Fire Science Show
Fire Science Show
183 - Innovation and fire safety with Vincent Brannigan
History repeats itself. A new thing is invented. We learn about it, understand it, and apply measures to capture its behaviour and regulate it. And then another new thing is invented. The measures we used start failing us, and the cycle repeats all over again.
It is not a story of fire safety; it is a story of humanity. Similar cycles can be observed in all aspects of technology. One could call them Innovation Blind Spots after Prof. Rein; in science, you could call them paradigm shifts after Prof. Kuhn. Regardless, these cycles are the frame we work in, and we need to learn to handle them.
In fire safety, they are often a cause of major disasters. In this podcast episode, I once again interview prof. Vincent Brannigan. Vincent has spent a large part of his career studying the limiting factors of innovation in fire science and its regulation.
This podcast is framed after a lecture Vincent delivered 15 years ago, which can be accessed here: https://www.fireseat.eng.ed.ac.uk/sites/fireseat.eng.ed.ac.uk/files/images/02-Brannigan.pdf
It is an engaging read, I recommend going through it after the podcast episode!
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, welcome to 2025,. Happy new year, everybody. Thanks for starting your year with me. I'm back with the podcast and I've promised you a good episode with Vincent Branigan on innovation in fire science. So here I am delivering this. I've connected with Vincent once again and recorded part 2 to what was published shortly before the Christmas, and that's what you're going to hear in a moment.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:But before we go, I would like to reflect on some things that happened at the end of the year. I've learned about the passing of Professor Jim Quintiere. That's very sad news for fire science overall. Professor Quintiere was definitely a role model, a true authority in the world of compartmental dynamics and fire science, a titan, a giant of the fire science. I don't know how to appropriately address Professor Quintiere, but important for me, he was a guest of the Fire Science Show. We had three episodes. It was such a joy to be able to talk and meet Quintiere for for those brief moments. I've only met him there's a few times when we were recording and, um, yeah, even though those were just few moments, I'll cherish them for for the rest of my life because, yeah, he was just such an inspiration. I'll definitely try to give proper tribute to Professor Quintieri later in the year in the podcast, but for now I just wanted to say that it made me very sad between the Christmas and the New Year. Other than that, the time was very nice and calm. I've relaxed, I've rested very well and now I'm ready to bring more fire science to you and in today's episode, as I've briefly mentioned, we're going to talk about innovation in fire science.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:Professor Branigan he's an expert on innovation. He did his master thesis on submarines as an innovation. He studied history of technology, so he has a very clever point of view on what innovation is and how innovation and technology work throughout the history of human civilization. And actually this unique perspective is brought in the context of fire safety in this podcast episode. An important note the inspiration for this talk, or even a framework for this talk, was a lecture Vincent gave like 15 years ago at Edinburgh. Talk was a lecture vincent gave like 15 years ago at edinburgh. I've been told about this lecture many times by many people, so I thought okay, if 15 years later, people are still discussing the lecture, it means it has been good and it actually was. And the paper that accompanied that lecture is listed in the show notes, so if you would like a written form of what's mainly said in the podcast, that's in the paper. In the interview, vincent gives more details, goes deeper, has some more fresh thoughts, because 15 years has passed, we have new examples. So I believe it's highly valuable to both read the paper and listen to this podcast episode, and I will not stop you from listening. Let's just spin the intro and jump into the episode.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:Welcome to the firesize show. My name is Wojciech Wegrzyński and I will be your host. This podcast is brought to you in collaboration with OFR Consultants, a multi-award-winning independent consultancy dedicated to addressing fire safety challenges. Established in the UK in 2016 as a startup business of two highly experienced fire engineering consultants, the business has grown phenomenally to eight offices across the country, from Edinburgh to Bath. 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 solution. 2025, there will be new opportunities to work with OFR. will grow its team once more and is keen to hear from industry professionals who would like to collaborate on 560 features this year. Get in touch at ofrconsultantscom.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:And now back to the interview on innovations. Hello, I'm joined today once again by Professor Vincent Brennigan. Hey, Vincent, good to have you back on the podcast once again. Hello, and now not separated by a table but by a few thousand kilometers, but still a pleasure to talk with you. And this podcast episode actually cannot start in any other way than mentioning our late Professor Jim Quintiere. Jim has passed away recently. It saddened me a lot. He was a guest in three Fire Science Show episodes, which were, for me, the highlights of the podcast. So I know that you have a history of working with Jim, so maybe you would like to say a few things about him.
Vincent Brannigan:Well, I have to say everything I know about fire testing that I use in my work in fire regulation. Fundamentally, I learned the basics from Jim Quintero. I had the good fortune. Fundamentally, I learned the basics from Jim Quinteri. I had the good fortune I was a law student at Georgetown and I got a job at the National Bureau of Standards. I was interviewed by Danny Gross I'm second generation fires, so they knew what a Brannigan was and he said to me what can you do? I said well, I was a stage manager. I can build anything that only has to last three days. And he said that's okay, we'll burn it on the second day. So they hired me and they assigned me to Jim Quinteri as his engineering technician and he was a little bit surprised. He had a law student as an engineering technician. But he found out I was not a complete idiot and I would learn anything and do anything he needed. And every single thing that I learned, one after another, jim Quintero and JQ explained to me in great detail.
Vincent Brannigan:My favorite story was I was running the E162 Radian panel and to get the results I was using a Burroughs adding machine and I had to do these equations on an adding machine and it was pretty awful. And Jake saw me struggling and he brought me an HP 35 calculator with and this is the joke it had reverse Polish notation. I had to learn reverse Polish notation TSC HP 35, but I wrote it all out on a long strip of paper from a grocery store you know cashier receipt and I wrote my programs out. He checked the programs that I had them right and we got the results much faster. But I would make anything he needed. I would go down to the machine shop and work with the people there and produce any device. We needed coolers for the gas analyzers, we were working on the floor and radiant panel and I just learned so much.
