140 secondsjust under two and a half minutes, is the time in which the conditions of the bar The Constellations of Crans-Montana have become incompatible with the survival of the people within them after the outbreak of thefire that caused 40 victims and 119 injuries on New Year’s Eve. This is the result of one numerical simulation which reconstructs in a way semi-realistic the dynamics of the fire, conducted by the architect Martina Bellomia and the engineer Giovanni Bellomia. The simulation analysis, carried out with NIST’s Fire Dynamics Simulator software (National Institute of Standards and Technology) American, was published on the Fire Safety Engineering Italia website.
The author of the analysis specifies that it is a simulation which It has scientific but not forensic valuesince the floor plan of the room, the materials included in the study and the parameters of the fire are not based on technical surveys carried out on site but on public information and reasonable hypotheses. Given this, the physical dynamics are modeled by the software in a scientifically realistic way and in compliance with official fire safety regulations.
You can see the result of the simulation in the video reconstruction above. It is initially shownignition of the fire on the ceiling of the basement bar room. Initially, the smoke (shown in black in the simulation) propagates under the ceiling.
Approximately 110 seconds from the trigger, while the smoke has invaded the entire ceiling and has begun to rise into the upper room, the phase begins development of the fireinto which the flames extend.
As the smoke extends into the lower part of the room, about 140 seconds after ignition the smoke probably occurs fltoshoverthe moment in which the fire becomes generalized, when the ceiling reaches a temperature of 600°C. The flames have invaded the entire ceiling, the upper room is completely occupied by smoke and they begin to fall drops of burning polyurethane which also transmit the flames to the furnishings in the lower part of the room.
At this point, according to the simulation, the temperature at eye level reaches i 60°Cestablished by Italian legislation as a maximum exposure limit for unprotected people. In short, it would be here “the conditions for people’s survival cease to exist”as reported in the simulation. Less than two and a half minutes since the flames reached the soundproofing panel on the ceiling of the The Constellations until the lives of the kids celebrating New Year’s Eve were seriously compromised.
