140 seconds, just under two and a half minutes, is the time the bar conditions The Constellations of Crans-Montana have become incompatible with the survival of the people inside them after the outbreak of the fire which caused 40 victims and 119 injuries on New Year’s Eve. This is the result of a numerical simulation that reconstructs the dynamics of the fire in a semi-realistic way, created 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 that has scientific but not forensic value, since 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. The start of the fire on the ceiling of the basement room of the bar is initially shown. Initially, the smoke (shown in black in the simulation) propagates under the ceiling.
About 110 seconds after the ignition, while the smoke has invaded the entire ceiling and has begun to rise into the upper room, the development phase of the fire begins, in which the flames spread.
While the smoke extends into the lower part of the room, flashover probably occurs around 140 seconds after the ignition, the 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 drops of burning polyurethane begin to fall, transmitting 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 60 °C, established by Italian legislation as the maximum exposure limit for unprotected people. In short, it would be here that “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.
