Fire Science Show
Fire Science Show
189 - Simple things that work
This episode emphasises the value of focusing on simple things in fire safety engineering, something we somehow miss when we go too deep into the technical details of our projects. I've looked at eight different aspects of fire safety - inspired by the CPR requirements, and I've added resiliency, redundancy and suppression to them. By promoting straightforward guidelines like evaluating material combustibility, ensuring effective egress routes, and engaging with rescue services, architects and engineers can significantly enhance building safety practices.
In this episode, we talk about:
• Simple methods yield effective fire safety solutions
• Importance of adhering to foundational fire safety principles
• CPR’s five essential requirements for construction safety
• Load-bearing capacity and material combustibility considerations
• Strategies for minimising fire spread between structures
• Importance of clear egress pathways for building occupants
• Opportunities for enhancing rescue team safety via communication
• Emphasis on redundancy and resiliency in fire safety systems
Each foundational principle allows fire safety practitioners to implement effective strategies that can lead to safer buildings and improved occupant outcomes.
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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. In today's episode we're going to talk about simple things that make our buildings fire safe. And by simple things, simple ideas, simple concepts. I by no means think they're primitive, irrelevant or should be superseded with something more complicated. I think there's a real power in thinking in simple terms and real value in applying those core, fundamental principles, and I think, looking at the world today, at the fire disasters that have happened across the years, I think in many of those it was those simple things that have been missing.
Wojciech:An idea for this episode came to me when, well, I'm quite following the healthspin, lifespan stuff, right, listening to a lot of podcasts, a lot of things and I find it absolutely fascinating that the world of advanced health, where people talk about all those crazy things optimizing exercise for lactate thresholds, different metabolisms in your mitochondria and stuff like that is pretty crazy. I think Hoyt Hotel said once that life sciences and fire science are the most complicated ones. I understood the fire part. Now I understand the life part. Anyway, there are those people who are geeking out on those extremely complicated physiochemical processes but when they are asked about advice what to do to gain healthspan, they will tell you eat less, sleep well, exercise, and it's this simple advice that actually works. It's that simple advice that gets you to the point where you want to be, where starting to consider those more advanced things starts to really matter. And if you reverse that if you don't know anything about pathways to generate energy in mitochondria, but you eat less, sleep well and exercise, generate energy in mitochondria but you eat less, sleep well and exercise, you're on a very good pathway to achieve the goals, even if you don't know about them. So this simple idea is extremely powerful in that space.
Wojciech:And I was thinking can we find a eat less, sleep well, exercise equivalent for fire safety, for life safety in buildings? And that was my quest. That's what I tried to do. I found some good ideas. I really like to resonate with the CPR fundamental objectives for fire safety.
Wojciech:There are five requirements in CPR for the building materials related to fire safety. They're very general, very high level. Those things are introduced in different codes across Europe in different forms. They're considered sometimes performance-based objectives, sometimes they're functional requirements, sometimes they are just the requirement on which you build further. But I think they're very good to start with. And to those I would add three more resiliency, redundancy and suppression, and altogether, I find that eight of those. If you start applying them to understand the fire safety engineering that you are doing, this will significantly improve the success rate of that engineering.
Wojciech:Simple things, but they work. So let's try and look at stuff that we all already know. Nothing new is being told in this episode. You know everything that's being told in this episode, but perhaps it will allow you to look at the stuff that you already know through a very different angle. So let's spin the intro and jump into the episode.
Wojciech:Welcome to the Firesize Show. My name is Wojciech Wigrzynski and I will be your host. This podcast is brought to you in collaboration with Ofar 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. In 2025, there will be new opportunities to work with OFR. Ofr will grow its team once more and is keen to hear from industry professionals who would like to collaborate on fire safety features this year, get in touch at ofrconsultantscom.