Vincent Brannigan:And then we kept in touch and eventually I got appointed in fire protection. I was first a adjunct faculty member in fire protection engineering. I went up through the ranks to full professor in consumer economics, teaching safety, and back to fire engineering at a campus reorganization and then Jim was brought into the department in fire engineering and the idea that I had the same rank of professor as Jim Quinteri was one of the most spectacular thoughts of my life. So of course I couldn't even approach his expertise, but it was kind of fun. And then we later were both professors emeritus. So he was a very close colleague and tremendously willing to tell me what I didn't know, which was lots of stuffbooks. You read his papers.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:You read his marbles models, everything MQH so on. That's the person I know. But also later, when I started making friends abroad, when I met people from Maryland, I've learned that he was just an amazing, funny, funny guy. He actually applied to my summer school this year. That was hilarious. Like of nowhere we get the email from Jim Quintere Are you willing to take a very old postdoc for your summer school on fire science? What a guy that was. Maybe I'll make a tribute to Jim Quintere episode eventually with some good stories, because I guess there is so many stories to be told.
Vincent Brannigan:Oh, there's lots more good stories All right?
Wojceich Węgrzyński:Well, let's leave that for the future and now let's try to focus for the topic that we've briefly mentioned in the previous podcast episode. So I wanted to talk about innovation blind spot innovation gaps. I'm not sure if it was you who came with the term innovation blind gaps. I've learned it from Guillermo Reyn. He's using it a lot. He also has a nice lecture on innovation and this terminology sticked with me. I like it a lot. Anyway, I know you've been researching submarines as an innovation, as an innovation tool. Was that your PhD master's?
Vincent Brannigan:Well, I can start from the beginning. When I was an undergraduate, I was a major fundamentally in the history of technology and very interested in law. I was going to go to law school and so I wrote my thesis on international law of submarines and how it was affected by developments in technology, and it had the grandiose title not grandiose work, but grandiose title of Law, morality and Power, a Study of the U-Boat in Two World Wars. And what I studied was how technological innovations occur within the legal system and how the society and the legal system try to grapple with innovations and the process by which they finally accept or reject the innovation or deal with it or don't deal with it as they move along. And just as a historical note, the lawyer, admiral Dönitz, who was the defendant at Nuremberg Kranzfuehler, was one of the most brilliant lawyers I've ever studied and his defense of Dönitz on the charge of illegal warfare was superb, including getting a letter from Chester Nemitz, the American admiral, who said he thought unrestricted submarine warfare was totally legal. You know, in other words, it was not a question of the United States also violated international law. It was a question that the United States believed it was not a violation of international law and that's why he was acquitted of all the charges related to submarine warfare. So I was fascinated by this process and while I was in law school I focused, as I started working on fire, on fire safety testing and technological innovation.
Vincent Brannigan:And the original example which I worked on with Jim Quintero at least he taught me about it was when they developed the original carpet test. They had a very simple test that would essentially distinguish between cotton carpet and wool carpet. Cotton carpet failed, wool carpet passed, no problem. Then nylon carpet was invented and nylon carpet failed if there was low-density nylon and passed if it was high-density nylon. Now nylon burns. So how is it that more flammable material made you pass the test and less flammable material made you fail the test? Well, it turned out, there was a threshold effect, the methamphetamine pill which they had chosen for the test.
Vincent Brannigan:Now you can think of the single burning item. It turned out there was a threshold effect. The methamine pill which they had chosen for the test now you can think of the single burning item, but it's real small had sufficient heat energy to ignite low-density nylon but not high-density nylon, because the phase change in the nylon absorbed all the heat. So the nylon was melting and it consumed the entire heat input, and then the nylon did none. So therefore they had a fire test that passed stuff that had near fire, near fuel, and this triggered my thinking and I started down the line of analyzing it, exactly the same way as the submarines, and what I came to the conclusion very quickly was that all fire tests that I could find and this is what I started teaching had this fundamental flaw not always the size of the fire, but there was something where the test was oriented to the technology that existed at the time the test was created and therefore was totally unsuited to any innovation in technology.
Vincent Brannigan:And this was a generic problem in all fire tests, and the way that we finally refined it now this took years was that very few fire tests are what I will call fundamental science. A bomb calorimeter is closest to fundamental science, but almost all other fire tests are some sort of abstraction of the fire hazard, some sort of ignition, some sort of measurement, and if you exceed those parameters, you have no idea how the material will respond. And this is what I later put in the article that you were referring to. That was the Edinburgh conference article in 2010. That was the culmination of about 15 years of work in that article, so the fact that it's still good doesn't bother me at all. I kept looking at various fire tests and what happens socially commercially is a test is developed and then the industry gets a vested interest in the test because they can then develop new products that get a good score in the test, even if they're garbage in reality.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:When you mentioned the nylon case I was working in my head because recently, like maybe five years ago, I've seen the exact same thing happen, repeat itself. So colleagues from UCLan University of Central Lancashire, they've published a paper I think it was in Chemosphere. I'm citing from that so I can be a little off, but basically the paper has shown that if you put a larger ignition source on a fire retardant mattress, I believe it's going to ignite. And it was just a paper. But then the industry replied to that paper very strongly in letters to editors that if they had used a smaller source of ignition, like the standard has foreseen, that the mattress would be perfectly safe and it will never ignite. And I'm like, wow, that's exactly the problem with fire safety today. Oh yeah, Like we're passing a test, not doing fire.
