Firefighter Air Resupply: Fire Codes and Standards

When the Air Runs Out: Buildings, Bottle Brigades, and the Worst Day of a Civilian’s Life

Somewhere in your city, there is a building someone is sleeping in tonight. It could be a 22-story residential tower, a 900,000-square-foot distribution warehouse, or a big-box retail center the size of four city blocks laid on its side. The person inside does not know that if a serious fire breaks out in that structure, the firefighters dispatched to find them may run out of breathable air before they reach them. Not because of a mechanical failure. Not because of poor training. Because nobody — not the architect, not the developer, not the official who signed the permit — ever seriously considered what it takes to sustain an interior fire attack in a building of that scale.

That is the gap the Firefighter Air exists to close. It is not a gap in technology, or in firefighter courage, or in departmental policy. It is a gap in how the people who design, finance, and permit large-scale buildings think about the worst day in the life of the people who will someday need to be rescued from them.

Fifteen Minutes and a Stairwell

A standard SCBA gives a firefighter approximately 15-20 working minutes of air before the low-air alarm sounds. That alarm signals that emergency reserve is being consumed and it is time to exit. Fourteen minutes is the entire operational budget for search, rescue, suppression, and overhaul. At sea level, in a one-story house, that is manageable. In a high-rise or a 750,000-square-foot big-box structure, the countdown begins before the real work does.

As Fire Engineering contributor Jimmy Davis documented in his April 2025 article on the Operational Burdens of Stairwell Ascents, the physiological cost of climbing floors in full PPE with tools and hose is severe. Research from the Illinois Fire Service Institute found that stair climbs produced the highest peak oxygen consumption of any fireground activity at 8.1 METs, meaning a firefighter ascending a high-rise stairwell is working near maximum cardiac output before setting foot on the fire floor. Heart rates surge toward 180 to 185 beats per minute. Core temperature climbs. Air is consumed at rates approaching 79 liters per minute, nearly double what NIOSH uses as its standard service-time estimate. The firefighter who reaches the 20th floor has already spent a significant portion of that 15 to 20-minute budget just getting there.

The same arithmetic applies horizontally. A big-box warehouse or large-area structure is, in the words of the high-rise community, a skyscraper laid on its side. The distances from the entrance to the seat of the fire, through toxic smoke and superheated air, can consume an entire cylinder before a crew makes contact with the fire. Interior operations begin, when they begin at all, with firefighters already running on reserve.

The Bottle Brigade: A Workaround That Doesn’t Work

When cylinders run low at a high-rise or large-area fire, firefighters do not leave. The fire does not pause. What happens instead is a process known as a bottle brigade: additional personnel are pulled from the fireground to physically haul full SCBA cylinders up the stairwell and stage them two floors below the fire floor for exchange. Those are firefighters who could otherwise be searching, pulling hose, or relieving exhausted crews. Every firefighter carrying a cylinder is a firefighter not fighting the fire.

Battalion Chief Jack Murphy and FDNY Battalion Chief Jerry Tracy, co-authors of High-Rise Buildings: Understanding the Vertical Challenges, put it plainly in Fire Engineering: transporting full SCBA bottles to a fire floor in an elevator that may have to pass the fire sector, or manually hauling them up a stairwell that may itself be contaminated, is an arduous task involving many firefighters. On paper it may seem feasible. In reality, most departments do not have the personnel resources to accomplish it. Departments that adopt bottle brigade SOPs quickly discover that the concept positions firefighters, already fatigued from stair climbs in full PPE, as air-supply logistics workers. Some policies even allow those hauling cylinders to dress down out of their PPE to reduce core temperature and fatigue. The operational picture this creates is straightforward: the building is on fire, civilians may be trapped above the fire floor, and a portion of the responding force is running up and down stairwells carrying bottles.

Firefighter Air President Mike Gagliano addressed this directly in the 2024 Fire Engineering supplement:

“It’s tough to manage air when you don’t have any air to manage. FARS is a much better option than hauling bottles up the stairs or relying on elevators that often fail. And, in the best-case scenarios, stairs and elevators are time consuming, personnel-intensive, and laborious operations that typically result in later-stage air resupply.”

Later-stage means the fire has grown. Search windows have narrowed. The civilian on the 18th floor who needed to be found in the first ten minutes has been waiting for twenty.