Wojciech:Oh man, that healthspan space. That's so fascinating. Perhaps we should make a fire science show episode about functional fitness for fire safety engineer and the importance of maintaining your health in this very difficult profession. I could actually invite Danny Hopkins. He seems to have some kind of PhD on lactate curves and thresholds. That could be an interesting episode. But anyway, let's focus on fire safety for today and let's focus on simple ideas that make our buildings fire safe, that make our fire engineering good and that actually kind of work they simply do work the eat less, sleep well, exercise equivalent for fire safety in buildings.
Wojciech:So I told you I'm going to start with the CPR requirements. So CPR construction products regulation is a thing that defines the unified market in European Union and through that it actually achieves some safety objectives because it tells you what you can sell in Europe that can be used in buildings and the role of those things could be related to fire. Therefore, the fire is regulated through this pathway and actually it's important to realize. Many people don't realize that CPR is not about safety. Cpr is about market access. It's a market regulation. It's not meant to regulate fire safety, but fire safety is a part of it as a whole. Anyway, in CPR there are those five requirements. I think they've been there since the Construction Products Directiveive, cpd, and most likely they've been there before. I'm not sure of the origins of those, but I like them a lot. Perhaps if you know the origins of those five clauses you can tell me, and I'll highlight that in the future episodes because I really resonate with them.
Wojciech:So the construction works must be designed and built in such a way that in an event of outbreak of fire A Load-bearing capacity can be assumed for a specific period of time, b the generation and spread of fire and smoke within construction works are limited. C the spread of fire to neighboring construction work is limited. D Occupants can leave the construction works or be rescued by other means. And E the safety of rescue team is taken into consideration. So it tells you that to build a building you need to account for those things.
Wojciech:Usually the codes and standards in your country would take those general objectives and either give you a more specific requirements that relate to each of them, how you achieve that, and those would go more technical into product standards. Those would go more technical into product standards. Those would go more technical into some sort of technical documentation that follows the product how to build, maintain, inspect and that's how you would get it engineered. But on the top level there is this objective and I would like to focus on the objectives because I would like to read them not as a requirement but as some sort of obligation, goal, pathway to achieving fire safety. Let's assume that if you get all of those right you get fire safe buildings. So let's go through them and see if we can work them out with some common sense instead of going deep into standards and technical documentation of products.
Wojciech:So let's start with the load-bearing capacity. It says load-bearing capacity of the construction can be assumed for a specific period of time. A specific period of time is an interesting one. Is it the length of the fire? Is it the time it takes people to evacuate? Does it include fire rescuers? Does it include impact on the surrounding buildings? Not an easy question to answer, but anyway, in our codes and standards this would be addressed through concepts of fire resistance or structural fire engineering. We've had those episodes in fire science shows, so we know how the deep engineering of that requirement would look like. But could you give like rule, of thumb, rules what kind of products lead to satisfying this? And I assume that load-bearing capacity in a building in its normal state must be maintained, so the building should not collapse either when you are using it. So let's say that's satisfied already.
Wojciech:And I would say first, I would like my structure to not participate in the fire. That's a very big choice for a designer. Do you design a structure that participates in a fire or you design a structure that does not participate in fire? And this obviously goes down to any sort of timber buildings, any sort of using combustible materials as part of your structure. Because if you consider the structure incombustible, completely, does not participate in fire in any way, then you separate the fire problem from the structural problem. You can solve them separately. If your structure participates in the fire, then there's feedback loop between the fire environment and the structure. The structure on its own can become a pathway to spreading the fire. It can deteriorate in a different way. So definitely that's the first thing and that's a much bigger choice than people would think it is Like does your structure really participate in fire?
