Fire Science Show
Fire Science Show
181 - Regulatory regimes with Vincent Brannigan
I just drove 500 km to have a conversation with Professor Vincent Brannigan from the University of Maryland, a very unique expert who combines law with fire engineering. In this discussion, we go into the complexities of building codes and fire safety, comparing traditional design methods (prescriptive) with performance-based designs (and all the stuff in between them). Through anecdotes and historical fire incidents, we highlight the impact of these systems on societal safety, economic development, and international trade. Vincent's unique background in both law and technology provides a rich perspective on how fire safety regulations have evolved to meet contemporary challenges.
In the episode, we explore the ongoing shift from politically validated regulations to those grounded in technical knowledge. This transition parallels developments in fields like medicine, necessitating a higher level of precision and expertise in ensuring public safety. We also tackle the thorny issue of global standardization, examining how experiential knowledge and political influences shape fire safety laws worldwide.
Finally, the episode dives deep into the challenges of balancing innovation and compliance in building safety. With examples from the world of hotels, airports and tall buildings, we discuss the role of engineers and regulators in navigating complex safety landscapes. Historical case studies, like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, serve as poignant reminders of the stakes involved. Listen in for a thought-provoking exploration of risk analysis, regulatory negotiations, and the constant evolution of fire safety standards as we seek to protect lives and foster innovation.
Thank you to the SFPE for recognizing me with the 2025 SFPE Fire Safety Engineering Award! Huge thanks to YOU for being a part of this, and big thanks to the OFR for supporting me over the years.
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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.
Hello everybody, welcome to the Fire Science Show. What happens when two passionate engineers meet together? Well, of course, a discussion happens, and if those two engineers have strong opinions at the subject and have perhaps argued about the subject a few times online, you can bet that the discussion is quite interesting. And that's what happened to me. I've learned that Professor Rennigan is coming to Europe, and what I did? I booked a train, I went to Berlin and argued with him and recorded this argument. Well, actually it's a nice discussion and Vincent is a really, really nice guy. I loved discussing with him and I loved him as a person and experiencing a little bit of contrast from our LinkedIn interactions. But anyway, I of course, took my microphones with me and I've turned this into a podcast episode.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:This is not truly an interview, but more like a real discussion between two engineers, and the theme of this discussion are our regimes in how our building codes operate, from performance based, or how Vincent calls them, traditional design, to performance-based design. What is the technical validation, what is a political validation, what higher purpose those codes serve, and what's the relation to the society, to safety, to economic prosperity, trade, whatever. I think it's a very interesting discussion that brings out a lot of context of how our codes and laws were built and we, as fire safety engineers, were deemed to follow them. So not that we have a choice, but from this episode you'll learn why you don't have a choice. It's full of anecdotes, full of historical examples of fires, full of very interesting insight and it's just a fun episode. I love when you can talk about very serious, difficult topics and law in the construction industry is definitely not an easy topic to talk about in a fun and engaging way. So I am sure you will enjoy this episode a lot way. So I am sure you will enjoy this episode a lot. I would easily claim that spending five hours back and forth on the train was well worth this discussion and meeting Vincent in person, and I really hope you will enjoy this episode as much. Let's spin the intro and jump into the episode.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Welcome to the Firesize Show. My name is Wojciech Wigrzyński and I will be your host. This podcast is brought to you in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Ofr is the UK's leading fire risk consultancy. Its globally established team has developed a reputation for preeminent fire engineering expertise, with colleagues working across the world to help protect people, property and environment. Established in the UK in 2016 as a startup business of two highly experienced fire engineering consultants. The business has grown phenomenally in just seven years, with offices across the country in seven locations, from Edinburgh to Bath, and now employing more than a hundred professionals. Colleagues are on a mission to continually explore the challenges that fire creates for clients and society, applying the best research experience and diligence for effective, tailored fire safety solutions. In 2024, ofr will grow its team once more and is always keen to hear from industry professionals who would like to collaborate on fire safety futures. This year, get in touch at OFRConsultantscom.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Hello everybody, I am joined here today by Professor Vincent Brannigan from University of Maryland. Hello, vincent, nice to meet you. Hello, hello Nice to have you on the show. Unusually for the Fire Science Show, we are live at Berlin. Vincent was kind enough to invite me to Germany while he's staying in here. So, vincent, what brings you back to Germany? Actually, that must be an interesting story.
Vincent Brannigan:Well, I first lectured in Germany in 1982 at Humboldt in Berlin in essentially scientific evidence used in the law. I then was a visiting researcher at the University of Frankfurt in 1984. And I've been here a number of times ever since as a docent in Munich and so forth. All in the field of technology and law and some in the field of fire specifically.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:I'm born in 1985, so you have a longer track of a career in academic in Germany than I'm alive. Well, vincent, that's a hell of academic career. And I must say I know you most recently from our interesting interactions on LinkedIn and you are a person of very strong opinions and I kind of enjoy arguing with you on LinkedIn. Anyway, one aspect of these arguments that we are having comes back to your law experience. So maybe first you could introduce us like what's your background, because I know it's a very interesting background.
Vincent Brannigan:My undergraduate degree was in the history of technology, with a thesis on the Nuremberg war crimes trials, where I studied the development of new technology and how the legal system captures it, in that case in international law dealing with submarine warfare. I then studied law at Georgetown, again focusing on technology and law. But I had the good fortune I'm second generation fire. My father was a fellow with the Society of Fire Protection Engineers, frank Rennigan, author of the well-known books on building construction for the fire service, for the fire service. So I was given an offer to work at the National Bureau of Standards, later NIST, as an engineering technician, because I'd worked in theater, I'd been a theatrical construction manager and then stage manager, and they asked me well, could I build things? I said I could build anything that only has to last three days. And Dan Gross said that's all right, we burn it on the second.
