High-Rise and Underground Firefighting: Tactical Solutions for Firefighter Adaptation and Survival
June 22, 2026
For the third consecutive year, the Firefighter Air Coalition has authored the FDIC Supplement — this year titled Fire in the Sky — placing it in the hands of tens of thousands of fire service professionals at the world’s largest gathering of firefighters and fire instructors. That is not an accident. As FAC President Mike Gagliano explains, FDIC is where ideas meet the fireground, where the arguments that shape policy, training, and building codes reach the people with the authority to act on them.
Three years of authoring this supplement is a statement: air management in high-rise and underground environments is not a passing concern — it is the defining safety challenge of the modern built environment, and the Firefighter Air Coalition is not leaving this stage until the fire service and the communities it protects fully understand it.
The article covers the full landscape of what makes these environments so dangerous — building system failures, tactical constraints, physiological hazards, prefire planning gaps, and the engineering solutions the fire service needs buildings to provide. It is among the most operationally grounded treatments of this subject to appear in the national fire service press.
High-Rise Buildings Were Not Designed for Firefighter Survival
Brooks opens with the central tension that anyone who has worked a serious high-rise incident already knows: architects and engineers design buildings for compliance, efficiency, and aesthetics — while firefighters encounter those same structures under conditions of smoke, heat, and failing systems. Fire safety codes frequently satisfy regulatory requirements on paper while falling well short of what interior firefighting actually demands. The gap between design assumption and operational reality is the subject of the article, and Brooks traces it across building systems, physiological realities, and tactical constraints with the kind of specificity the fire service rarely sees in print.
The air supply math is unforgiving. A standard SCBA provides roughly 15 to 20 working minutes before the low-air alarm signals that reserve is being consumed — the alarm that tells a firefighter when it is time to exit. In a residential structure, that window is workable. In a high-rise, the clock starts at the street level. By the time a crew completes a stairwell ascent in full PPE with tools and equipment, heart rates have surged, core temperatures have climbed, and air consumption has accelerated well beyond what any standard service-time estimate assumes. The firefighters arriving at the fire floor are not fresh. They are already deep into their air budget — before a single door has been forced or a room searched.
Brooks does not frame this as a failure of air management discipline or a training problem that better instruction can fix. He frames it as physics — and as the predictable consequence of sending firefighters into structures that were designed and permitted without anyone seriously asking what sustained interior attack in that environment requires. That reframing matters enormously, because it shifts the conversation from what firefighters should do differently, to what buildings should have been designed to provide.
Standpipe reliability is its own chapter of failures. Brooks catalogs the causes: fraudulent inspections signed off without testing, vandalized valves and outlets, maintenance lapses that leave pumps offline, debris and corrosion blocking pipes, seized clappers and check valves, and improperly set pressure-reducing valves and pressure-restricting devices. PRV and PRD misconfiguration is particularly dangerous — a standpipe outlet that has been pressure-restricted below the threshold needed to support interior attack delivers nothing useful to the crew at the end of the hoseline.
Underground Firefighting: Fewer Exits, the Same SCBA Air Problem
“Every improvised workaround is a gap between what the building was designed to do and what the fireground actually demands.”
The underground dimension of Designing for Survival tackles environments the fire service literature has consistently underserved. Tunnels, transit systems, below-grade parking structures, subterranean mixed-use developments — these are not edge cases in major urban centers. They are routine operational terrain, and they present the air problem in its most compressed form. The distances are horizontal rather than vertical, but the arithmetic is the same: entry points far from the seat of the fire, egress routes shared with smoke, ventilation systems that behave unpredictably, and radio communications that degrade precisely when they are needed most.
What makes underground firefighting uniquely dangerous is the absence of any exterior option once crews are committed — no window to ventilate from, no roof, no aerial ladder to reposition the approach. Brooks examines what pre-incident planning must account for in these environments, addresses the specific and growing hazard of electric vehicle fires in below-grade garages, and makes the case that building infrastructure supporting air resupply is not optional in these structures. It is what separates a manageable incident from one that becomes unsurvivable.
Tactical Realities: When Building Systems Fail, Firefighters Adapt
Brooks addresses the tactical realities of building system failure directly — and they reframe the entire conversation. History is filled with examples: standpipe valves that seize, fire pumps pulled offline for maintenance, fire department connections that are vandalized, smoke control and HVAC systems that malfunction at the worst possible moment. When infrastructure fails during a working fire, firefighters do not stop operating. They adapt — stretching hoselines through alternative stairwells, deploying smoke curtains, pushing repeaters into radio dead zones, improvising air resupply through whatever means are available. Those adaptations represent operational ingenuity, but they also represent the distance between what the building was engineered to support and what the fireground actually demands. The more robust the building systems interface with fire department operations and less improvision is required when lives are on the line.
FARS
FARS: The Firefighter Air Replenishment System Already in the Codes
Among the engineering solutions Brooks examines to counter these hazards is one that addresses the air problem directly at the structural level. Firefighter Air Replenishment Systems — FARS — function on the same principle as a water standpipe: compressed breathing air is routed through the building’s infrastructure to fill panels at stairwell landings and key interior locations, allowing a firefighter to connect, refill a cylinder, and return to operations in minutes — without removing the SCBA, going off-air, or pulling crew members from search and suppression to run a bottle brigade.
As Brooks states, “This sustains operations without retreating to ground level, extending working time and stabilizing rotation cycles. Adoption of such systems reflects a fundamental principle of ‘designing for survivability.’ Just as sprinklers protect occupants by suppressing flames, FARS protect both occupants and responders by sustaining the firefighters advancing into danger.”
FARS provisions have already been independently incorporated into the International Fire Code, the Uniform Fire Code, and NFPA model frameworks — not as experimental proposals, but as codified responses to a documented operational gap.
The broader argument is that architects, engineers, building officials, and the fire service must close the gap between code compliance and operational reality — before a serious incident exposes exactly how wide that gap is.
Designing for Survival — Required Reading for High-Rise and Underground Firefighting
If you command a company or a department operating in a jurisdiction with high-rise or large-footprint structures, this article belongs in your pre-incident planning process. If you are a developer, engineer, building official, or municipal leader — this article is the professional record that the conversation in your jurisdiction needs to reference. The operational case for FARS has been made on firegrounds for decades. Brooks has now made it in a format that the people who design, permit, and govern the built environment can hold in their hands.
Three years. One platform. One mission. Firefighter Air keeps returning to FDIC because the built environment keeps growing taller and deeper — and because the firefighters dispatched into those structures deserve a built world that was designed with their survival in mind.