Vincent Brannigan:Well, if I tell you, when I was at NIST, at NBS, back in 1973, we had prison fires and they brought in fire retarded mattresses and the man was striking paper matches and dropping them on the thing, like 20 of them, showing it didn't ignite. And I said, gee, can I do that? Yeah, I was just a kid looking at that. He said sure. So I took out of my pocket. I had a little metal canister of what are called Ohio blue tip wooden matches, two inches long wooden matches that I used for igniting the A162. I struck one of them, threw it on the mattress and it exploded into flames. Danny Gross had to pull the sprinklers. We had a mattress in the mattress to put the fire out and he said get that crap out of here. So we this was. This is one of the examples. I've used it in class and so forth for years, so it's nothing new. They get a vested interest in a test, they know the threshold of the test and they can design a product around the test and this is a major problem.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:And the exact thing that we're discussing here can be very well explained by fire science. There's a chemical reaction that has an energy of activation which is like a threshold value. Like you said, it's a threshold value. You pass the threshold, the reaction accelerates, just goes on. So it's about knowing where the threshold is and then, yeah, you actually can do beautiful fire safety engineering, knowing the fundamental properties of your material.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:If you know exactly what your hazard is going to be like, imagine you're designing an industrial process, you know exactly the hazards, the amounts of fuel, the fuel type, fire load, not the fuel load, the fire load you can design around that. But if you're designing a hotel room and office, a car park, somewhere where people can come with random stuff and some crazy guy is going to bring their own matches to ignite, how do you design around that? And it's kind of funny and scary that the history repeats all the time, all the time, like look, you were just mentioning 1970s, but take a look at the flammable facades and the use of SBI in Europe today. It's the exact same thing.
Vincent Brannigan:Oh yeah, oh yeah. It shows up in other areas. For example, the test that is used for flammable fabrics for clothing uses a single layer of fabric, but many people in wearing clothing and it's particularly women wearing skirts multiple layers. You ignite it, you get what the Germans, I believe, call a brand shack to fire chimney up between two layers of fabric and two layers of fabric, each of which individually pass. If you put them a centimeter apart and ignite them, they fail. In other words. So it isn't just the stuff, it is in fact the configuration of the stuff that can generate the failure. So this is where fire testing is incredibly and absolutely critical. To stipulate that no fire test can be used on configurations of material or on stuff that was not in the designer's contemplation of the test, the single burning item, I mean. This is why it's so terrible. It's so terrible not because it's a terrible test, but because it's used on things which did not exist in the test designer's mind. And this has to be an absolute formal stipulation on every fire test that you can only test the materials that were in the designer's mind.
Vincent Brannigan:This flips over to a different area. Let's take Mont Blanc, the Mont Blanc tunnel, for just a moment. They used essentially the ignitability of flammable liquids to determine what you could put through the tunnel, rather than the effective heat of combustion of a truck full of the stuff. This was idiotic by any technical grounds. There's simply no technical rationale on which you can justify it, because once you have a small fire going, it's the heat of combustion, not ignition point, which is the hazard and this is in the article, of course. And it wasn't until after the fire that someone suggested anything. The heat of combustion of a load of the material to design the tunnels and they found the stuff they could put on a truck was unbelievable. It was up into the you know gigawatts of fire and and the no system would hold that so clearly. In that case, I believe that designers were attempting to get a test through, for whatever reason that would allow all kinds of highly combustible material in the tunnels. Now, whether with political pressure or otherwise, I have no idea.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:I wouldn't even say it could be just like knowledge. You know, because, to be honest, fire science is often obvious after the disaster. Like look at the facade in Grenfell. Like how many people studied the flammability of vertical materials? It has been known for 50 years and yet it was put on a building and the fire science did not stop it. So I'm just saying fire science is sometimes not powerful enough to convince people they are doing things that are stupid.
Vincent Brannigan:Well, we can get to what I'll call the underlying political question a little later. But, very simply, the regulatory system failed because it allowed things which were not well understood to be put on buildings. So that's a regulatory failure that I pointed out when I was teaching in Scotland in the 1990s. In other words, that England was allowing things, under their guise of performance-based design, that nobody understood. There was a reward for industry to be blind and stupid, and even today people are claiming oh well, how could we have known? Let me go back all the way to the Titanic to do a parallel. I'll go all the way back.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:I'll just stop you for a second. I need to make a comment to the listeners because you want to go to Titanic. I really like interviewing Vincent because he's investigating not just the problem of innovation in fire safety. He's researching the problem of innovation overall like a human technology problem, and it, of course, reappears through the course of history. It reappears all the time, and all the time we're dealing with innovation, all the time we're dealing with new technologies that exceed previous knowledge, hence creating these innovation gaps, and that's exactly what I wanted to bring you, vincent, in the podcast. Now give me Titanic, please.
Vincent Brannigan:Okay, the Titanic was permitted to have fewer lifeboats than the number of people on board on the grounds that it had radio and could call other ships for help if it had trouble. That was the theory Fair thing, yeah. Unfortunately, there were several things that are required to make that work. One is that the other ships have to man their radios 24 hours. There was no such requirement. The other thing is that Titanic has to be required to know its position at all times. There was no such requirement.
Vincent Brannigan:So when Titanic hit the iceberg, the radio starts signaling the wrong position. Because they didn't have to keep track of their position. It happened by chance that Carpathia was coming on a course that would make it cross the actual position earlier. You know, in other words, that was just pure luck, absolutely pure luck, and Titanic sent out several positions, all of which were wrong, which is why it was so hard to find the wreck. Because the wreck and they know the wreck was right where the ship broke in half, because the boilers went straight down. So it was 20 miles off, which, in the dark in the middle of the North Atlantic, could be on the moon, you know. In other words, you're not going to see it, and so these things. In other words, they don't close the loop. They make an assumption and then they don't close the loop.
Vincent Brannigan:This goes right to your example of people bringing in stuff far greater than the fuel load that is assumed by the performance-based design. This is why, interestingly, we can do certain things with hotels. The amount of stuff that people bring into hotels is very small, so we know what stuff it is, we know where it is in the room, so therefore we can use sidewall heads and fairly low density system to control fires in hotels. Hotel fires are about the easiest thing to control and that's why we sprinkler all the hotels in the United States and we retrofit the sprinklers, because it's easy.