Vincent Brannigan:And so they hired me and they assigned me to their newest faculty member, the newest member of the NIST crew, jim Quinteri. So I was James Quinteri's engineering technician and he taught me everything I know about engineering. But what a great teacher. So I ran the E162 radiant panel, I ran the smoke chamber, I ran a number of other tests and worked on the Armstrong what was then the Armstrong flooring radiant panel with Jim. Just basically I'm the technician he's doing all the thinking but learning a great deal about how standards were developed, test methods were developed and what the problems were from very good people and burning a lot of Christmas trees and other things along the way.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:They are still being burned as we speak. So that's a lovely tradition of EMD. I had Jim on the podcast. We were talking about the best era in this, the 1980s and all this stuff. So I imagine while he was having fun, you were in the back building this stuff and I'm amazed that a renowned professor takes pride of being someone's technician.
Vincent Brannigan:But that's a statement to I have to say, as a law student, being an engineering technician for Jim Quinteri was an honor.
Vincent Brannigan:So, I then was fortunate. I worked for the US Fire Prevention and Control Administration. I was the first legal person. I was the entire legal department when we had eight employees. I was the entire legal department when we had eight employees. And then I got my clerkship for the US Consumer Product Safety Commission doing fire safety cases for Judge Paul Pfeiffer At that time. And then the university made me an offer, joint with fire engineering and consumer protection, to do consumer protection law and I was then appointed full-time in consumer law but I kept working in fire as one of the areas of consumer protection.
Vincent Brannigan:So I published articles on retrospective codes and building regulation and a whole group of things on codes and code problems. In 1991, the university reorganized and my position was moved to engineering. John Bryan invited me to come. I was already a full professor to engineering. They approved me as a professor and that's how I ended up as a lawyer, as a professor in engineering. I always explained I was a professor in engineering, not of engineering, and that kept them happy. But they even the faculty of engineering elected me as chair of the promotion and tenure committee because they thought, since I knew nothing about engineering, I would be very fair to all the departments, I would not be prejudiced and I would write the rules and I could be. I was a fair chair. I thought it was a good arrangement. So that's pretty funny. Fair chair, I thought it was a good arrangement. That's pretty funny. But I've worked on codes and standards and law for all areas of technology, not merely fire, but it's all the same kind of questions.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Starting with submarines and in fire safety systems and a hefty dose of medical stuff in the way. A very interesting background. I wish I can summarize my career in 20 years like that. I still have to do submarines, maybe copters, I don't know choppers.
Vincent Brannigan:Oh, I do. The V-22 Osprey, the rotorcraft, yes, no problem.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Nice. Anyway, you've mentioned the regulatory systems, and that's one thing that I really wanted to discuss with you. How do the regulatory systems work from the perspective of someone with a law background?
Vincent Brannigan:Okay, fundamentally, we're dealing with social control. How does social control work? Regulatory law is about social control, and I taught courses in the interaction of regulation and product liability, because we do both social control through direct regulation and through holding people responsible afterwards financially and integrate those together. I actually taught one of the very first courses in the integration of these two areas, and that's what I built my career on was the integration of liability and regulation in social control, and my particular interest was new technology and innovation.
Vincent Brannigan:How do we capture new tech? And the submarines in World War II were a new technology. World War I and World War II was a new technology, and so I developed a theoretical approach, which I refined over the years, as to how societies capture new technologies in the regulatory system, and it's a very sloppy, messy, difficult process, as we know repeatedly and we've seen it over and over again in fire as an example of where it's very difficult to get your hands on new technologies before they cause a great deal of problems. To use another one that we're having today lithium batteries on the one side and drones on the other side, that these are all new technologies that all of a sudden the legal system is confronted with and we're not quite sure how to deal with it. So I have explored this in every different technology that I can, trying to draw from one area into another to better understand how we deal with new technologies.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:We'll come back to the innovation later. I know you had this amazing talk at University of Edinburgh. That was like a long time ago and people are still discussing it, but here where I would like to go is a comparison of the performance-based regime and prescriptive regime, which is an interesting thing. You know I'm involved with SFP and introducing performance-based engineering is something that we largely support in here and I also like have to my understanding, a full performance-based regime in smoke control in Poland, whereas I'm fully prescriptive in any other aspect of fire safety, and it creates a lot of challenges which perhaps are differently understood by an engineer who's doing that and differently understood by authority, by firefighters, by the society at all. So first let's try to define the regimes of CBD and prescriptive base.
Vincent Brannigan:I tend to use the word traditional rather than prescriptive. I realize because many traditional codes, particularly in the United States, were very flexible in certain areas. They did not prescribe the precise thing to be done. They required approval of a particular way of doing it. Best, very small example fire lanes for the fire department. There's no prescription, there's no rule. The fire marshal comes and says the fire lane will be here and that's it. They make a decision and an adjudication right there. So there's no prescription, there's no rule, it's just a decision made by the fire marshal. So I'm using the word traditional codes for these Prescriptive codes, for what most people call prescriptive codes.
Vincent Brannigan:And again, many performance codes. Any performance code that has a deemed to satisfy solution, where someone politically says this will satisfy the performance code, that's a traditional code. That is not a performance code. Once the state says you can comply by doing this, that's a prescriptive or traditional code. There's nothing about it, that's performance. So we have this mix and poor language. That drives us crazy sometimes. Now to get to the critical difference between the two. Again, the language is very sloppy.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:You had a point yeah, I had a point that in some of your works I've also read an interesting thought that if you have a performance-based regime but you define what tests are you performing and what's the expected outcome of the test, that's a prescriptive regulation, just with additional points, right?