Wojciech:A second would be how quickly it will deteriorate in the fire, and that goes more deeper into the choice of the materials, the layers of your structural materials, and I think it's a very important question the bulkier, the simpler the properties of your materials used for the structure are, the better chance that you satisfy this requirement easier, like if you go with very heavy, bulky materials. Of course, there are cases where spalling would be an issue, for concrete for example, but that's a technical challenge Deep, deep, many layers below what we're considering right now. If you have a multi-layered material in which you have thin layers exposed to fire, they will deteriorate. They will create cavities, they will create pathways for fire to spread. If you have some materials to fire protect, they can detach themselves from the structure, they can deteriorate themselves. They will have only this limited amount of time that they are going to work. Not saying that they will not work, but definitely if you have a simple bulky structure, engineering that is much easier than figuring out additional protection layers to provide this structural safety requirement. And with those.
Wojciech:I would also add one more thing that we rarely consider when we're thinking about fire resistances and materials used for structural fire protection how the structure is interacting with the fire environment on its own. The fire lives in some space and the fire in a small room will be different from the fire in a big room, even if it's the same fuel, same ignition, that those will be two different fires. So structure and the shape of your building does inadvertently influence fire always. And also, if you build your space with a lot of cavities, with a lot of concave spaces, spaces that are difficult to ventilate, spaces in which heat can accumulate, spaces in which fire can thrive, you're going to have a much more challenging time proving that your load-bearing capacity is satisfied for a specific period of time, whatever that period of time is.
Wojciech:If you make a simple structure, if you make tall spaces, height is such a profound and important thing to consider when designing a space and its fire safety. Usually, the taller the space, the safer it will be. Of course, if you start stocking stuff all the way to your ceiling, the taller it is, the worse it's going to be. But if we're talking about free space from your fire to your ceiling, due to how entrainment works, due to how heat transfer works, due to how smoke layers work, the due to how heat transfer works, due to how smoke layers work, the taller the space, the safer the structure would be. So, in fact, even for such a complicated stuff like load-bearing capacity and its maintenance, there are some simple, very basic things that one could consider that will be deciding whether you have a simple, robust system or you have to go into some really high-level fire safety engineering to prove that your building is going to be safe. Ah, structure was a tough one. Let's see if we can deal better with the generation and spread of fire smoke within the construction work.
Wojciech:So while the first requirement referred to something we call resistance to fire, this one we would usually relate to something we call reaction to fire, how the materials respond to fire and how they burn. And if I would like to think about this in very simple terms, how do I provide this fire safety? The first consideration really would be is my material combustible or not? To me, when thinking about fire safety engineering of any space, this is the only thing that matters in terms of the material properties. Is it combustible or not? Because if it's not, that's a certain outcome. It's not gonna burn, it's not gonna spread the fire, it's not gonna add to the effects of the fire in my building. I'm pretty sure that this will be a fire-safe thing. There are ways where you can use fire-safe things in an unsafe way, but 95% of cases this means you don't have an issue at all.
Wojciech:When your material is combustible but of course has some sort of characteristic, it's perhaps fire-retarded, it has a great Euro class, whatever. The only thing that those things change is how surprised you will be when it goes off and burns down Like. Really, those characteristics change how those materials ignite. Of course they can delay the ignition, they can increase the ignition temperatures, they increase the activation energy required to start the reactions. We know that. We know that they work. But also we know that after some threshold is met, after enough heat is produced within the fire, they will burn and they will participate in the fire. They will generate heat, they will make fire greater. There is always no chance that them participating in fire will make fire less hazardous or less severe. They will make fire worse.
Wojciech:So if you are using combustible materials, you really need to consider that. What's going to happen with them beyond what their fire retarding characteristics give you, like ignition is not the whole story of fire. If you only care about whether they can ignite or not, sure, then perhaps you can refer to those types of materials and be good with them. But if you really care about the outcomes of a fire in the building, what happens if a fire grows? What happens if someone brings a larger fire source to your building? What happens if there's a scenario that you have not foreseen? If my materials are non-combustible, I'm pretty sure they're not going to combust. If they are combustible to some extent, then I probably would need to consider that and it's such a basic thing. You know whether it burns or not. But when you look at the internet space, where you look at marketing, of course people want to sell materials, all types of materials, and I fully understand the objectives behind bringing plastics into buildings. There are some solutions for which the plastic materials are absolutely brilliant and they will solve so many problems of a modern building. They're just going to provide you a fire hazard.
