Fire Science Show
Fire Science Show
206 - Fire Engineering Infrastructural Projects with Mukesh Tomar
Today I'm taking you for a sightseeing trip to see what fire safety looks like beyond our usual office, residential buildings and car parks. Fire engineering takes on an entirely different dimension when applied to massive infrastructure projects where conventional building codes provide minimal guidance and engineers must forge their own path.
Dr. Mukesh Tomar from Jacobs takes us deep into the world of "non-real estate fire engineering" – the complex realm of cable tunnels stretching dozens of kilometres, nuclear facilities requiring marathon-like design processes, and mega-airports that function as entire cities. These projects demand fundamentally different approaches from traditional buildings, with engineers often working without clear objectives while balancing multiple stakeholders' requirements.
The challenges are as fascinating as they are daunting. How do you establish evacuation strategies for maintenance workers in remote utility tunnels? What happens when nuclear safety requirements from different global standards conflict with each other? And how do you integrate new fire safety systems with decades-old infrastructure during airport expansions? We explore these questions while uncovering the frustrations and rewards of engineering at this scale.
Perhaps most thought-provoking is how these specialised challenges are increasingly relevant to everyday buildings. As electric vehicle charging brings industrial-scale electrical systems into residential buildings, the line between conventional and infrastructure fire safety grows increasingly blurred. Without clear objectives and specialised expertise, are we adequately addressing these emerging risks?
Whether you're a seasoned infrastructure engineer or working primarily in traditional buildings, this episode offers valuable insights into the outer boundaries of fire safety engineering and the critical importance of establishing clear objectives before attempting solutions. Follow the Fire Science Show for more deep dives into the fascinating world where fire science meets real-world engineering challenges.
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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. Today we're talking fire engineering, and fire engineering is a very specific set of projects, very interesting set of projects. Today we are talking broadly infrastructure, energy, really big projects which cannot be qualified as your everyday real estate. I thought that a lot of engineers listening to this podcast are obviously in the space for building stuff like residential buildings, office buildings, car parks, malls, etc. That's our everyday jobs and that pays the bills. But for safety, engineering is so much broader, so much broader, and there is a lot of interesting things happening in different sectors of built environment which I would love to bring to you as well.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I'm personally a bit involved in non-real estate projects. We're doing a lot of tunnels, as you know, listening to this podcast, but the scope and the world is much bigger than that. Therefore, I've invited a guest, dr Mukesh Tomar, from Jacobs, and he actually has a pretty big experience working on different types of very large infrastructural and non-real estate projects across the world, many of them in Middle East, which brings a very interesting perspective into how fire safety engineering looks of interesting aspects, from being able to define the objectives of the engineering, working with the local governments or authorities, building up the knowledge base to start even with the project and figuring out a project specific considerations. We talk about very long cable tunnels in remote locations. We talk a bit on nuclear. We talk a bit airports. I think it will bring you a very interesting perspective and if you actually work on non-real estate infrastructural projects, this will bring you a lot of things that you can relate to in your everyday engineering job. So I hope we captured the spirit of a little bit different fire safety engineering in the non-real estate projects. So please join me and Lukasz in this episode.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Let's spin the intro and jump into the episode. Welcome to the Fire Science Show. My name is Wojciech Wegrzyński and I will be your host. The FireSense Show is into its third year of continued support from its sponsor, ofar Consultants, who are an independent, multi-award-winning fire engineering consultancy with a reputation for delivering innovative, safety-driven solutions. As the UK leading independent fire risk consultancy, ofr's globally established team have developed a reputation for preeminent fire engineering expertise, with colleagues working across the world to help protect people, property and the planet. Established in the UK in 2016 as a startup business by two highly experienced fire engineering consultants, the business continues to grow at a phenomenal rate, with offices across the country in eight locations, from Edinburgh to Bath, and plans for future expansions. If you're keen to find out more or join OFR Consultants during this exciting period of growth, visit their website at ofrconsultantscom. And now back to the episode. Hello everybody, I am joined today by Dr Mukesh Tomar, the head of fire engineering at Jacobs in London. Hey, mukesh, good to have you in the podcast.
Mukesh Tomar:Lik ewise, Wojciech . I was thinking of making a session with you on this special podcast, so it's an opportunity for me, actually, and it's a pleasure to be here.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Yeah, it's a pleasure for me. It's always fun to talk with fellow fire engineers about fire engineering, and today we're going to talk about fire. You called it non-real estate type of build environment. I usually call it infrastructure fire engineering, but that's the thing we're going to talk, so maybe can you define the scope where we will be in today's episode.