Vincent Brannigan:Right, right, in other words. That's why it's very difficult to say this is a pure prescriptive code, this is a pure performance code. They have elements in both of them. The more important difference for my purposes as a lawyer is how we validate these as laws and traditional codes and I use the word traditional instead of prescriptive were laws. They were passed by the legislature and they were politically validated, that is, the legislature using its political power, which, and you know, in Europe, of course we can go back to monarchies, we can go back to the Roman Empire, doesn't matter, doesn't matter what generates it, but it's valid because the political structure says this is a valid law. And they're very German, very continental, but also in England. I mean, there's no question that the traditional codes were political decisions by the legislature using their power. Political decisions do not have to be technically correct, technically valid or even technically intelligent. There's no requirement at all that the political people make sense. So we're lucky if they did, but in many cases they didn't. But all prescriptive, traditional codes were politically validated.
Vincent Brannigan:The proposal in the 1990s was that engineering had matured enough that we could move. Now where do we move to? Was that engineering had matured enough that we could move Now? Where do we move to?
Vincent Brannigan:In the 19th century, first in medicine, then in certain other areas, they moved to what we will call technical validation. That is a group of technical people, physicians that could later be engineers in a certain area. It was just a term that a problem had technical solutions and we could trust a technical body of some sort to write the rules and regulations and society would enforce. They would delegate to the technical body the ability to control certain things, and this was a slow process. In medicine it all derived from medical guilds where to become a physician you had to satisfy the local physicians that you were a physician and finally the state, in about 1900, took it over and licensed physicians. But who did they license? Whoever the physician said were good physicians. So this was technical validation and it requires technical regulators and it requires a high level of technical expertise and a certain amount of uniformity in order to make technical validation work. So to license engineers to build buildings, for example, who did you ask? You asked other engineers, but the state put their stamp on the engineer and said you are qualified to build buildings, and that is technical validation.
Vincent Brannigan:Problem with technical validation is it doesn't have the flexibility of political validation and in general, technical validation is expected to be right. The very first examples of technical validation in the United States were boiler explosions and the boiler code and giving the mechanical engineers the ability to come up with a code for boilers and technical validation. You have a very high level of expectation of technical correctness on the part of the field that is given this authority. So this is a constant stress back and forth. Airplanes were originally, there was a legal structure for them and then they went to technical validation very early because they were so complex. Technical validation can break down. The Titanic was technically validated and so that's no guarantee in a technical validation that you, if you think about it, they're very rarely correct.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:And anyway, I had this impression that the validation also comes from statistics or the collective experience of a group of people. We know that this solution is safe because we learned to live with it and it always has been safe.
Vincent Brannigan:And this is the medical model, this is where this actually comes from medicine that the first licensed profession, where it was just handed over to them, were physicians and surgeons, because they were the ones who operated on people and either people lived or died and they were trusted to look at other doctors and say, yes, you're qualified to be a doctor, We'll trust your decisions. So, yes, this is empirical, developmental knowledge. There's no question that and I have actually other papers long ago on this particular problem, because this is what I lectured on at Humble in 82, is the difference between experiential and theoretical knowledge and how the legal system captures it. So, as they say, how do you become a gondolier? You're the son of a gondolier and all the other gondoliers say you're a good gondolier, that's how you become a gondolier in Venice as a practical matter.
Vincent Brannigan:So, experiential knowledge the problem is in fire safety. Because of our risk structure, our experiential knowledge is very limited in certain areas, simply because fires don't occur that often and big fires don't occur that often and we can build 100 buildings before one burns down. So our experience is not very deep. To use an example that I routinely say people talk about oh, we have 1,500 reactor years of experience in the nuclear power program? No, we don't. We have 30 years of reactor experience, repeated 150 times or whatever In other words.
Vincent Brannigan:we don't have 100 years experience on any reactor. We don't know what's going to happen 100 years down the line on reactor, so people lump kinds of experience together in a way that is not very useful from a regulatory perspective. So these two divisions once we try to say something is going to be technically correct rather than politically correct. It takes both statistical analysis. It takes technical analysis and it takes looking at the qualifications of the people out there who are making decisions.
Vincent Brannigan:The argument over single stairways in buildings Excellent example of where I just don't think the people proposing single stairways and building have done the homework that they need to do to figure out whether or not the risk is the same. So they have instead tried to use political pressure and get it approved through the political side rather than through the technical side and rather than submitting it to a group of fire experts for their opinion, they get some politicians who are funded by builders to say, yes, we'll have single stairway buildings. And this is where it gets very interesting. If you submitted the issue to a group of high qualified fire people, what would they say?
Wojciech Węgrzyński:But you can revert the problem and we also have a lot of requirements that are just completely ridiculous, like why do we need four-hour firewalls in offices? Just because it's a skyscraper, like the fires will not know that it's on the 30th floor versus 12th floor and it's not going to burn twice longer. It's conservation of mass and energy. And you know we also have those stupid laws that don't lead you anywhere, but they're required because the political force enforced them.
Vincent Brannigan:You have a fire extinguisher behind you. Yeah, but they're required because the political force enforced them. You have a fire extinguisher behind you. Yeah, what a useless piece of equipment that is Well.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:it's good to hold doors.
Vincent Brannigan:Yeah, yeah, yeah Do you hold fire, doors open with the fire extinguisher?
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Yeah.
Vincent Brannigan:In other words, I use fire extinguishers as an example of a ridiculous technology.
