be decided on a whole lot more than occupancy status. As a current firefighter and fire investigator who has been in more than a thousand structures fires here is what I've personally come to decide.

• Many vacant structure fires that people jump to the conclusion are arson, may actually be warning fires or accidental due to smoking/drug use or improper electrical hook ups.
• Vacant structures are sometimes set fires to attempt to conceal a crime such as rape and homicide. These crime scenes need to be preserved to the best of our abilities.
• Making an assumption that a structure is somehow safer because it is occupied is concerning; think about hoarders, meth houses, ammunition's, removal of bearing walls during home renovations, or really god knows what.
• Legacy construction vs. New construction, web trusses, gusset plates and glue to put together these new houses.

As firefighters we don't pick and choose who we are going to save. And we don't know if someone is in there until we check. Making the call on weather to go interior needs to take into account a multitude of factors. Automatically sending crews in because its occupied or not send them in because its vacant is not properly evaluating the incident. Structural stability, fire extension, and the progress the crews are making are what you should be evaluating constantly.