Vincent Brannigan:A couple of sidewall heads and you've got the problem essentially solved. You know you're not going to save the guy in the bed who kills himself, but you'll save anybody else in the hotel. A self-closing door and a hotel level sprinkler system. And that's what they did at Operation San Francisco back in 1999. I did speak there, yep, we did speak about that, yep. So this is where innovation you know sprinklers were an innovation. I mean, you can have safety innovations too, and we have to figure out where to safety innovations.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:And I think I want to go exactly where you wanted to go. I mean, I feel the innovation pace is accelerating, like the amount of new stuff that's being implemented into buildings is unprecedented. I also think the innovation in the way that we build buildings, like the shape of the buildings we're building, the tallest buildings, wonder buildings yeah, that's innovation. Look how quickly this innovation pace accelerates and how we are still in the same spot with fire testing, phenomena, testing regulation that is effective in those terms, like it's almost impossible to regulate the new tallest timber structure right, it has to be performance-based, right.
Vincent Brannigan:Well, let me give you an example, then we'll get to that. All right, the World Trade Center had the world's largest, tallest load-bearing walls. It was an innovation. It had lightweight trusses that held those walls together. If the trusses fail, the walls fail. Okay, by buckling. Okay.
Vincent Brannigan:Now, at that time the fireproofing, as it was called, of steel required 50% more on columns than beams. That is because of what I'll call the Empire State Building design, where column collapse is catastrophic but beam collapse is strictly local. But the World Trade Center design introduced beam collapse as structural failure of the entire building. So when the beams collapsed due to inadequate fireproofing or whatever, they pulled the building down and everybody died. Now nobody recognized that having, in effect, massively structural lightweight steel beams I'll call them beams for courtesy was potentially lethal unless they were heavily protected against fire, and also the method of fireproofing the beams was vulnerable to impact. So we had multiple problems at the same time.
Vincent Brannigan:So basically, that showed that I mean there's an older design innovation, that's, you know, 1972. I have to say, with some pride, my not on the beam issues, but the World Trade Center was built without sprinklers and my father protested the building of the World Trade Center without sprinklers and they changed the law in New York to require sprinklers in a building, local law five. So the idea that my dad protested the building of the World Trade Center, I think, is very interesting. So that was an innovation. There's no question, Some innovations are good and some innovations are bad. The Empire State Building was probably the best building to be in to be hit by an airplane of tall buildings. I mean it had a steel structure, you know, like Gage, and the World Trade Center was the worst. So this is where the whole question of regulation comes in and now we can move, whether called performance-based design or anything else doesn't much, yeah.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:But how do we deal with that? Like, you can't trust the old system or the traditional system for innovative solutions or innovative hazards, and the innovative hazards will come to your buildings whether you like it or not. Like I'll give you an example. Some years ago we were designing subway station. We requested to have smoke control at the intermediate level. You know, people go from the platform to level and that level to the floor and the intermediate level is basically a concrete chamber. There's nothing in it. There's glass, concrete, that's it.
Vincent Brannigan:They don't put stores in it the way they do in Germany. They don't fill it with kiosks.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:Yeah, in some stations they would do, but I'm talking about simpler design in which they don't. And this actually is a more difficult case for us, because we told them you still need a smoke system for at least like one megawatt in there because if there's any reason the smoke goes there, that there's going to be a trap for hundreds of people.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:And look, five years later people carry megawatt fire design fires with them. It's called electric scooter ride and I'm not saying we have foreseen that there will be a time where innovation will bring us electric scooters as a hazard but we just left the space that we don't know something, and I would be comfortable leaving a design fire of at least one megawatt.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:So we at least have some sort of system in place and now that the future reached that point where this hazard is actually present, so even old wheelings, in my opinion, are prone to innovation hazards.
Vincent Brannigan:The example which I use, which you might have the same but maybe not every open space in a building in the United States is considered as a place to host a wedding. Every single one, every single museum, every open aircraft carrier deck, any place where you can put a couple of hundred people at once, they will bring a wedding in there. And I have two daughters. I know this phenomenon and it is absolutely amazing the stuff that gets brought in when they have a wedding and the people and on top of things, they're often drunk. So these are spaces which are museums traditionally and they do sleepovers.
Vincent Brannigan:I have an article on this, on museum ships. We have museum ships like Belfast in London is like one. We have a dozen of them and they have kids sleeping on these ships, these old buckets, and the fire safety is minimal. So every kind of place like that can be used inappropriately if you don't have a very tight regulatory system. Like that can be used inappropriately if you don't have a very tight regulatory system. So my answer to the basic question is you can either have innovation and low levels of regulation, or you could have innovation and low levels of regulation. You will have a disaster. So if you have innovation, you have to have high levels of regulation. You can have static systems and low levels of regulation, and performance-based design was sold on the idea you could have innovation and low levels of radiation regulation, which is why it's a disaster.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:Well, I think it depends on the competencies of those who do it, but we've talked about that in previous episodes. The competencies are difficult, right.
Vincent Brannigan:Let me just say the way regulation works. You can have regulation in the government or you can require private sector qualified regulators. That's a well-understood thing. In other words, you can have a small government that requires you to hire independent reviewers of high quality for a project. We do that all the time. They botched this. They botched this horribly in Florida the FIU bridge collapse. This was an innovative method of you know the Florida International Pedestrian Bridge Collapse. They had a private regulator supposedly appointed to review it, but the contract was inadequate and didn't provide for sufficient money to do an adequate review, and that was a regulatory failure. But it was a private regulator. They could have had a much better private regulator examine the thing and said don't build it this way or put these conditions in, and so forth.
Vincent Brannigan:So if you're using in your regulatory system, if you're using private regulators, you have to prevent conflict of interest. You have to prevent underpaying people. You know words, they have to put enough money into the regulatory process, but that doesn't mean they have to be government workers. That's a totally separate question. Who does the regulation as opposed to the regulatory structure? For the most part and let me just say airplane safety regulation is heavily private reviewers who actually work for the company and are supervised and regulated by the government. In Maryland, in my state, we no longer have public inspectors of elevators. It's all private and there's a clerk in the office who makes sure that a qualified inspector is inspecting your elevator in your building. They're not government elevator inspectors. So there's complete flexibility between public and private sectors. But you have to have the regulatory system. You have to have the regulatory system and in the case of performance-based design, that regulatory system has to be continuous.