Vincent Brannigan:We don't want unprotected people and the fire extinguisher companies go crazy whenever I say this yes, the question of four-hour rated walls in an office building deals with safety of firefighters. There's no question that if a fire gets away from them, they have to be able to evacuate the building. So firefighter safety is a separate and again very close to my father's heart. So sometimes things which look ridiculous from an occupancy point of view are really a firefighter safety point of view. I actually handled a code for agricultural buildings that was a firefighter safety code, strictly firefighter safety in agricultural buildings, because nobody cared if the building itself burned down, but they cared whether the firefighter died, but they cared whether the firefighter died. So that's the issue. But I'll fully agree with you that there are parts of codes that I stare at and I say what was in their heads.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:You may not have this experience in the US, but in the developing countries, which Poland has been some time ago, and now there are many other countries who have the same collective experience, where, when you try to develop a new safety system for your country starting from basically nothing or you maybe have a system that you want to entirely replace we tend to take, you know, some regulations from US, some regulations from Germany, some regulations from European Union, some British.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:We mix a hefty dose of safety margins on top of that. We end up with a ridiculous regulatory system where a collection of political decisions from different parts of the world becomes something that is believed to be a technical standard in here. Because when we took a law from Germany, nobody questioned the you know capability of German engineers to say that this is a good solution, like no one questioned whether this is a political decision or a technical decision. We just took it assuming it's a technical decision and it's going to lead us to safety. And this creates this Frankenstein of a system in which safety margins add on each other and you end up with very difficult.
Vincent Brannigan:Even in political systems. A good political system relies on technical advisors. Yes, and there's no question. Our system in the United States very interesting because the political decisions rely on essentially officials and technical people like NFPA and their building codes. In other words, we have consensus standards, organizations which are well recognized as broad-based technical groups not perfect those issues, and then those are reviewed by the political people to say, well, did the technical people really take a hard look at this? And if they took a hard look at that, they adopt the code as a standard without a great deal of modification. The National Electrical Code of the United States is viewed as a the technical people write it, they send it to the states and say you want to do anything different. They say no, we'll take it that way.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:But does it mean that the state tells you for designing electrical system you're supposed to follow the electrical code, or it tells you the electrical system in the building shall fulfill this requirement?
Vincent Brannigan:Okay, specifically, the National Electrical Code is a NFPA document. So when we talk about it, so the National Electrical Code is a recommended model code, virtually every state, with the exception of a few special hurricane problems, adopts the National Electrical Code unchanged. Okay, they don't put any changes in, but it becomes the political decision of the state To enforce the code.
Vincent Brannigan:To adopt and enforce the code, and so that way you can go all over the United States and the electrical systems are the same. And so that way you can go all over the United States and the electrical systems are the same. So when we have a power failure, for example, we can import electricians from every other state to put the power back together. Because this is not the consumer side. The industrial side of power is essentially identical across the United States. So when we had a power failure in Maryland, for example, people came from eight other states power crews to repair the power systems and they were perfectly able to just slot right in and repair power systems because it's all the same.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:And what would you say about the European system where we have our own standardization body, cen, which basically standardizes everything, which basically standardize everything, but in the space of construction product market or buildings, because in Europe anything related to fire safety is in the end the market regulation those are not required until directly mentioned in your country code. So if there's like a standard for smoke control ventilators EN 1211, part three there's a code that tells you what the ventilator shall do, how do you test the ventilator, what are the characteristics? But until the characteristics are mentioned in the Polish code, which would say oh, the ventilators have to have class F400 two hours based on this standard, until this little clause is put into my law, it's just guidance.
Vincent Brannigan:We have the same issue with states. I will say I was first traveling in Europe in 1977 when the trains didn't run on the same electricity in different countries and the only trains that could cross the border were diesels. That's a funny problem. In other words, when I first was in London, you bought an iron and then you went to the plug department of the department store to get the plug that would fit the electrical company that you worked with. We had no, there was no. I was astonished by this because the United States this was all standardized by 1915 and no state Now states in the United States adopt building codes and whatnot. No state in the United States would adopt a different electricity.
Vincent Brannigan:It just wouldn't be done you know, and so we were used to a much higher level of industry-developed, government-bought standardization. Everybody you know so. And the life safety code is very similar. It's industry and government working together creating the life safety code and governments mostly adopting it pretty much the way it exists Now.
Vincent Brannigan:Maryland other than the state of Maryland which is right outside Washington, just to the north, the same population as Austria, so you know it's five, six million people and we are a very fire safety-oriented state. So we have more sprinkler requirements. We have more. We had the first smoke detector requirements at houses, we had everything, for fire safety is just a little bit more advanced in Maryland than many other places. So people go to Maryland and look at how much it costs and what we did, and then they sprinkler other buildings and other things. For example, the university. All our buildings are sprinkler. We have no unsprinklered building at the university. Even the oldest ones are all retrofitted, and this is true through state buildings, throughout the state. We don't have unsprinklered buildings and so therefore we can be flexible on other code requirements because the buildings are sprinklered. As my father always said, sprinklers give you academic freedom at the university because no matter how stupid the professors are, they can't burn the building down, you know so there's something in that.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Anyway, I would like to move this discussion further a little bit. So, in what you've described so far, you could have a political system that basically takes a technical system and makes it the system that you've pursued. So the political power can tell you OK, there's a national electrical code, there's an FPA code for this, for that life safety code. You just follow that, you're good, let's move to the fully performance-based design. Where you would not have an FPA code for performance-based design, you would have someone telling you like in Europe, we would have it defined the fire shall not spread between buildings or the evacuation routes shall be sufficiently free of smoke.