Wojciech:It's not that we should advocate banning all the combustibles. We should learn how to live with combustibles in a safe way, and fire safety, engineering them is one way. It just triggers me so much when I see, you know, those posts that start let's debunk the myths of, let's say, timber or some other material and they will say it's not going to burn, it's going to char. They have these protective layers, protective coatings, whatever magical properties you have, and yes, that's true, they would resist fire. They would resist ignition in some scenarios for very specific sources of ignition that are usually defined in the standards. That's how you engineer the product. You know what test it's going to go through and you design a product to pass the test Doesn't mean it's going to pass every single fire in the building and then you put that product in the market.
Wojciech:I think a lot of fire engineers are not willing to participate in these discussions or not willing to acknowledge that. That any combustible material is potentially a hazard Just depends in which scenario it's going to be involved. Essentially, a hazard just depends in which scenario it's going to be involved, and I think a lot of failures of fire safety engineering we've seen throughout the world is simply caused by the fact that someone believed that Euroclass B material or Euroclass C material will have fantastic fire performance. They just knew that when the fire will be fairly large, they're still going to ignite and they're still going to burn, and those properties will probably be secondary or maybe even not provide you anything. Fire will be fairly large, they're still gonna ignite and they're still gonna burn and those properties will probably be secondary or maybe even not provide you anything. I'm not against this industry, but I would love a world in which engineers understand this and and just don't blindly apply a characteristic and and think that all problems are solved. And if I think of you know about easy, simple things that we need to consider about building materials, definitely, whether they burn or not is the number one thing.
Wojciech:Another thing is like what's in the material, what's the chemical composition? I had David Purser in the podcast where he talked a lot about toxicity and how smoke is created. The chemistry of it is fascinating episodes. I highly recommend them if you've not seen them. And David said that the chemical composition is critical for materials Like if you don't have nitrogen in the material, you're not going to have HCN as a product of the fire, and this goes for many materials, depending on what's inside that drives what can go outside of it. All the smoke is toxic, all the smoke is hazardous, but some materials will just generate much worse products than other ones. And understanding what's been in the materials, I think is also quite important when we design spaces and especially if we design spaces in which evacuation can be difficult. Let's say, hospitals or maybe tall buildings where you could expect some people to be exposed to smoke. So there's no really easy way to satisfy the generation and spread of fire and smoke within the construction works by a single mean, but considering whether something can burn or not and what's it made of can really influence the course of your considerations regarding to this particular requirement.
Wojciech:Let's move to the third one. The spread of fire to neighboring construction works is limited. This is a very interesting one and if I look this is my personal, honest opinion If I look at the Palisades fire in Ley, for me the buildings were ridiculously close to each other. I'm not even sure if there is a way that you could satisfy this requirement in such a densely built environment with a lot of buildings so close to each other, with the spaces between the buildings which are filled with vegetation. It's just for me, I'm not sure if I could engineer that in a safe way without making the buildings further away.
Wojciech:And this is a really simple thing. If you want to build a building that's standing in an empty space surrounded by emptiness non-combustible emptiness then you solve the problem. There's no spread of fire to neighboring construction works right, then you solve the problem. There's no spread of fire to neighboring construction works, right? If you build in a dense urban environment or maybe in a national park or in some other wuy area, you start to be considering how your construction work affects its surroundings and how the surroundings will affect your construction work. And it's not just about building material, it's not something that you can solve on your own as well, because the surroundings of your building are also going to affect how vulnerable your house is or your building is and, in that context, how your building will spread the hazard further. And I think, while we have some general guidelines, in Poland we have guidelines of how far you need to put the building from the edge of your plot, for example, and that also is related to the type of a building on the adjacent plot, to the amount of windows that buildings have and so on. I think those are pretty good practical requirements for placing the buildings in safe distances. But you need to consider that safe distance Like at, to consider that safe distance, like at what distance your building is going to create hazard, and I think, again, many people would oversimplify this and would not really give this a really thorough consideration.
