Live report from SFPE Annual Meeting!

SFPE President Carl Baldassara opens the Annual
Meeting and reveals the new logo!

SFPE is right now holding our Annual Meeting which is followed by the conference, seminars and events all pertaining to fire safety engineering and fire protection engineering. The meeting and conference is in Long Beach, CA this year.

As a member of the SFPE board, I'm happy to say that we're now launching a strategic plan that's bold and exciting. SFPE is rebranded with a new logo, with the clear message "Engineering a Fire Safe World". More information will follow on the SFPE official web page, blog and other media, as we roll out the new strategic plan.

A very interesting week will follow in Long Beach with great possibilities for networking and professional development. Today we also have specific events for young professionals within the Alliance of Young Engineers, awards ceremonies tomorrow and a lot more things coming up! See the full program at the top link.

And don't miss the live feed on Twitter from the conference: #SFPE2014 - stay tuned!

SP Fire Research grows in Lund!

SP Fire Research (new name from January) grows in Lund with the recent addition of fire safety engineer David Winberg. David will work closely with me with fire safety engineering, i.e. research projects, expert consultancy, courses and committee work. David is a fire safety engineer (Lund University) who previously worked as a consultant with Grontmij for three years and at Niscayah prior to that. David also did a year at Rolf Jensen & Associates in Chicago.

Not bad starting the year with a 100 % growth ;)

Reflections: Fire safety conference in Poland

About 200-250 polish fire profesionals attended the conference in the
winter capital of Poland, Zakopane.

This week I've participated at a big Polish fire safety conference in Zakopane. I presented myself about the Swedish experience of FSE, and also about the development in Europe. There is a strong development in Poland now, and it's interesting to see that we share some problems too. Poland is in another stage than Sweden is, but there's still plenty of areas where collaboration is possible. With a common European market for products and also services, this becomes even more important. Some accounts and reflections follows here.

Warehouse fires is one of the themes of the conference. Fires in warehouses in Poland has been a big problem due to property losses mainly. There has not been many fatalities. Some causes are that buildings are used in other ways than they were planned to. When using sprinkler systems, these may be designed for certain fire loads. In reality this may be deviated from by storing higher than supposed or other fire loads. Fire walls and other fire safety systems have been badly constructed in some cases. Also, for buildings with low fire rating of the structural fire safety, it is not safe enough for the fire brigade to conduct operations to extinguish the fire. Usually, the rating should be R60 or higher but roof structures may be of R15. A problem causing more svere fires has been the use of combustible insulation. Retail buildings are about 5 % of total fire losses, about 15 M€.

From a Swedish point of view warehouse fires is a very hot topic as well. In a national project we're currently gathering designs of commercial warehouses and other one story buildings that are public (with more than 150 persons). The goal is to produce guidance on how structural fire safety of these types of buildings may be conducted. One big question is if, how, and under what circumstances, the structural fire protection may be lower than R30.

Matthew Ryan presented the experience of London Fire Brigade's Fire Engineering Group. London fire engineering group consists of 9 persons primarily working with approval of fire engineering designs. Other groups handle other approvals and tasks. The geographical responsibility is the London area with a population of 8 million. Almost like Sweden's 9 millions. The group was formed in 1990 when for engineering was put into focus. FSE was deemed to be needed to grow world class cities and keep up with technology. The experience is that buildings usually are partially fire safety engineered approach. They also ask themself if we will ever see completely fire engineered buildings. From my own point of view, I agree. It mirrors the Swedish experience. Prescriptive solutions will probably be used for a long time for many parts of the fire protection systems - but FSE will be essential for certain solutions and for certain buildings.

For good fire engineering it is important with good communication between design team, building control team and the fire brigade. The building control body is the approver of design. Fire brigade takes an impartial role and is not paid by the developer. The fire engineering group act as consultants within the fire brigade. The London group primarily looks at fire safety plans, questions from building control body, fire safety strategy and supporting documents such as CFD calculations etc. They are always having early meeting when certain issues are relevant, for example when using CFD, other computer simulations, smoke control, complex fire brigade accessibility. In the assessments they ask what-if questions, practicality questions and they also use a lot of the experience from the investigation team. A close connection to experiences of actual fires in therefor possible. The whole process is documented and followed up. Accountability and transparency is essential.

For example, for the Shard (310m tall) the fire brigade were involved eight years before completion. In that case they looked especially at evacuation by lifts, the reduced fire resistance of structural part (90 instead of 120 minutes), complicated fire brigade access and special technical systems for them. 

The brigade is also witnessing that the testing of fire protection systems in practice works in the finished building. Mainly the process is working. However, there are problems with delayed consultations - decisions are already taken when the brigade is involved. There may be lack of knowledge at times. That the designed building is actually complying to the design in practice is not always ensured. 

They see that there are some challenges. Saving money by using fire safety engineering is increasing. De-regulation of building control process might lead to decreased quality of control. Maintaining skills of the local authorities is hard due to cost savings. Also, longevity of the buildings may be discussed - will try be maintained properly? And how can fire fighters to interact with the buildings, it's getting increasingly complex. There's also limited real fire evidence of the new types of buildings.