Vincent Brannigan:in case of a fire, the goal for performance-based codes is written in the model code. There's a performance-based version of the life safety code. Some states don't adopt it, some states do, we did. The performance-based version doesn't say let's see, it varies from reasonably specific to more general. But, for example, garages and houses. Even in the performance based code there has to be a continuous firewall between the garage and the house to prevent a car fire from spreading to the house.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:What it's made out of, what it is, I mean it's like a one-hour rated wall, but is it a requirement that the wall of certain characteristics shall be there or you should provide there is no spread Like could you use? A water current instead.
Vincent Brannigan:No, I'm saying that even in the performance code there are bits of it where they were not sure if they could show by performance, and this is just specific garages and single-family homes.
Vincent Brannigan:you know, in order to protect people, they kept so even in the performance codes. It references certain parts of the other code, for example the width of stairwells, exit stairways, because there are things in which standardization is viewed as critical, that people have to recognize what exit signs look like. You know these kind of things. Anything that deals with consumer standardization of reaction to fire is much more likely to be traditional or prescriptive. We're not going to wander around on other things and, on the other hand, sprinkler systems, we're very flexible with systems as long as they meet certain basic standards. But there you know. So these are the plastic pipes and the copper pipes.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:I always felt that the sprinkler system is the most ridiculous end of prescriptiveness. Like I was contemplating then when I was recently in New Zealand, I was swimming in a swimming pool and above my head I had sprinklers and I'll tell you why. Yeah.
Vincent Brannigan:I was in a hotel in Utah that was being renovated. They drained the swimming pool, filled it full of carpets and other things for the renovation built the biggest fire hazard I ever saw, but it was sprinkler. So it's because, because people can drain a swimming pool and use it for something else. That's why it's sprinkler.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Okay, well, that kind of makes sense. When I was discussing this with my colleagues at New Zealand, they told me ah, wojciech, you know what? It's sometimes not worth the argument, it's cheaper to put it.
Vincent Brannigan:Because they might use it for something else, and this may be what we get to later, but I'll give it a moment right now. One of the things about performance codes is they take more regulation. In other words, in prescriptive codes the assumptions are built into the code traditional code but performance codes, if you say this is our fire load, then you have to specify the fire load in a way that it can be enforced and people come in and do the enforcement and that's why you know there was sprinklers over the or sprinklers in any other unusual Like okay, it kind of makes sense what you say, but my experience is different.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:In Poland, the performance-based code for, or the performance-based requirement for, smoke control is literally one sentence you should have sufficiently free of smoke escape exits and then it's open to anyone who wants to pursue that and we'll get to the competency of people in a second.
Vincent Brannigan:And when? Let me ask you the question when you put in a proposal, then that gets if you will stamped and approved and you have to build according to that proposal and that says what the fire load will be. And then you have to have a fire load, fuel load discussion and then that has to be competently regulated to make sure you don't exceed the fire load.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Yeah, and then that's a challenge. It goes further, because you also have to define what are your tenability criteria, what's your exposure, what's?
Vincent Brannigan:your evacuation.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:It's an entire process which is unregulated. It's just based on on, it's just based on the best practices, whatever the best practices are. So I, I I kind of resonate what you say, because I see that in my own country.
Vincent Brannigan:If you, think of a theater again. Yeah, think of the venting of a theater in the old days. You know, we had the theater that I was stage manager of was built in 1912. And we had a fire curtain and we had a water curtain backing up the fire curtain and we had roof vents so that what burned on the stage would go up and people could exit out when they went to open theaters. The question of how much combustible material you're going to have on the stage became really important and it was unregulated, as you say, and it was unregulated, as you say.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:But the question I had in mind is, like we often, even in this space of performance-based design in smoke control, but more commonly in Poland, when you would be designing a building that's like very innovative or very big, beautiful, large building that escapes the code, you would have to show that your performance-based solution does not work worse than the code solution, some sort of equivalency of safety and I know in the UK they would do it a lot with the smoke control. They would show that the smoke control solution is not worse than the BRE system and because the original solution was a political decision.
Vincent Brannigan:I find that approach to be nonsense.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:That's the full circle in my head, like, okay, if I was comparing to a technical system where a group of scientists would come up with a solution. We knew throughout the history and numerous examples of real fires that it actually provides a level of safety, I'm game with that. But if it was a king's order that the wall shall be?
Vincent Brannigan:Euroclass B. This was the Titanic. I've gone through the Titanic in great details. The interesting point was they said we don't need so many lifeboats because we have wireless and we can call for help to another ship. The only problem was they did not require that the Titanic know where it is. There was no requirement that the Titanic's wireless or any other ships be manned 24 hours. There was no requirement that the Titanic know its exact location. So when the Titanic hit the iceberg, they didn't know where they were within close enough distance at night for a ship to come rescue them. They were at least 25 miles off.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:And so this was the problem was a political decision was made based on totally inadequate technical basis, but anyway if you want to assume some level of equivalency between two solutions, how do you first define a level of safety of a solution? How do you demonstrate it?
Vincent Brannigan:Of the existing one. You have to do the risk analysis. This goes to our risk question. You have to do a thorough risk analysis of code-compliant buildings and what are the possible failure modes, because that's what you're looking for. Where could the code-compliant building go bad? And this is what I'm saying with the Titanic. The Titanic was a code-compliant building but it wasn't safe. So you can have a code-complying building that's not safe because that particular damage has not occurred yet. And so look at the Kobe earthquake, where earthquake Japanese know more about earthquake codes than anybody and code-compliant buildings and highways and everything collapsed because this earthquake was different from the others. Look at Fukushima. At Fukushima they said we have a code-compliant tsunami wall which was not big enough and they put the generators in the basement rather than up in the air, which brought the entire nuclear power plant down. I mean, this is the problem with saying, well, we're equivalent to code compliance, maybe we're equivalent to stupidity, yeah, but if someone wants to design, is it the engineer that should seek that?
