SFPE Europe Working Session in Switzerland

Evening entertainment at the Eurofire conference 
that followed the SFPE Europe meeting.

On the 8th of October a meeting and working session was organized by SFPE Europe in Basel, Switzerland. SFPE Europe is actually called the European Chapters Coordination Group (ECCG) and formally consists of the national chapter leaders. The group meets about 2-3 times a year and focuses on the development professional fire safety engineering in Europe.

Some reports from the meeting regarding SFPE:

• It's great to see that new chapters are formed! Most recently, there's the new student chapter formed by Edinburgh University.
• Also, it's great to see that several European countries are considering the formation of new chapters. Anyone interested, feel free to contact me!
• SFPE HQ has found a new executive director, Nicole Testa Boston, which is great! Welcome Nicole!
• The ECCG has now been formalized and there will be a one year term for the SFPE Europe president. It's now being lead by Jean-Claude de Smedt from Belgium.

The working session itself was titled "Professional recognition and qualification of fire safety engineering/engineers" and was moderated by Robert Jönsson. Last year SFPE Europe conducted a survey on the status of fire safety engineering in Europe. The results showed that fire safety engineering is progressing in Europe, but also that there are large differences in what we mean by FSE. There are also big differences in how we measure and require competence as well as qualification of practitioners. These are of course vital elements to ensure a high quality of fire safety engineering work. Below you will find the presentation I made in Switzerland at the working session and the Eurofire conference.



The presentation of the status in Europe set off a discussion about what we need in the European countries. Robert and I had prepared background information, including a lot of excellent material already being done by others. These questions has been raised before, and will again.

Some of the key conclusions were:
- There is a need for operational standards, or job descriptions, of what fire safety engineers do
- These descriptions may be matched when defining model curriculum or contents of educational programmes. See SFPE:s BSc curriculum and strategy/core competences.
- Short courses are needed for professional development of existing practitioners, and also to raise awareness and knowledge of the fire safety engineering field among other disciplines.

These are just some of the questions that SFPE Europe will continue working on. For more information, feel free to contact me!

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.

SFPE Engineering Technology Conference

It's been a great and interesting day at the SFPE Annual Meeting. The Engineering Technology Conference is going on the first two days. There has been numerous good presentations, award ceremonies and reports from the SFPE organization.

I'm proud of the several prizes that Sweden received (see SFPE Sweden homepage, in Swedish: http://www.sfpe-biv.se/nyheter/nyhetsarkiv/10089-prisregn-oever-svenskar-i-usa). Most notably, I must say, is the price to Robert Jonsson for his great effort in mentoring and inspiring at the fire safety engineering programme in Lund. More than 700 students have graduated and Robert is the key person to the successes of the Lund program. A big congratulation to him!

Great presentation were made by Nina Hansen, Denmark, on fire risk assessments in tall residential buildings. I'm sure this may be interesting for the SFPE Sweden's group that currently are looking at fire safety verification of buildings were pre-accepted solutions are not valid, including buildings with more than 16 stories.

My colleague, prof Ulf Wickström, is holding his presentation of a new formula
for calculating time to ignition of solids.

My colleague professor Ulf Wickström presented a simplified formula for calculating time for ignition of solids. Validation with numerical methods show great accuracy and big improvements compared to previous methods.

Kristofer Overholt from Texas University presented a really interesting study on fire penetration into void spaces. Experiments and analytical models were compared. Also, the effect of natural vs PPV ventilation were studied. Fires into the construction is very relevant in Sweden nowadays. We have a good understanding of predicting and analyzing room fires, and the fire brigade are using great tactics. But when it comes to fires in the structures we need more knowledge and new methods. With growing fire damage costs, this is definitely an area where more research is needed.

One interesting conclusion is that the use of PPV may effect the fire behavior and increase the risk of a smoldering fire to a flaming fire. Kudos to Kris at University of Texas, Austin, for great work in the area.

SFPE Annual Meeting: Fire Safety Engineering in Europe

This week I'm participating at the SFPE Annual Meeting in Savannah, GA. Savannah is great with warm weather and a welcome change from the cold autumn winds back in Sweden. I'll be reporting from the conference at the blog. More information about the annual meeting is found here:

http://www.sfpe.org/SharpenYourExpertise/Education/2012SFPEAnnualMeeting.aspx

This morning I'll be holding my keynote speech on Fire Safety Engineering in Europe - which you may see below!

Fire Safety Engineering in Europe - Opportunities and Challenges on Prezi

Questionnaire on FSE in Europe

SFPE Europe is conducting a survey on the status of fire safety engineering in Europe. For this, we need your help! So far we've collected answers from the following countries:

Belgium Denmark Estonia  Finland  France Germany Italy Norway

Poland Spain Sweden

Switzerland

If your country is not on the list above (or if you have good contacts in another), please send an e-mail to me: michael.stromgren@sp.se and I'll get back to you with the questionnaire. This help is greatly appreciated as we then can work better towards the goal of better fire safety in Europe by proper fire safety engineering.

Heading towards a Fire Safe Europe

Meeting location of the Fire Safe Europe
meeting in Brussels.

Last week I attended a meeting with the Science Advisory Board that is part of Fire Safe Europe. Fire Safe Europe is working for greater awareness of fire safety among policy-makers, both at the European level and in the member states - which I think is great. One of the important questions when working with risk management is risk communication and risk awareness. Societies often tend to be very reactive - we adjust regulation and legislation after incidents happen. With this approach we will always lag behind. Raising risk awareness then, is therefore a great. We need to be aware of the risks, and how to manage them, before accidents happen.