Vincent Brannigan:Cannot have fire and forget. Must regulate the building cradle to grave. Regulate the building cradle to grave. Inspect the building, check the building, check what's in it, check how it's used. You check whether there's a wedding there. The analogy is generally counting the house in an assembly occupancy. If you have an assembly occupancy, it's very common for the fire department to come in and literally count the house. And if they can't count the house, then you have to have a system for knowing how many people are in the building and they insist on that. Otherwise you get terrible disasters in assembly occupancies. They get overcrowded and so forth.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:I think at this point we've identified the innovation gap or the issues coming from the innovation. But I don't want to leave the listeners without answers. I don't want to do just questions and good stories. I know you have some good answers on how to approach the testing of innovative technology in a way that actually gives us a chance to account for those innovations, and in the paper the Edinburgh paper that you've mentioned there was a four-step model of test, development and use and I really actually enjoyed that model. So maybe we could go through that model, would you like that?
Vincent Brannigan:Okay, I think that the main thing is let me even simplify it rather than do it that way.
Vincent Brannigan:You have to have someone in a position to say halt before you do the innovation, and then you have to do adequate research on the innovation before you allow it to injure people. To use an example which I think is in the paper when bicycles were allowed bicycles we have bicycles on streets, that's great, we have bicycles. Then they invented the recumbent bicycle. The recumbent bicycle, where the operator is laying down and there's nothing in the bicycle that's more than one meter off the ground. That's an entirely new hazard. Even if it meant the technical definition of a bicycle, it's an entirely new hazard. Somebody had to look at recumbent bicycles and, for example this sounds so stupid they're required to have, like, a flag that sticks up about two meters from the bicycle so cars can see them. In other words, you need to do something when you have an innovative technology. So therefore, the mere fact that you mean technical definition of a bicycle doesn't mean that a novel bicycle should be allowed, and this is the tricky part of regulation. This is the tricky part is to say what is an innovation and what isn't. So in some cases you need approved lists. In some cases you need approved characteristics. In some cases you just need, as the food and drug does, somebody just looks at the new product. You can't do it by rule and so some sort of system for identifying an actual innovation. The Food and Drug Administration again is an example. If you change anything about a drug it's packaging, it's labeling, anything it has to go to the FDA, and you can't change the color of the pills without going to the FDA. Now, most of these are very simple desk reviews, but people get used to taking blue pills every day and all of a sudden you're giving them green pills and they say this could be a difference for some. So this is, you know, just have to have some sort of system for tracking every innovation. Second, you need proper inspection of the thing as installed, and this is where we fall down, totally Generally called detailing. As you get more and more complex structures, as we move from log cabins like they're in a wooden cabin, as we move to more complex structures, every step of the detailing comes very, very important. And things that go through firewalls or things that affect sprinkler systems or things that affect cameras. This is all detailing and it has to be not just specified in advance, it has to be inspected and checked by some sort of regulatory system, and this inspection has to go permanently through the entire thing. The reason is and the four-step process that I get is the way we develop fire tests. We develop fire tests by multiple levels of abstraction. First we think we think we know what the problem is, then we define the problem, then we abstract from the problem to some test characteristics and then we create tests. That's the four-step process I described, but it all starts at the beginning, where we know what the problem is.
Vincent Brannigan:We did not anticipate lithium batteries None of our structures. When they talk about single stairways, whatever, none of it is based on the fact that people now have electric battery scooters they can park in the hallway. That innovation alone, in my opinion, makes a single stairway argument in any kind of building deadly. That people can now easily park a complete fire hazard in the hallway and they have reasons for doing it. And how can you justify? A lithium-ion battery scooter is all by itself enough fire to imperil in a single stairway building. So unless you can figure out how to ban that, you've got a real problem.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:In your four-step model you define some interesting definitions, you use some interesting wording, so you've put forward technological frame and technological model and I enjoy those. So could you briefly explain what's a technological frame?
Vincent Brannigan:A frame is what you believe is the problem. Can you give a fire example? Yeah, you gave the example of an open area in the subway. In other words, the frame is we have an open area with no combustibles, with just a bunch of people walking through it. That's the frame. That's what is structuring everything, all right. Then you try to think well, what kind of fire could we have in that frame? And you say someone's suitcase could be on fire due to a lithium battery. You get a small fire. All right, that's your technological model, all right. So you abstract from your frame what you believe to be the problem. Now let's take a bigger and different one.
Vincent Brannigan:When they built the World Trade Center, they thought about an airplane hitting it, but their frame did not include the fire created by the fuel on the airplane. All right, they thought about the impact but not about the fire. So their frame was inadequate from day one. All right. So let's now we can go to wildfires. We can find the same thing. What do people think of as the frame? And that is, in the case of wildfires, two things. One is how far you can throw burning brands in front of a fire with a wind of a certain size and actually ignite buildings. Well, this turns out to be a whole lot further than anybody thought. That's, the frame was inadequate. When the frame is inadequate, nothing works later. Absolutely nothing works later. So defining the frame is an absolutely critical step, and that's done generally by people who are outside of the traditional fire engineering community, because they're the ones who set the contract to the fire engineers to do the modeling. So we need people who are familiar with culture, behavior, what people do. Let me give an example, not much to do with fire.
Vincent Brannigan:The instructions for getting off an airplane in the event of an emergency are leave your carry-on baggage behind. They tell you that when you get on the airplane, if they evacuate. Do people do that? No, I've seen people get off airplanes carrying suitcases, musical, know musical instruments, god knows what, going down the slide. So therefore and that's where you have flight attendants there to supervise them and say put that down.
Vincent Brannigan:So the question of whether your frame is adequate for the particular circumstance gets a little tricky. Now I've done a lot of work on command and control. There are things which can command and control that you can't regulate. So you use command and control and if you've got the right people and this is where evacuations in wildfire areas, that you don't let people take horse trailers on dirt roads. They have to detach it. If the horses can walk, fine. The issue of evacuation buses and floods where people want to bring big dogs on the buses big problem of evacuation buses and floods where people want to bring big dogs on the buses Big problem. And, in other words, you have to figure out your frame has to take everything into account that you reasonably have to deal with.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:But when we discuss this reference creating test methods or accounting for some new hazard or innovation does this mean that this account is only valid for within this technological frame and within this technological model? So if a new model appears in your frame or the frame changes, the test becomes invalid.