Wojciech Węgrzyński:or you would still argue that it's the regulator. Ajj, Whose role is it? It's?
Vincent Brannigan:both ways. The engineer has to show that they have done state-of-the-art risk analysis, real risk analysis that really complies with the state-of-the-art, and then the regulator, who's operating for the state, has to decide whether we should take that risk. And that's Brandenburg Airport. That was the issue at Brandenburg Airport. The design was terrible. Brandenburg Airport the design was terrible. The design was, I mean, the fundamental design was we will suck smoke down and blow it out down. We will suck smoke down. Now, what building has ever been built that sucked smoke down? Maybe in Australia, and this was a gigantic building and so therefore, it was all blue smoke and mirrors, it was all faking it and finally, at the end of the day, without tests that showed it worked, the regulators wouldn't take it. Because the weakness in the German system was they didn't have to have code approval when they built the building. They could go for code approval when the building was built. We never allow that. That's something we never do.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Yeah, in Poland you would also have to have. Like depends how strictly you follow the code and how complicated the building is. So if you go a complicated building adhering to the code, the process would be a simple approval of the expert. But if you want to derogate, there would be a very extensive process of negotiating with the authorities how much you can derogate.
Vincent Brannigan:Right, and if your building is a novel building, a truly novel building that's not contemplated by the code, we'd have the same problem, even if you're in technical compliance, if your building just doesn't look like anything we've seen before. These were the first covered football stadiums and you have 40,000 people in a football stadium, 50,000 people. They said we're going to have to take a deep look at this one and they did simulations. In some cases they built quite large models to see if the air smoke control would work and things like that.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:But I would tell you a funny story of where this goes also very wrong. So we had buildings in Poland, so every time you wanted to deviate from some requirement, you would have to give something in exchange to provide this equality. Like, let's say, you would not want to have four-hour firewalls, instead you would do some sort of higher spec sprinkler system or voice alarm or whatever you know. You would just, you know, compensate one deviation from the requirement with some additional system. But you know what happened They've run out of the systems to put into the building. The building had everything you could put, like every single technical solution you could have in the building already had, and they wanted to do another deviation and we've run out of solutions.
Vincent Brannigan:This is the issue of wooden buildings. Okay, this is an issue with wooden buildings. This is the issue of wooden buildings. Okay, this is an issue with wooden buildings. The question is, if you put in every state-of-the-art fire safety system in a wooden building, is it still safe? And there are some buildings where we don't think so and we just decide that's a risk we're not going to take.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:But when is it safe enough? Is it ever safe enough?
Vincent Brannigan:Eventually, that's a regulatory decision. Yeah, in other words, no one has a right to build a building and so, therefore, every building has to satisfy the. Now, if you think the regulator is being unreasonable, we have ways to appeal that, and, yes, we do do that. And if you think but, for example, I'm just trying to We've just had buildings where they just sat down and said, no, you can't do that. Whatever you're doing there and here's the most common that we argue with right now these are wooden buildings on top of a concrete platform. All right, so you build a four-story garage and then you build a wooden building on top of it. Now, the question is how does the fire department get there? And the fire department just said we can't fight the fire in that wooden building, so you have to have a wooden building that completely fights its own fire, which nobody can have.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:There's a question of a very, very long discussion of burnout. You know that the building shall survive burnout and I had this funny discussion with colleagues that the more you try to define burnout, the more stupid it becomes, because burnout is burnout. The moment you start to define it, oh it's when temperatures decrease or where flaming ignition stops, or you know that's not burnout, that's just burnout with additional clauses that makes you comply with it. It's kind of funny. But still again, the question, like at the higher level, is is burnout necessary for us or for the society to accept the risk? And the society was never asked about it.
Vincent Brannigan:Well, actually they have, and the Supreme Court has wrestled with the case in different ways. We don't always call it burnout. I understand that we don't always call it burnout, I understand that. But for example, until the World Trade Center building number seven not the Twin Towers, the other building we'd never had the collapse of a high-rise building in the United States due to fire. So we're pretty good idea. We might have been overbuilt but we knew what burnout was. And the Twin Towers were a unique problem because they were the world's largest load-bearing walls. So we're very sensitive to collapse and fire in those kind of buildings. Homes and wooden you know we have lots of. I have a wooden building, you know. We know they collapse already. When the fire starts you just want to get the people out, there's no question. But the famous Ash Building that was the Triangle Shirtwaist fire back in 1912, the building still stood. They rebuilt the building. You know it was no great problem.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Within those technical systems, those regimes. Either it'd be performance based design regime, either it'd be performance based that just calls clauses of codes, either it be a prescriptive system. How do you feel the competencies play a way? Because I also feel that we sometimes regulate how things should be done, but we leave a massive blank space in who should do them and what the quality of those people should be.
Vincent Brannigan:Oh yeah, Well, of course, being at the University of Maryland, we were the producer of fire protection engineers in the United States.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:And still are.
Vincent Brannigan:I told my students, you know the 30 of them, you know freshman class. I'd say, look around. You'll know these people for the rest of your career, because that's all there is.