Wojciech:And today. We also know that it's not just radiation from the external plumes, it's not just this direct impact of fires, but it's also, perhaps, firebrands generation. At this point we don't really have good grasp on how much firebrands are generated in building fires, while we recognize that once the wildland fire reaches human development and houses start igniting, the firebrand showers change. You suddenly have a completely different type of a firebrand shower. I've had this discussion with Albert Simoni in the podcast episode about WE fires shortly after Maui fires, once the first house is hit, it starts producing firebrands and that's going to spread. It's not something we address yet in our building codes. Perhaps there are building codes that address that, but it's something that a fire safety engineer should be aware. So my simple overview of the spread of fire in neighboring construction, of how your building is going to spread the fire to neighboring construction, is how far. It is Very simple thing to consider and a very important lens to view your project and how much stuff it can generate that will spread far away and to what extent it's going to be vulnerable to stuff coming its way from the outside. That's another thing how vulnerable your house is or your building is to the firebend showers. Okay, so we've covered three of them, two more to go After we finish them.
Wojciech:I'll probably reiterate the main points. Let's move to the occupants can leave the construction works or be rescued by other means. So we're now considering the fire safety through the lens of evacuation and being able to escape your buildings. And, of course, when a building fire happens, you don't want to have your occupants to be affected by the fire, which means they've escaped the building, and different building codes would impose different regulations. Some would just give you the travel distances or widths of your pathways, number of staircases. Some would tell you to run analysis, perhaps available versus required safe evacuation type of analysis, to prove that evacuation can happen. Those would be very, again, deep fire engineering considerations that we are used to be doing, but if we take a step back and look at the general principles, so first, yes, we want people to be able to escape from the fire, from the building. For that they need sufficient capacity of exits and evacuation pathways. In some buildings I would say this is less of a problem. Any pathway through which a person can go is good. In some buildings, like sports arenas, where you have to evacuate tens of thousands of people at the same time, having this capacity matching the capacity of the building is absolutely critical. That's a fire engineering problem, but in general the high level perspective is that you need to provide those people a space to escape. And now some things that could end up really bad and I think an engineer should really look at that perhaps are not listed in the code that explicitly.
Wojciech:I like to look at my projects in to what extent I have dead ends in my building, especially dead ends in which a person could be surprised by the fire. This especially something that I look into when I'm designing car parks enclosed car parks, underground car parks. Sometimes the developers tend to make those labyrinth style car parks where you drive around, let's say, the core of the building, for example, and you park in a very remote space at the end of a very long pathway that curves multiple times, and to me those dead ends are very challenging because I imagine that there could be a person out there which does not see the entirety of the car park and if the fire happens in a different part of the car park and that person, for example, is cleaning their vehicle, having a loud vacuum cleaner with them, they could be actually surprised by the smoke coming their way. They would not know the fire is happening in the building and at that point the smoke would be coming through the only escape path that person has, creating a really potentially lethal trap to that person. And the same goes to corridors with dead ends. The same happens to the way how layouts of buildings are built. If people venture into a space from which they will have no escape and they are unable to go back to the way they have entered, you create a trap. And I believe this is how many, many people have perished in fires. And it's not because well, sometimes it would be because sometime someone broke a law or designed it incorrectly. But I believe not enough consideration was given to the problem of whether you will always have a pathway to escape and having those two pathways and if you don't have two pathways, completely independent pathways to escape. Making sure that the person has ample time to escape with this single in all considerations allows them to safely find the route to pathway to escape.