Vincent Brannigan:Right, the frame will continue to change over the time of the building. There's absolutely no question, which is why you constantly look at the models that you're built on to see if the frame is still, if they're still reflective of the frame. Now we can go to wooden buildings. Yeah, let's go to wooden buildings.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:Yeah, sure, I'm in a wooden building right now.
Vincent Brannigan:I know, I know my house is made out of wood. You know it's protected wood construction. I got no problem with wood. But when you start putting 3,000 or 4,000, 5,000 people into 20-story wood buildings, then you get into very interesting questions as to what I'm not very interested in. Oh, it could pass a panel test and the charring works, but will it work under all fire circumstances where, for example, what happens when the fire department starts work and so forth? And we have very little history on large, high rise wooden buildings. We just don't have it.
Vincent Brannigan:And I was in the South Hampton. I published that picture on LinkedIn the South Hampton terminal for cruise ships. Thousands of people in a room with a gigantic wooden ceiling. Thousands of people in one room with a gigantic wooden ceiling with all kinds of combustibles below it. What happens if? What is the radiant energy that comes down if such a thing is burning? There's no sprinklers, there's no, nothing. And we know all right, and we're building wooden buildings and we will find out when they start burning what happens. So nobody has what's the biggest wooden building anybody's ever built and burned? You know a couple of stories tall. Then I remember out in California they were building. In San Jose. They were building wooden buildings on concrete podiums, podium construction where the lower four stories of the building are concrete and the upper 12 were wood, with the suggestion that fire trucks would drive up this four-story garage, you know, and store complex and they would fight the fire from the top of the podium. Well, they had this design.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:The fire department said to hell with that, we're not doing that, we're not putting our people there, and the whole fire protection design of the building was terrible yeah, particularly that projects like that are becoming very popular and we've been involved in some of them in london and the idea is that you buy a building, you put more floors with clt technology because it's light, you know you can then sell down a bigger building, so that's a new practice that's very popular. But the amount of engineering, the fire safety engineering, the considerations that go into those projects is actually insane, including full-scale testing of the entire compartments for those buildings, but testing that is actually considering the technological frame and the technological model. I would say Perhaps we've not used the same terminology that you did, but that's the thing we're doing. What can be the worst fire that could happen in that building? What can be the worst circumstances at which the materials are stored in the building? What's the worst configuration that?
Vincent Brannigan:can happen.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:And then we just build it up, burn it down, observe the consequences, try to figure out from this single experiment. Well, there's actually also a problem. It's a single experiment. You don't have a range of outcomes, but from that you can engineer some really good answers. I'm not saying it's the best or the perfect approach, but I think it's good enough for the problem. But we're not going to stop the investor from building buildings, so that's the best we can do.
Vincent Brannigan:Well, the regulators do? Regulators simply stomp. Look at the Berlin airport.
Vincent Brannigan:Okay, they tried to bully their way past the regulators and the regulators said no, yeah, and, and so if you have regulators with backbone, now that is a problem in England. We know that in England I'm saying specifically England now is that the regulators have neither authority nor backbone in the circumstances. And so therefore, uh, we called them cowboys when I was lecturing at Caledonian and eventually, I mean, you know, disasters are slow in coming. Second, almost all those buildings are sprinklered and we know from the United States that if a building is properly sprinklered and the sprinklers are maintained, you're not going to have a catastrophic loss. We know that. We know that from a lot of buildings, with a lot of experience with really crappy buildings with good sprinkler systems. And if I could quote my dad again, he always said at the university that sprinklers give professors academic freedom, that no matter how arrogant and stupid they are, they can't burn the building down.
Vincent Brannigan:So we have been relentless about sprinklering buildings in the US, and that's why our loss figures on such things are very good. All of our losses are in unsprinkled buildings. Basically, what we know is that for most fuels, most fires, most problems.
Vincent Brannigan:I'm going to leave exterior cladding. I'll talk about that in a minute. Sprinklers work very well. We lost a brand new building here in Maryland, seven-story stall, fully sprinkler, not yet occupied Brand new, getting ready to occupy and we lost it to an exterior. Fire Went right up the outside right to the roof, burned the whole building down from the top and that was down. It was a number of years ago down in Prince Frederick and what they simply found was that sprinklers did not protect against exterior exposures. They just weren't designed that way, so that the relevance of this is to wildfires Shifting, and I'm going to use the technological frame of wildfires for a minute as an example of where we have to do things differently.
Vincent Brannigan:Basically, what happens out west very heavily, although not totally, is a wildfire acts as a multiple ignition source for single-family homes or small multifamily homes, multiple ignitions that the fire department can't deal with. As soon as you have ignitions that the fire department can't deal with because there's too many of them, you then burn the entire city down Because our cities, many of our cities, are very vulnerable to exposure fires. That is, building to building, spread of fires because our exteriors are highly combusted. So we essentially have built a lot of buildings, particularly low-rise apartment buildings where we can get the people out. We don't lose people in these fires, but we lose the buildings, so our wildfires. There are towns that lost hundreds and hundreds of houses, where the trees were not done, that were between the houses, that the fire spread from house to house to house, so convincing people that we have an urban conflagration problem, not a wildfire problem, that essentially anything that ignited a half dozen houses at once.
Vincent Brannigan:Most cities can't handle more than two building fires at once absolutely the fire departments aren't, and so if you ignite six widely scattered houses due to a wildfire a mile away, you can burn down the whole city in some of these areas. So we need to harden cities against exposure fire from other buildings.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:Yeah, that's a question that we've posted. A few years ago we were trying to get a research grant, which was unsuccessful, unfortunately. The question was like are the urban configuration I think, of the past or temporarily on hold? And the second question, the second question that the company did is it better to invest you know, I don't know pacify protection of your buildings, for example, or maybe just build more fire departments in your city to have more manpower to handle the fires? Because I don't think anyone ever looked at it from an urban scale, like what exactly is the risk profile of a city? And investing in what particularly will give better outcomes.