Vincent Brannigan:And now that we're training people and, I hope, doing a good job around the world, people and I hope doing a good job around the world. And there are some programs I mean I helped found the program at Scotland that has now been closed down, but they were doing a good job. You know, you can. The number of trained and qualified people who can at least do fairly conventional stuff is quite high. Then the need for people who can really do the high thought high. Then the need for people who can really do the high thought, introspective work. That's a huge issue In unusual buildings, unusual sizes, unusual materials.
Vincent Brannigan:And again, right at the moment, I think our greatest challenge is the conceptual work in wooden buildings. And, for example, I realize they're not the same, but if you go to Yellowstone National Park, a beautiful national park in the United States, the gigantic wooden buildings there, they have exterior sprinklers Right To protect against wildfires. Now they're dry pipe. You know winter design sprinklers but they have exterior sprinklers and we may need that on certain wooden buildings. You know to say, as you say, a water curtain. It might work.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Another interesting twist in those regimes is imagine we have you don't have to imagine we had those, but imagine we have a political system. Some political force put a requirement in place and some years later we find it completely inadequate to the real fire risk. How do we deal with the building stock that we have? And is there a way forward, like how do we adjust the entire technical society to?
Vincent Brannigan:In 1983, I wrote a law review article on applying new laws to existing buildings retrospective fire safety codes and I tried to examine this as of then, a long time ago. And basically, what you have to do is a very sophisticated risk analysis as to what things you have to change in order to get a significant reduction in risk, and what we found in Operation San Francisco. Now I'm jumping forward to 1989.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:What was Operation San Francisco?
Vincent Brannigan:It was 1989, operation San Francisco. We'd had two bad hotel fires. Okay, so Bill Marriott, who was? I don't know if you know the name, he was the head of Marriott Hotels, but a very, very, but a very well-known Mormon very very religious man had a meeting and one of my father's students was his safety director and he said are our hotels safe?
Vincent Brannigan:And Sonny Scarf said our hotels comply with all the codes. And Bill, who was a real humanitarian, he said I didn't ask that. He said are our hotels safe? He says these people are our guests, we shouldn't kill that. I said are our hotels safe? He says these people are our guests, we shouldn't kill them.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:I mean, it's very simple.
Vincent Brannigan:So the Marriott Corporation put up $5 million and the federal government put up $5 million and they ran a series of fire tests in San Francisco in an old veterans hospital garage where they would build hotel rooms you know a model hotel room and try to come up with inexpensive, retrofit sprinkler systems for hotels. And they came up with designs which were inexpensive, functional, weren't perfect but were much better than what were there and they were installed in hotels all across the United States. Under the pressure that the federal government will not allow its employees to stay in an unsprinkled hotel, the Federal Fire Safety Act used the federal government's buying power to drive well, essentially all the non-sprinkled hotels, except for the rent-by-the-hour hotels you know out of business. So pretty much in the United States if you walk into a hotel it's fully sprinkled and the sprinklers they use sidewall heads and they I mean they could run the sprinkler and the sprinklers they use sidewall heads and they I mean they could run the pipes down. They were very cheap, but basically what they had the advantage.
Vincent Brannigan:I did my first risk analysis on this. I was the third speaker at Operation San Francisco. I followed Mayor Feinstein, later Senator Feinstein of California, and she talked about what a great fire department they had in San Francisco. I said, yes, I've been looking at your buildings and you need a great fire department because you must have the worst code in force. And I was with, unfortunately, I was with a woman lawyer from San Francisco and from the city. We went around looking at the buildings and I had her check every lady's room for sprinkler system. They weren't sprinkling the bathrooms and of all the places an arsonist will start a fire, it's bathrooms.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:We know this. This is an interesting take, but it's something technically feasible to add to the building. What if you have a combustible facade? Catastrophe.
Vincent Brannigan:Right right Unsolvable problems. Yes, we have unsolvable problems that we've torn buildings down.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:And this is also caused by, to some extent, the political system not understanding the technical systems.
Vincent Brannigan:We've torn down old schools, asbestos and fire safety. Oh yes, we've simply said these buildings have to go, and Britain has a problem with these aerated concrete right now in the buildings. So yes, we've certainly. We tore down buildings at the university that we could not improve, and so that's a risk. That's a good risk. Analysis says whatever you do, this building will never be safe.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:You use this a lot the risk analysis. How does a good risk analysis look and how does it fit into those regulatory regimes?
Vincent Brannigan:You have to. I don't do risk analysis. I examine risk analyses done by other people and what you have to do is you have to look at the magnitude of the greatest risk. I don't do risk analysis. I examine risk analyses done by other people and what you have to do is you have to look at the magnitude of the greatest risk and what is the most likely scenarios that can produce that greatest risk. We almost never design against the greatest risk. At the university, the greatest risk is a fuel truck running into the building, but it doesn't happen very often, so we have the equivalent from nuclear of maximum credible accident. So to give an example from my department, we had a new faculty member. We use heptane in the department and we normally get it a liter at a time or two liters at a time in metal safety cans, and he had ordered a 50-liter drum of heptane.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:I like that. That's nice, that's nice, that's nice.
Vincent Brannigan:And it arrived at my department chair saw it on the truck. Yeah, when berserk said get that out of here, take it off campus, we're not going to, we did. Our fire safety would not withstand a 50 gallon heptane drum, you know kind of thing, a 50-gallon heptane drum, you know kind of thing and your personal opinion.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:If you want to create safety for society, whatever however you would quantify safety, would you rather lean into prescriptive system based on technical, or you would rather drive into performance-based, with assuming competency of the designers?
