Question: If your house catches on fire, are you safer in a
new home or a 25 year old home?
Answer: The old home!
Modern, open floor plans provide more oxygen and the
ceilings collapse sooner. Old homes produce open flames and white smoke.
While new homes do not always have an open flame, they produce black smoke
which is comprised of flammable gasses or vaporized fuel which “flashover” in 3
½ minutes, causing the temperature of a fire to increase from 250 degrees to
1,500 degrees in less than 10 seconds – your home just blows up. Underwriters
Laboratories confirms that new homes blow up in less than 5 minutes whereas
older homes take about 30 minutes to reach flashover. Due to average response
times of fire departments, newer homes are more often total losses compared to
older homes.