Wojciech:Another aspect of this which perhaps is not appreciated enough in many engineering projects is that you also need good information about the fire, so people not only have to have you know the ability, the means of escape I like the term means of escape. They not only have means to escape, but they also have information that a fire is happening and they need to escape right now and they have to have knowledge on how to do that. And this information layer would be as important as the building layer in your project and it's not that you can replace one with the other. Both have to exist in a project. And it is especially difficult because the knowledge part comes with the building users and we as building designers. We commission a building. Our job is done. So it's not that we're going to stay in the project and educate the users of the building on how to escape it. We need to create some tool set that allows the building on how to escape it. We need to create some tool set that allows the building operator to convey that knowledge to the building users.
Wojciech:So that's quite a big information challenge to do and I would say it's extremely important to understand how big difference this makes in a building evacuation case BD-7974.6 or going to Reno's paper from NIST on pre-evacuation time distributions, how vastly different those times are in different types of occupancies. This must be recognized by the engineer. This must be understood and the risks related to building a building in which the occupants will be highly trained, there will be high level of maintenance support, there will be fire wardens on every floor. The risks are completely different from a space where you may have random people who just ventured there. They are not trained and there's no one to manage them. Those are two completely different buildings and I think more care has to be given to this very fundamental consideration how people will be informed about the event of fire and how knowledgeable the people will be about how to escape this building in the case of a fire. Very simple thoughts, but they really need good consideration by the engineering team.
Wojciech:I also had this very interesting episode with Michael Woodrow in this podcast and he was using the examples like this very, very simple ideas that you want. Tell the architects that you want people to be able to leave the building and they can work solutions around. That that's good communication, that's great communication in the engineering team and that's also something I would be advocating for. And then here I also can plug that I have another podcast on COVID Witness in which the means of escape and this good communication crafting good tools to communicate to building users are covered in depth in like eight episodes. If you enjoy this, you'll definitely enjoy that one.
Wojciech:The final one on my list, coming from the CPR, is the safety of rescue teams is taken into consideration, and that is a really tough one. A really tough one for us fire safety engineers, because we're not fire rescuers Perhaps some of you are, and I believe that this is absolutely fantastic to have this type of experience as a fire safety engineer. I do not have this experience, but I wish I had. I know a lot of good fire safety engineers are also voluntary firefighters. I think that this really builds up your understanding of this aspect of rescue team fire safety. So we often do things that are meant to help the fire rescuers, but I think the main thing is you need to talk with them. You need to build a pathway of communicating with the rescue teams and actually find out what they want from the building. Especially if you're designing a very complicated, high-end, very tall or very large building, you really need to have this feedback about what the fire rescuers would expect from a building, because sometimes we focus on stuff that we believe are super important.
Wojciech:For me, a case of smoke control. It's kind of painful, because often I spend so much time designing smoke control in a building with this higher goal of safety of rescuers or giving them ability to come close to the fire, and sometimes they don't trust the smoke control, sometimes they don't understand it. Sometimes the fact that I've made a pathway for them with the smoke control, sometimes they don't understand it. Sometimes the fact that I've made a pathway for them with my smoke control is not used because they were not aware that the pathway exists. It clearly lack lack of communication between those two and even though I've designed my building with the objective in mind to support the safety of rescuers, I've not really done that.
Wojciech:And you solve that. And you solve that by communicating. You solve that by talking with them and understanding their goals. And perhaps all they want is more water supply. Perhaps they want an easier path of access, perhaps they want to be able to park in a specific location in front of your building, perhaps they need access to some part of the building you did not think about. And in here, the only easy or well, it's not easy, but the only high-level advice I can give to you is to talk more, to communicate better with your fire brigade and I think if you do that, that's going to significantly improve your safety of your buildings. That's a simple thing that you can do to really significantly improve the safety in your building. So we went through five functional requirements coming from a CPR and I've promised you, you know, easy solution eat less, sleep well, exercise.