Mukesh Tomar:Yeah, I'll tell you. That's why I say non-real estate fire engineering, because I see someone who is also a fire engineer, by the way. I can meet him in a pub or somewhere. And when he asks, can you fire engineer? I say yeah, I'm a engineer, by the way, like and meet him like in pub or somewhere. And when he asked me, like you fire engineers, yeah, I'm fine, like what you do, that's like I do the same stuff as you do. And then it's hard for me to explain them like why is so different like what I do from what they do? Like you know which? What the most of the fire engineers do is like a real estate project, which is office walls or the commercial, the buildings. But very few have, like what? Experience on the infrastructure wide. So when you say infrastructure is quite hard, some people only think like it could be, like you know, industrial projects, like factories and warehouses, those kind of things. So it's not really on infrastructure. So for me it's like real estate and non-real estate.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:It's the easy version of saying like what we generally count in infrastructure if I had to qualify myself into a group, I would say I am in that case 70% infrastructure fire engineer and 30% real estate fire engineer. So I also touched a bit of both worlds and I can relate to the, in one hand, this engineering looking the same. In one hand it's been completely back. First question to ask what's your background? How did you come to fire engineering and when did your career take a twist into the infrastructure projects? Did you work on real estate before?
Mukesh Tomar:Oh yeah, my career is full of turns and twists, you know. So if I have to start back like, in 2007, I graduated with mechanical engineering and I went it for a master's in aerospace engineering quite interesting.
Mukesh Tomar:and then I worked in winter as well for testing of like some buildings, aircraft, aerofoils, whatever you call it and after that I ended up in working for a medical firm which was to design for the medical equipment. Quite interesting, from mechanical to aerospace, to designing medical equipment but I had a passion of doing something in the field of either thermal or aerodynamics or those sort of things. So I was not really planning a career in the construction sector or the consulting sector, where I'm currently, but it just happened that I got an opportunity in 2011 and I joined the company in India back in those days and then we started with fire. So I was starting as a fire fighting engineer, fire protection engineer, generally make design for sprinklers and those active systems, generally speaking. So I worked on lots of these triples, by the way, and I've done lots of these triples. The problem I found and it's not a problem it just get boring after a certain point when you know there are standard that you can use and you can make your design. So the challenging part is like I would say like 10 20 person in those work. But but what I was always like? You know that I need to make a strategy so I can change the whole dynamics of the things. I can make things more you know, valuable or useful. Hence I was trying to shift it into the fire engineering, the actual fire engineering where we make fire strategies, and it took me like quite five, six, seven years. And then when I shifted to Dubai in 2015, and then I started slowly, slowly shifting into the fire engineering and since then it's been fun.
Mukesh Tomar:So my first entry to the infrastructure project was in 2017, when I was working on Al Maktoum Airport in Dubai and I have to deal with a project where we had a number of road tunnels, tunnels, and I got surprised that how come, in 2016 and 17, we have such a limited data for road tunnel fire. And then I got excited as well, because when you don't have something, it's a possibility, right. I see it as a possibility that I can pursue it. I thought of doing a PhD in that topic, and then I also, like you know, started reading the codes and practices by different people, like what AECOM does, what Atkinson, what Tha does, what everyone else does, just to compare, and to my surprise, they all were slightly different than each other, and so does the codes of the various countries.
Mukesh Tomar:So it is like I'm not able to understand how can a code or standard in UK, europe, asia or USA can be completely different than each other while they're solving the same problem. I mean, you know, I'm still not 100% sure. How does it work? So when I work on this project like one is in India, one is in Dubai or in Saudi and one is in UK, one is in Europe and they all follow a different code and the approach is completely different the objectives are completely different. Sometime, or most of the time, half the time, the objectives are not very clear.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I have this from the opposite side, so I'm mostly dealing with projects in Poland, but we have engineering offices from all around the world trying to do projects in here and I am the one explaining that it's different in here. Like we do it differently and people are always surprised like why is it different? Would you say that those infrastructure larger projects allowed you to do more fire engineering? Because in the world of residential commercial buildings I feel everything's prescribed In Poland you would only engineer smoke control. Really, you absolutely don't.
Mukesh Tomar:I mean, if you look at the very old standard, like you know, if you talk about, for example, nfpas are like NFPA 101 or 5000, which are mainly for life safety code, the similar codes of UK or Europe or the Middle East. They are very similar. Similar codes of UK or Europe or the Middle East. They are very similar. They're written in a way that you can adopt them in a building and you can make your design according to them and most cases they are purely prescriptive work, exceptionally in few projects where you have challenge.
Mukesh Tomar:You do a little bit of performance-based and which is most limited to work you on a few of the CFD cases and then you dissolve it and then you show asset-to-asset and some smoke layer and that's it, that's all. But here in infrastructure it's quite opposite to the real estate projects or those projects it can be as hard as 80%, 90% performance-based and only factor-in-person prescriptive-based. There are a few examples that they are fully performance based, 100% performance based. So when you start you really don't know what you need to achieve and so you know it gets very, very interesting when you work on those projects that there are no clear objective what you want to achieve, and then you get challenged under like whatever you say, because you don't have a benchmark to set like you know that we need to start here.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Why would you say you don't have an objective to achieve, so there's no authority that has an objective. The authority doesn't know what the objective should be, or they choose inappropriate objectives.