Vincent Brannigan:Okay, Let me distinguish hazards for just a minute. Residential hazards, residences where people are doing all kinds of weird stuff. We have a pretty good idea of prescriptive codes, of how to make residential housing reasonably safe for almost anybody, and we sprinkle it in buildings. We put in alarms, we have multiple stairways. You know pretty much we're safe. We know if we do these things we can have a lot of other confusion and not very well. On our older buildings we used to. We did for self-closing doors, we did fire alarms, self-closing doors and a couple of things.
Vincent Brannigan:These are on garden apartments where people walk out and there's no elevators and it turned out, once you put in self-closing doors, even if they weren't fire doors, you got a lot of safety out of self-closers on doors, and so we can have prescriptive solutions that are designed for these repetitive, like hotels, hotel rooms. The hazard in every hotel room in the United States is very similar there's a bed, there's a little bit of luggage, there's a few chairs. That's your maximum, worst guest in a crazy state.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Yeah.
Vincent Brannigan:Where that is. You're almost always doing prescriptive solutions because or traditional solutions because they work and it's cheap, and you just do it all the same. Now we talk about assembly occupancies with a lot of people where they serve alcohol. That's where risk analysis and performance-based design comes makes a whole lot of sense. And then you get the weirdo buildings and we'll call Notre Dame the weirdo building. What made anyone think that because it was heavy timber they didn't have to do fire protection on the construction? It's insanity. I mean, you know, if you've got welders and cutters and roofing people, you need firefighters right there. Remember we were in the Doge's Palace. They had a permanent firefighting crew in Venice. Whenever it was open to the public, there were two firefighters with charge tooses ready to go in the building.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:However, for those buildings, the prescriptive may kill the building.
Vincent Brannigan:Yeah, you need a lot of thinking. Well, airports Airports clearly have to have performance thinking because the hazards vary. What happens? Because everything is changing. For example, there's a lot of fuel around and there's airplanes and for example, you have an airplane on fire next to the building. You're not going to solve that with a prescriptive solution, so I would put airports at the end. Or cruise terminals you know any of these kinds of things. You need very sophisticated fire protection and prescriptive codes are almost useless. Office buildings we find prescriptive codes work quite well. There's not a lot of equivalencies done. Everybody has enough exit stairs. They sprinkler the building. We have standpipes, we have fire alarms, you know.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Yeah, yeah, but offices are evolving. Like you would have open plan, you would have some stuff you would not have like 30, 40 years ago, right, but what we treat actually in most of our office buildings we treat them as every floor was open plan.
Vincent Brannigan:We don't assume there's any subdivision on the floor. So the whole floor is a fire unit, you know, and it's got.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Which actually kind of brings some interesting dynamics. If you introduce timber to that, like which is the worst case fire scenario, is really open plan worse than a compartment fire?
Vincent Brannigan:But we know that people want to move the walls around in offices, so, and then we tell the jokes. The jokes are well, that's a building full of lawyers. So you know, fire safety is not that important. I got that from the DC Fire Department.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Well, I think we can stop in this space. It was a very interesting discussion covering a lot of interesting technical concepts and legal concepts and the history, how were they implemented, and I guess it's an interesting lesson to anyone listening and thank you, thank you for that, and we'll probably continue in a while about the innovations.
Vincent Brannigan:I would just close by saying on September 11th now, my department that I was in had done the work on the earlier explosion and we knew a great deal about how weak that building was and I was just hoping, as I watched the building burning, that they were getting everybody out, because that was a very dangerous building and it's just simply horrifying to me some of the hazards that that building had that were not well recognized by people and we really owe people our best efforts on those kinds of things. The area that's getting a lot of attention right now is wildfires and urban congregations, and we have not fought that one out. That's a risk and now that's really demanding much more thinking. That has gone into it up to now.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:Yeah, you cannot. Energy generation, storage, distribution in buildings.
Vincent Brannigan:My problem as a lawyer is I have to wait for the technical people, I have to beat them to do the technical work. I can't do it, I don't do it. Well, thank you, vincent, so much, and see you shortly.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:And that's it, at least for this session. I've scheduled another discussion with Vincent about innovation, blind spots in fire safety engineering and how we apply laws to innovation in technology in general. That's a very much subject of his interest and professional lawyer and engineer career, so you can be looking forward to that one For this discussion. It was interesting to find out how he finds overly regulated performance based design as the same as a prescriptive based design. A takeaway for me is also the part at the end where we, whenever I ask him, where would you apply the pbd? And we build, or he's built, this very interesting uh hierarchy of of building complexities, from, you know, residential to hotels, offices, up to assemblies and and large airports and and cruise terminals. That's very interesting and if you think about it, it really makes sense that with the increasing complexity and the decreasing how to say it repeatability between the buildings in the built environment stock, you get more and more exposure to fire safety engineering and you need more specific concepts, while if you're building your stock buildings like run-of-the-mill residential ones, what you want is a model code. What you want is simple requirements that can be routinely done at large numbers, at large scales, in multiple buildings at the same time. So that would be it for the Fire Science Show episode.
Wojciech Węgrzyński:If you know of an interesting guest coming to Europe within a five-hour drive from where I am in Warsaw, poland, let me know, because I enjoy those in-person interviews a lot. It clearly creates a different dynamic in the interview. I hope you enjoy this approach as well and I'll try to deliver more of those. There's been a few in this year in the fire science show episode and I am liking them more and more. Anyway, thanks for being here with me in the fire science show. I'm on a mission to deliver high quality fire science to all of you, and that also includes opinions of important people in our industry also. Also when, when they are critical or perhaps even a little bit controversial, you'll find them here in the Fireside Show, your source of knowledge and your source of professional development in your fire career. Thanks for being here with me. See you here next Wednesday. Cheers, bye. Thank you.