Wojciech:It's probably not possible to do it perfectly for fire safety, whereas in the real world you really need to work on all three of those. In fire safety, if you lack in one, you can over-engineer other ones and create a system that will still work. That's actually robustness or redundancy, which I'm going to talk about in a minute. But anyway, if I had to summarize the easy things that you really always need to consider in your buildings for the structures will it participate in the fire? For materials are they combustible or not? For the spread of the fire to neighboring buildings is how far my building is in relation to others? For occupants is there a space where they could be trapped and do they have the information and knowledge that allows them to evacuate? And for safety of rescue teams were they even consulted? And those are simple, really simple guidance that if you did that, you probably got most of the fire safety in your project and if any of those brings you doubt if your structure is participating in fire, well then you have some fire safety engineering to do in front of you and you should really probably do a good job of doing that, because that's a challenge. If you have materials that are combustible, you really need to understand what that means to your building and so on.
Wojciech:Simple lenses to view the projects, and I think in many projects it's the lack in those simple things that creates real farm hazards and leads to really bad outcomes in fires. So now that, as I've said, I've not found a complete answer in the CPR requirements, even though they're pretty complete, it's hard to give sound, easy advice on what you should do to get your buildings working. So I was thinking about some more simpler, even things to go even simpler from those simple terms, and I thought that one advice, one easy thing, is related to redundancies. So perhaps you're familiar with this Swississ cheese model of safety, layers of safety. I'm not sure who to credit for it, but I've definitely learned it from professor gilmrain. He's a big fan of this concept. It basically means that fire safety encompasses with layers and there's gonna be holes in all of those layers, like holes in your swiss, and only when the holes in the layers match a problem can get through all of them. And if each of them has holes but other layers cover for the holes in the previous ones, you still have a system that prevents failure because some of the layers will stop the problem. And fire safety truly is a multi-layered system with multiple things that can go wrong, but also multiple things to prevent a disaster and those systems cover for each other. And I think thinking about redundancies is critical when thinking about good fire safety solutions.
Wojciech:And one way you can think about it is to find whether you have a very strong single point failure things in your building like a failure of a single thing that can really take the building down or create a massive hazard. Looking for those in your projects, looking at your projects through this lens, do I have a single point failure of all systems? This really can prevent the biggest disasters. For me, such failures are usually related to building automation, like if you have a catastrophical failure in your detection. If you've never detected the fire, nothing will work in your building. If you have an integrating system and it does not work in some way does not do theIR scenario, you're going to have a single point failure in your building If your scenario changes while the building operates in the FHIR. It happens sometimes in some projects that there's a mistake in how the FHIR automation scenario is written. I had an entire podcast episode on that in FHIR Fundamentals. If you have these catastrophic failures of the systems, they're all going to not work, they will not work at all and you're going to have a catastrophical failure. Avoiding those single point failures gives you this robustness.
Wojciech:And I've also said resiliency. For me, resiliency is a buzzword, but I really like it. You know, I really like it and I really like applying resiliency to find safety and I really like applying resiliency to find safety. Resiliency means or at least that's how I understand it it means how quickly you can bring back the normal operations after a fire, so how quickly the building will come back. The more resilient it is, the easier it is to return to normal operations. And I like to view projects from the perspective of resiliency because if you focus only on life safety and those considerations that we would do for life safety, you have perhaps this single point of failure in the design. You're only viewing problems from one angle, to come back after a fire as soon as possible and view your design from this perspective, you can find things that you would overlook if you only viewed it from the life fire safety point of view. Also, from my experience, all solutions that work really well for resiliency, they would also work very well for just the life safety of your building, for evacuation of your occupants, for minimizing the fire spread, for minimizing the life safety of your building, for evacuation of your occupants, for minimizing the fire spread, for minimizing the fire damage in your building. So I also think that introducing resiliency simply improves the fire safety of your building on all layers, and it's just a different way how can you view your building.