Vincent Brannigan:Just a few examples and I don't think it's answered either. I was recently out in Yellowstone National Park. I don't know if you've ever been out there in the American West.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:No, but I would love to.
Vincent Brannigan:A rustic building in the middle of nowhere. Shall we say they're 200 miles past? Nowhere, I mean there's no mutual, there's no fire service at all. The historic buildings of the Yellowstone Lodge and whatnot have exterior sprinklers. They have exterior sprinklers against wildfires and the buildings were fully sprinkled 100 years ago. I don't know when the exterior sprinklers went in. I was trying to find that out, but all of the important buildings have a built-in fire protection system. Probably, given there also they use some, they cut back vegetation and whatnot, they can probably save the historic buildings in the event of another Yellowstone wildfire like the 89 fire.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:There's a village in Japan it's called Shirakawa-go. It's like the 89 fire. There's a village in japan it's called shirakawa go. It's between takayama and kanazawa. Probably doesn't mean uh much to people, but you can go with that and they have like hundreds of old houses, old farm houses, very big, and they're like very, very unique, uh, built with natural materials hay, timber, natural shedding and and stuff like that and uh, it's a unesco heritage village. So they really want to protect those buildings and they have this system of monitors fire monitors spread around the city that spray water everywhere and those are hidden in different pieces of architecture and if there's literally any sign of fire around the village, they would just flood the entire village with those monitors to protect the buildings. It's quite lovely their videos online, because there's a festival I think it's in March, I think where they test this system every year. So you probably can go there and see this on your own. Maybe I'll go there one day to make a Fire Science Show episode on that.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:But anyway, we got distracted from the main topic, which is crafting a good test. So I would like to go back to the question of a good test and the good testing methods. So I captured one sentence from your paper that really resonates very brilliantly with me. I'll read the sentence the real difference between a bare path and a clear path may not be captured in the test. And I love it because that's exactly what I see in the laboratory. If I test a wall and it collapses like one minute after the test finished and there's another test and the wall collapses 29 minutes after the test has finished, they have the exact same rating right. They have the exact same number attached to it. People don't know the difference. No one knows the difference. Only the manufacturer knows the difference. I know the difference, but I'm on the NDA so I'm not allowed to say about that but the manufacturer is not interested in talking about that that they barely passed the test.
Vincent Brannigan:So this knowledge doesn't really propagate, right? What do we call the person who graduated at the bottom of their medical school class? A doctor, doctor? Okay, all right. So this is a generic problem in all testing systems, all driver tests, everything, which is that pass-fail tests, have this as a fundamental core problem, and it's true even on another level. Let me just say the blood alcohol concentration for drunk driving, whatever it is, is a very arbitrary number because in fact there's some evidence that alcoholics can have higher levels because they're used to it. They can have higher levels of blood alcohol and still drive effectively. We find this is it is one of our that people who don't drink at all I don't drink at all right now you know they get drunk much faster on very small amounts of alcohol because their systems aren't used to it. So all testing, this is a generic problem of all testing, particularly fast-fail testing. But even testing that puts levels on it and I realize this might be a diversion, you might edit this out, but I give my engineering students the question of why grade point averages are useless and you know, useless as engineers and they ponder and they can't figure out why. I tell them they're useless. It's very simple Averages depend on the equal interval hypothesis in mathematics, that is, the gap between a 1 and a 2 is the same as between a 2 and a 3.
Vincent Brannigan:That's the equal interval hypothesis. You can't average it unless those are true. But nobody tells the professors to maintain an equal interval between an A and a B and a C and a D. There's no pretense that those intervals are equal. So therefore, averages of those letters, they're like averaging gold, silver and bronze medals at the Olympics. Nobody knows what those mean. They mean nothing, and so what we do is we apply arbitrary numbers, grades of good, better and best, and we just end up with garbage. And so this is a problem that occurs even if you don't have the pass-fail issue, unless you have a method of maintaining the intervals, and we usually don't.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:But you introduced another term in your paper, which is reification, and I think it relates to that. Oh, reification.
Vincent Brannigan:Now that is actually very, very important and I probably don't spend enough time on it in the paper. Reification, the usage of the language, the way I use it, and I realize that in political science it's slightly different, and so you will find people in political science Marxist political science that have a different approach to what reification is. To me, technical reification is confusing the score or the name of the thing with the underlying material itself, and it has to do with how we put things in boxes and classify them. So when we talk about wood or heavy timber or something, in other words, people say, well, that's heavy timber. I said, yeah, but it makes a whole lot of difference how smooth that timber is, how much it's chamfered, how much you know, in other words, but we reify it as heavy timber or whatever.
Vincent Brannigan:And so reification is the use of is to pretend that the abstract definition of something is the same as the thing and they're just not. They're just not and this is the whole argument totally unrelated to fire that we have over transgender people in the United States. In other words, people reify chromosomes into two genders and that's it and nothing else will be accepted and so forth, whereas the biological scientists say it's a whole lot more complicated than that, and but nobody wants to listen to it. So this is reification. Is you confuse the abstraction with the reality? And this is where this is where.