The Worst Day in a Civilian’s Life

Every large-scale building should be evaluated not just for what it is on a normal day, but for what it demands on its worst day. The worst day is when fire breaks out, smoke migrates through HVAC and elevator shafts into floors above the fire, residents in hallways and stairwells are caught between the fire below and locked doors above, and the fire department arrives to face a building its designers never imagined through the lens of rescue. On that day, victims are found not just in the fire apartment or compartment, but in the corridors and stairwells where smoke has driven them. Firefighters must search those floors on air. The crews assigned to evacuation, search, and rescue above the fire sector need a continuous air supply near where they are working, not staged at a cache two floors down and thirty minutes of physical labor away.

The fire protection community has a phrase for what interior firefighting requires: air and water. Without water, there is no suppression. Without air, there is no interior attack. Water has been codified into building infrastructure for decades. Standpipes route water from the street to floor-level outlets throughout the structure, so crews do not have to run hose up 30 flights of stairs. Every qualifying high-rise has this infrastructure. The question that designers, developers, and permit officials have not been pressed to answer is why the same logic does not apply to air.

FARS: The Air Standpipe

Firefighter Air Replenishment Systems — FARS — answer that question with the same logic water standpipes answered it for hose operations a century ago. FARS is a fixed, pressurized air distribution system built into the building’s infrastructure, running through stairwells and into hallways, terminating in fill panels where firefighters can connect and refill their cylinders in under two minutes without removing their SCBA or going off-air. The bottle brigade disappears. Personnel freed from hauling cylinders can search floors, relieve exhausted attack crews, and support command. The civilian on the 18th floor gets a better chance because the firefighters looking for her are not also serving as air-supply logistics workers.

FARS has existed in some form for more than 25 years and is not experimental technology. In 2015, the International Fire Code adopted Appendix L, establishing a national foundation for FARS design, installation, and maintenance. The Uniform Fire Code followed with Appendix F. NFPA addressed it in Appendix D. Three of the most influential model code bodies in the country looked at the same operational problem and arrived at the same structural answer. Murphy and Tracy noted that local departments with FARS installed are “relieved of the enormous challenge and responsibility of time and personnel having to physically transport what could be hundreds of SCBA cylinders. Most departments do not have the personnel resources to accomplish this.”

What the Codes Already Know — and What Municipalities Cannot Claim They Don’t

The IFC, UFC, and NFPA did not add FARS provisions because a catastrophe had already occurred. They added them because the fire protection community identified a foreseeable, predictable operational gap and codified the solution proactively. That is the purpose of model code development. Once a provision enters a published national code, the legal landscape for every municipality shift, regardless of whether that municipality has formally adopted the specific appendix. Constructive notice is the legal doctrine that treats a professional as having known what their role required them to know. A building department official issuing permits for a 30-story residential tower in 2025 is on constructive notice of IFC Appendix L. Unawareness is not a defense. In the eyes of a court evaluating whether a jurisdiction met its duty of care, unawareness is evidence of the failure itself.

This is why the Firefighter Air engages not only fire chiefs, but building officials, city attorneys, and risk managers. The fire service can describe the operational problem. It takes the right internal audience — the people who approve permits, manage municipal liability, and advise elected officials — to recognize that continued inaction creates documented, growing legal exposure. Every qualifying structure permitted without a FARS requirement is a building that will exist without one for the life of that structure. Once the certificate of occupancy is issued, the leverage is gone. The time to build air into a building is before the concrete is poured, not after the first injury or death.

The Conversation Worth Having Before the Incident Forces It

Every department that has seriously studied high-rise operations reaches the same conclusion: it is never a question of whether a city will face a serious high-rise or large-area fire. It is a question of when. These fires do not announce themselves. They happen on Tuesday nights in buildings that have stood for fifteen years, staffed by companies that have never run anything like it. The operational gap is not discovered in training. It is discovered in the middle of the incident, when the bottle brigade is struggling up a contaminated stairwell and crews above the fire floor are running critical on air. The time to solve the air problem is before a qualifying structure is ever permitted, which means jurisdictions must adopt the applicable code provisions first. Adoption has to happen before the permit counter opens on a project. Once a certificate of occupancy is issued, the leverage is gone for the life of that building.

The person sleeping in that high-rise tonight is not thinking about air standpipes or IFC Appendix L. They are thinking about tomorrow. They deserve a building that was designed, from its very infrastructure, to give firefighters the air they need to find them on their worst day.

That is not an unreasonable expectation.