Wojciech:I've also said that the simple thing that will work is suppression. I'm a massive fan of suppression systems. There's nothing better in the case of a fire than getting rid of the fire, and that's pretty much the only way you, as the building designer, can get rid of the fire. To use some sort of suppression systems to extinguish, control, suppress whatever term or goal you have in your mind Putting water fast in your fire. There's nothing better you can do. There's no better way to improve efficiency of smoke control than reducing the size of a fire. There is no better way to improving the fire resistance of your walls than shortening the length of the fire and the severity of it. There's no better thing for evacuation than suppressing the fire and not having it produce smoke and heat to endanger your occupants. There's nothing better for limiting the spread of a fire to neighboring structures than suppressing it within your structure, not allowing it to escape your building. It acts on all the layers.
Wojciech:It's just such a phenomenal tool and I'm really pissed that in some places it would be considered expensive and necessary. We're even talking about this thing called the sprinkler culture. In US they have a sprinkler culture. In Europe we don't have a sprinkler culture. I US, they have a sprinkler culture. In Europe we don't have a sprinkler culture. I hate it. There should not be such a distinction. It's such a magnificent tool and also it's a really good redundancy layer, because usually those systems would operate on pressures. They would have their own thermal mechanisms to release water, so they act as a secondary detection system. It's a really valuable tool and I wish we could use more of that in our projects, allowing us to engineer around it, perhaps reducing some of other requirements that we put on our buildings if you have good water suppression in them, because it really makes such a big difference. Of course they have reliability. They can fail. That's a thing to consider. But for me, if I have Sprinklers in my building I am so much more comfortable with all of my fire safety engineering because literally this one addition has single-handedly improved every other fire safety aspect of my building on every single layer. Everything is just better fire safety aspect of my building on every single layer. Everything is just better. So I guess, uh, sprinkles in here would be an equivalent of exercise. Perhaps I don't know.
Wojciech:Anyway, in this episode I I was really challenging, you know to, to try and and simplify stuff, to find the simple things in this really really complicated world of fire safety engineering that we are dealing with. I'm not sure if I'd done the best job in the world. If you have some own ideas about the simple things that really make tremendous difference in fire safety engineering projects that really change the way how buildings are. And I'm not talking about increasing fire resistance from 60 minutes to two hours. I'm talking about those really simple things like taking into account whether you can trap people in your building or not. It's such a simple and profound thing that you can save lives by applying this lens on your building and really, when I see those disastrous fires in the world, it's very rarely that those projects lacked minutes of fire resistance. It's very rarely that there should have been euro class b instead of euro class c in the materials of that building. Really, really, those high level engineering things, they matter. They matter a lot when you go in depth.
Wojciech:But those biggest failures usually happened at the simplest terms and and I think we're not focusing enough on getting the simple things really well in our profession and I wish we did collectively a better job in that. So if you have good ideas on how to improve this further, perhaps you have some more things to be added on the list. Perhaps you have better solutions. Perhaps you can capture the spirit of some of the requirements from the cpr better than I did. I'm definitely not a structural engineer that one was a big challenge to me but perhaps you have good ideas on on recommendations we could give to fellow fire safety engineers. I would be very happy if you let me know and I'll try perhaps revisit this in a year or two. Maybe I'll have some more clean thoughts on all of this that has been discussed in this episode.
Wojciech:It was a journey. It was very interesting to prepare this episode for you. It gave me a lot of space to think about my own fire safety engineering and I think I'm a little better fire safety engineer than I have been yesterday and I hope it was also entertaining, interesting to you, to look at fire safety engineering from a different angle than we do it in here. Every week, and speaking about that, every weeknesday is the day when new fire science show episodes come up, and next week it's not gonna be any different. So hoping to see you all in the fire science show next wednesday. Thank you very much, see you there. Bye, thank you.