Pop Rivet wrote:
My insurance agent though, had the best reasons for us
(not necessarily you) to NOT have a metal roof: Metal was
MUCH harder to punch through to get into the house for fire
fighting and supposedly most fire departments hated them for
that reason. Even when a fire was cold, they can't,
apparently, be sure without first letting it cool, and then
going inside and ripping the roof off from the inside to
expose any remaining embers. When I heard that, I called
the fire dept and they agreed, surprisingly. I thbought it
was bunk, to tell you the truth, but that was two sources
that should have been reliable. Now, we do have a volunteer
fire dept, so an urban dept might not care what a roof is -
they have much better and bigger equipment and more money, I
suppose.

More then likely, you hit the nail on the head when you said your department
was a volunteer dept. Probably underfunded. But they would still have the
basic tools to do the job.

The majarity of FD's in the US have no problem with metal roofs. They are
easy to vent. The axes they carry (nothing special about them) can cut
through them. You have carbide-tipped chainsaws and gas-powered circular
saws that will cut right through them. Any roof gets hot when there is fire
underneath it.

Any insurance agent that tells you otherwise doesn't have a clue about the
FD. And you can't have a much more fire-safe blanket on your house then a
metal (slate, tile) roof.