Vincent Brannigan:When they were in Capran, where and this was in German so the they said oh, everything was brand fest, that is, everything had passed a test and therefore was fireproof. No, it just means it passed that test. Passing the single burning item test doesn't mean anything other than how it would respond to a fire. The size of the single burning item test Doesn't mean anything else. And so what you find endlessly are people convert passing a test into a quality of the material. Okay, and that's just nonsense.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:I've seen this at home as well. Actually, one tunneling project we were doing smoke control consulting again, and we've received technical documentation of the tunnel and I see there's some odd material on the walls. I asked them what the hell are those panels? And they're like oh yeah, they're HPL. I'm like what? Like HPL? That's like high-pressure laminate, that's basically… Formica, what we would call Formica right, yeah, it could be. It's like squished cellulose layers.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:Anyway, I'm like Jesus, haven't you heard about the King's Crossfire? Like it's extremely dangerous to put a flammable material on walls of a tunnel. And they're like no, no, it's Euroclass B, it's an excellent material. And I'm like oh my God, and what they did? I've sent them a video. I've done some experiments with Professor Rain and Matt Bonner on facades and we build like a facade with just the Euroclass B materials and they actually burned quite like hell. And I've sent them the video and they're like oh, oops, I guess we'll reconsider this material because it doesn't look bad. But that's the exact thing. The problem, they would consider this material being Euroclass B. That's an extremely high class and Euroclass system which passed the SBI test, brilliantly beautiful material. But a tunnel fire is not a corner fire. A tunnel fire is a completely different technological frame, completely different technological model. And yet again we're in the place where something is being applied beyond the scope it was tested for.
Vincent Brannigan:Even let me just the one that I worked on years ago, putting carpet on a wall. If you put nylon carpet on a wall you have a nightmare fire. In other words, on the floor, on the ground, fire spread relatively slowly even on nylon carpet. You put it on a wall and it goes right up the wall like a rocket, and you know it. Just nobody tells people. Don't put carpet on walls. It's really unbelievable. And in other words, as soon as you change the configuration, this goes back to the lady's dresses with the two layers the configuration, this goes back to the lady's dresses with the two layers. And as soon as you change the fire configuration, as I pointed out, all of the assumptions that fuel load can be described in. You know, kilograms of wood per meter, yeah, but a kilogram is one solid log of 50 kilograms and Celsius carved into little slices and packed up. Those are totally different fires. The fuel load to fire load doesn't work.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:So, to finish up this interview, I would like to put in some positive thinking Because you know, I see opportunity in what you propose. With the technological frame technological model verification, validation, verification of the test you can actually start trying to understand when some measures become good. Safety innovations. Also a way you can measure the impact of any innovation on safety that you propose. And we're not only living in a world of continuous hazard innovation, but we're also living in a world of safety innovation. There has been so many new technologies out there.
Vincent Brannigan:Oh yeah, and lithium batteries being a perfect example. Here's the situation. What we need to do when we do fire test development is document the technological frame and the model that support the test. They have to carefully document it so that nobody suggests, going to your example, the tunnel, that this test rating has any meaning outside of this technological frame.
Vincent Brannigan:The corner test or the single burning item test is essentially a trash can fire, that's all it is. It's a waste paper basket on fire, and if that's the only hazard you have around, it could be a good test. If you have a bigger hazard around, it could be a worthless test. And this is what we have never done. We've never documented the technological frame and the model that supported it for the abstraction to the test, and that's why the carpet test fails, that's why the clothing test fails, all these Poie Mont Blanc fails. Nobody sat there and said this is the frame that we're dealing with. They just come out with a test and then everybody runs with the test and puts it wherever they want and does whatever they want, and that is that's the problem. So the cure is to do the science, is to do the social science, which is the frame, and the modeling, which is physical science, and to do it and document it as part of the test.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:Brilliant, brilliant. It's just one sentence, but it really summarizes the entire thought process, the answers, the science. Thank you, vincent, for that. And we'll end up on this and, as you know, 31st of December, so wishing you all the best for the rest of 2024, which is not really a lot of that left.
Vincent Brannigan:I'm sure it will be fine. It comes later here than there, but everything will be fine. And I'm going on. This Friday I'm going on a 25-day cruise to the Caribbean, but the last time that I put it up on LinkedIn.
Vincent Brannigan:The high-pressure water mist system went off in the kitchen about 12 feet away from me. I thought they did it for me personally, so, as an oven had overheated and the system went off, you know, I went over and took a picture of my car and I just thank you very much for the demo. You know, it's really, really good, stig Brodersen brilliant, brilliant.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:So you're starting 25 with a banger. Brilliant, brilliant. So you're starting 2025 with a banger. I'm also having a lot of fun in here, so all the best for 2025. Please enjoy your cruise and see you in the new year.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:Vincent, thank you very much. Take care, thank you, bye-bye. Released in 2035. Happy New Year, everybody, and thanks for being here with me. I hope you've enjoyed this episode with Vincent.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:The paper that we've talked about, which was the framework for this interview, is linked in the show notes. It's really good and I highly recommend reading to it. This is a very interesting read and I think Vincent, with his background on studying innovation in general, has nailed a few very, very good points and issues with fire safety. It is actually very interesting to look on the entire concept of fire safety through his eyes. I'm not saying I'm agreeing with everything Vincent says and obviously some of the things that he says are very emotional, but he makes a lot of sense. If you try to understand it from his perspective, it makes a lot of sense and those things, those issues that he identified, are very sharp and they truly exist in the world of fire safety and innovation, especially the ones related to limitations of testing.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:We are very commonly using test methods beyond what they were meant to represent. We are often connecting entire behavior of a specific material with a specific outcome of a test. Like the HPL panel Euroclass B I brought up, we connect the performance of that panel with that single marker, which in some contexts is very inappropriate. So we really need to understand better. And I really liked his last sentence. It was just one sentence. I probably should have followed up on the interview on that sentence, but he said that the answer is science. The answer is social science to investigate the context, and the physical science to understand the fire. And if you think about it, that truly is the only answer, and in a podcast such as Fireside Show, that's the best answer one can receive.
Wojceich Węgrzyński:Anyway, I'm not going to summarize this anymore. It was a very interesting, thoughtful conversation. There's a very interesting, thoughtful conversation. There's a paper that accompanies it. The paper is 15 years old but it's still fresh, to be honest. So highly highly recommended read after this, and I can only invite you to the Fire Science Show next week, next Wednesday. It's 2025 and Fire Science Show is still going strong. You'll receive your weekly dose of fire science every Wednesday. That's my promise to you and see you there. Thank you, bye, thank you.