The London fire brigade account of fire safety engineering is very interesting. I belive we phase the same challenges in Sweden, and many other countries as well. It's also different to see the fallout of other control procedures. It would be very interesting to see  how national control procedures, and other circumstances, affect the actual fire safety in buildings - especially in fire engineered buildings.

Nordisk remiss om fire safety engineering

Det nordiska samarbetet inom fire safety engineering har
tagit fart under 2012/2013 (Foto: miguelb/Flickr)

Under förra året satsade de nordiska länderna på ett samarbete inom fire safety engineering med målet att ta fram en nordisk vägledning. Målet är nu nära, och i höstas skickades specifikationen ut på remiss. Specifikationen benämns INSTA 950, "Fire Safety Engineering — Verification of fire safety design in buildings". Senaste svarsdag är om mindre än två veckor, den 11 februari, så jag vill nu påminna och uppmana nordiska brandingenjörer att svara på remissen!

Varför är då denna specifikation viktig? Genom att arbetet sker inom nordisk standardisering (INSTA) med förankring hos de nordiska byggmyndigheter (Boverkets motsvarigheter) kan publikationen bli normgivande och officiellt refererad i nationella byggregler. I Sverige kan alltså publikationen komma att komplettera eller ersätta BBRAD, med samma status som denna.

Kortfattat innehåller specikationen vägledning för verifiering, metodval, hantering av osäkerheter och specifik vägledning inom olika områden. Bland annat ges mer detaljerad vägledning för utrymning, val av brandscenarier och dokumentation. I dokumentet finns också hänvisningar till de internationella standarder för fire safety engineering där det har skett ett stort arbete de senaste åren. Specifikationen har utvecklas gemensamt i Norden och en del av arbetet är baserat på Boverkets BBRAD och det som Fredrik Nystedt genomfört inom arbetet "Verifying Fire Safety Design in Sprinklered Buildings".

Som sagt, skicka gärna era remissvar - de är viktiga! Den som inte har fått remissen skickad till sig via standardiseringen kan kontakta mig.

Risk levels analyzed in new Swedish building regulations

In the afternoon session yesterday two Swedish fire consultancy companies presented a comparison of risk levels in the old vs. the new regulations. Mainly, the prescribed design parameters, such as the 2 & 10 MW HRR were analyzed. Analyzing risk levels is welcome and there's actually several similar projects going on now in Sweden.

However, some decisions and assumptions were made that may have led to another result.
- Minimum levels are not aspirational, individual practitioners are responsible for choosing a relevant design fire at, or above, the minimum level. Assuming that all consultants choses the lowest safety level is something they are liable for themself.
- Involved companies were not chosen to be statistically representative. Companies on the other ends of the scale may have been excluded. There are examples of design being performed previously where robustness (probably) were not handled at all - whereas the analyses assumes that all companies tested robustness.
- Many data in the analysis were lacking for the Swedish situation and thus data from other sources were used. This introduces uncertainty in the model.
- Difference in the suggested design HRR and the HRR of the consultants is just one factor affecting risk. Other factors, such as fire growth, may have a greater significance.
- A question that was not raised in the presentation is what risk the risk level should be? Could the analyzed values from the consultants have been over-conservative?

The article has great value in starting a discussion, even though no scientifical conclusions may be drawn. It's obvious that there's a great variance in how the previous regulations were applied. Risk levels will now be more conformed with greater societal control.

Further questions must certainly be discussed - what risk level do we get with nationally set values? One question that also is relevant is what the risk level should be? One way would be to compare with the risk levels of prescriptive regulations or with regulations in other countries - and to look more into factors affecting risk levels.

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The Nordic countries are well represented at the conference. There's some 15-20 Swedes of the 160 participants. In the picture you see Swedish and Icelandic representaties - at the table blocking the emergency exit ;)

Presenting the Swedish fire safety regulations in Hong Kong

Today was the start of 9th International Conference on Performance-Based Codes and Fire Safety Design Methods in Hong Kong. SFPE is hosting the conference at hotel Excelsior.

Hong Kong by night just outside my hotel.

I was presenting together with my former colleague, Caroline Cronsioe, who works at Boverket/The National Board of Housing Building and Planning. We also have two co-authors, David Tonegran from Tyréns and Henrik Bjelland from University of Stavanger.

The topic of the paper is the new Swedish building regulations that were implemented

Link to our paper

Link to our presentation

Some reflections after today is that several countries have mixed experience with performance-based design (PFD). Low competence among regulators may rule out that possibility - prescriptive is more well known. In other cases lack of guidance has led to varying and insufficient fire safety. Give the same problem to ten fire safety engineers and you'll have ten different answers.

This is one reason to why countries such as New Zealand and Sweden starts "prescribing" design values and criteria. There's obvious parallels of structural safety where design loads and resistance have been set nationally for years. It's quite reasonable in my opinion that we set the societal risk level nationally. Compare with road safety where speed limits are natural today but weren't implemented until risk awareness grew. However, more work will be needed on calibration of risk levels for fire safety. Here, international collaboration is welcome - and the conference is an arena for discussing such ideas.