There's also another side of the problem - we also need to do just evaluation of the actual risks. If not, we will end up mismanaging the risks - putting protection where it's not effective and thus wasting societal resources. So how is Europe doing today in the area of fire safety? In fact, that's a quite hard question to answer. It may even be hard to answer on a national level. There is no harmonised way of collected data on fires, or on doing deeper fire investigations. I believe that we need improve our way of collecting information in several ways:


- Better and harmonized statistics. Statistics say that the fire risk in Sweden is five times higher than in the Netherlands. Are the statistics comparable, and if they are correct - what's the underlying reason to the differences? For development and improvement we need good numbers we can trust.
- Deep fire investigations including the response and effect of fire safety systems in buildings. Often, fire investigation tend to focus on blame - who caused the fire? Or, on the actions of the fire brigade, or maybe on how the fire progressed. The invesigations seldom look into fire safety system of the building. Sweden recently expanded the national fire investigation programme to study the behaviour of fire safety systems in buildings - which is commendable! However, it'd be great to exchange experiences to a greater degree with other countries. Many of the most significant fires, leading to change of regulation, are few-time events and since Europe consists of many small countries it would be very benifical to increase the statistical base. For a small country like Sweden the number of buildings are simply not enough to draw conclusions on the relatively "rare" significant fires.
- Pre-fire investigations of fire safety in new and old buildings. There is little, or no, greater investigations about the actual fire safety in buildings. For all of the technical aspects of buildings, several errors may occur, leading to a lower quality. For fire safety, we may have problems with design methods, design assumptions, inadequate workmanshop and when the building is finished - failing maintenance. What do we know of the fire safety of buildings after one, ten or even fifty years? Knowing this becomes increasingly important as we today have tools to optimize fire safety in a new fashion. With narrower safety margins we also need to be able to trust the end results to a higher degree.


Next year the Construction Products Regulation (CPR) will come into full effect in Europe. That will also mean higher competence need for building owners/contractors. CE-marking is no guarantee for fulfilment of fire safety regulation. The CPR focuses on harmonizing the internal market in Europe - we should be able to trade across the borders in Europe. While many of the common European methods resembles the old national ones - we also have an enirely new situation when it comes to verification of fire safety. There is clearly a need to  sure that we keep the actual fire safety at a high level. And for that, we need to measure the actual fire safety level.


Without proper information, and hard facts, on the actual problems we're facing - we'll be stuck in engineering guesswork. We need the information to know where to put the resources. Still, there's a number of things we can start with already. Several tools can be improved, sometimes by fine tuning, and some times more radical changes may be needed.


- regulations, standards and guidelines
- systems for review and control
- levels of competence and qualification of practitioners


In the end, we want the adequate fire safety measures based on the associated risks. Fire safety should also be efficient. We have a lot more competence in Europe today than we had twenty years ago. We have the tools to evaluate and improve fire safety. We just need to use them right. With better information, and better use of the information, we'll have an even greater opportunity to continue our work for a Fire Safe Europe.

FSE in Europe is progressing

For the The Malmö University building Orkanen,
fire safety engineering using risk-based methods were
 used. Rougly 2M€ were saved by this approach. 

Several projects for fire safety engineering going on in Europe and the indicators point in the same direction - fire safety engineering is progressing. The experience of PBD of fire safety in Europe now has a history of about two decades in some countries. Most notably in the UK (1989), in Sweden (1995) as well as Denmark and Norway. Manybuildings wouldn't have been feasible for functional or economical reasons if not performance-based design (PBD), using fire safety engineering methods, would have been possible. And several other countries wants to follow today, not least in Europe. I've written about this before, when I worked at the National Board of Housing, Building and Planning (in Swedish).


In March SBR in the Netherlands hosted an expert meeting on fire safety in high rise buildings. The Netherlands are in need of a more modern approach to fire safety and thus wanted a discussion. I moderated the session where four representatives from different european countries presented one high rise each. While some things differ regarding fire safety approaches, we also do have a lot in common. The most progressive design was done in the UK and in Sweden - where fire safety engineering is allowed to full extent. Germany, on the other hand, have prescriptive regulations for high rise buildings which means a more rigid design.


In the european standardization work is going on to establish standards on fire safety engineering. One of the  things we are looking right now is how fire safety engineering is used in connection to prescriptive regulations. This is the primary method being used in Sweden and we will be presenting this approach in the SFPE Conference on Performance Based Design in Hong Kong in June. 


The Society of Fire Protection Engineers (SFPE) is the largest international community gather fire safety professionals. A European group has recently been formed and two new national chapters has newly joined, namely the Benelux Chapter and the Polish Chapter. Since before, we have chapters in France, Spain, Italy and Sweden. And the door is open for more chapters. With SFPE Europe, it will be easier to find common ground on important aspects such as education, certification, policy-making and regulation.


With all these signs, all these projects going, I'm confident that an interesting road lies ahead of us. We've seen the big eurocodes project on structural safety of constructions being implemented after thirty years of collaboration. Hopefully it won't take that long time for the area of fire safety. With a common european approach we will eventually be able to have a more open market with regards of fire safety products and services. It won't be easy, of course, but that's where we're heading.


Both the european standardization, SFPE Europe and national chapters needs active members - feel free to contact me if you're interested and I'll tell you who to talk to. Grab the opportunities ahead and be part of the action!


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