Mukesh Tomar:Okay, so since you touched on the authority, I'll call myself lucky on a project where I can interact with authority. So it varies from region to region. It is usually in certain region, I'll not name which reasons. You can only contact authority. Once you finish your project. You submit it for the final or, like issue, for construction level of design. So when it goes to construction then you have the first opportunity to interact with the authorities, and that's too late for such projects.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:But there is a client. The client must know an objective. Okay.
Mukesh Tomar:That's really a very high ambition to have a client which knows the real object I mean with no respect to any client so they do know some of the objective, but when it comes to fire, things become critical. So if I have to take an example, let's consider an example of 60 or 50 kilometer long of cable tunnels in a place like there's no city or nothing in there, like there's no fire service at all. So what do you expect the client to have as a requirement of object from the fire engineering? They don't really sometimes know, like, what it means to them. So we have to tell them and the things become challenging in such a long and complex project what it means to them. So we have to tell them and the and the things become challenging in such a long and complex project when you need to work. So as a fire engineer, we work against few objects. Like we need to make sure that the people who are there either occupying the building or the facility or working for maintenance, are safer. They can they can go out safely if there's any incident. Second, there should be an inherent and if not exclusively, provision to have the continuity of that business, so someone should not lose all of the investment or the or the work that they have done, and then there should be a resilience as well. So property protection, business continuity, life safety, all of them right.
Mukesh Tomar:So if you look at the code for the standards of any country, they are mainly code for the standard for the building. So we have a building regulation in uk. There is similar building course or building fire course in in various countries in middle east, but they cover building, interestingly, right, and we're talking about infrastructure. So sometimes they have one liner. There is. There are few countries they have tried to put a table in their standard or their building aggregation codes, one table to cover the all the infrastructure project, saying like, okay, if you have a cable tunnel, do this, just one line.
Mukesh Tomar:That's just not the way to to deal with making your objective for such a infrastructure heavy project. So when I'm saying like there's no objective or there's no clear objective, what I mean is like, because I don't have a building code saying to me, how do I make sure the people are safe? Everything I propose is just going to be my own interpretation of how do I do for engineering. Right, so I could do, you could do differently. And even in my team some people can do it totally differently than me. Then it becomes a hard sell to the authorities, to the client. Whatever we are saying makes sense. So that's why I say there is no clear, defined objective. It varies quite significantly in this project sometimes.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I like the example that you brought, the 60 kilometer long cable tunnel. That's such an abstract concept to me that I would love to put it forward if you're willing to talk about examples like that. So okay, obviously let's agree. Life safety, continuity, property resilience that's, let's say, groups of objectives that we can narrow. Life safety continuity, property resilience that's, let's say, groups of objectives that we can narrow. Life safety I probably limited, because it's going to be manned only where the cable connects. There's not going to be people in the cable.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:So let's say, life safety is like default, probably okay. Now how do you care for other? Because like it feels like kind of binary, like Another objective you could put in is I do not have a fire in the tunnel, which is realistically very difficult to achieve with 100%. So where do you put those boundaries? How much safety for continuity, for productivity protection would you like to put in and how the hell you quantify that? That's a very interesting question.
Mukesh Tomar:So there are a few clans that try to go to that level of resilience that what if we just don't allow fire to happen or not to grow? So we're talking about like an environment where the either oxygen is too low or something similar, something similar. We have not explored those for the cable tunnels for various reasons, but we did explore them for some warehouses and data center and some nuclear plants, and the outcome was that is a very complex solution. It looks very simple on paper, very simple, that you can reduce the oxygen and you can do some other methods and then the fire will never happen. But it's like your insurance policy you have one page of the cover and you have 100 pages of your terms and conditions. You know what I mean. Yeah, it's in some way it's like that. So when you read the fine prints you will know what I mean. So when you, when you're trying to go with that approach that, can we do it completely foolproof that fire will never happen? The answer is no. That's not going to be achievable, unless someone just makes it on paper, which is of course you have to accept, but then it won't happen. So now let's go down to the objectives Life safety. It looks very simple that life safety shouldn't be an issue but believe me, there are people when they go in work there, because of their arrangement it depends.
Mukesh Tomar:If there's a partition between the large utility, tunnels could be like you know, someone can separate the dry utility from wet, or it can be some of the separations. When you have separation and it's a far separation, it's slightly easier so you can transfer people to other side and then they can slowly, slowly go outside. But when it's just a unique direction, just one way traffic tunnel or like one way, simply one tube, it becomes so hard because you don't have a huge clear height or the area to contain the smoke, so any fire, you are just chasing your life as a staff or whoever you are. And with such a long tunnel you aren't expecting exits or the cat ladders or the access hatches at a few meters. We're talking at least a few hundred meters, if not a few kilometers. So in one of the examples we had a two kilometer example. We had a two kilometer. So you can imagine like if you, if you are very good runner and when you are very good senses of sensing there's something wrong and you make it right point you make your exit and then you may be able to reach there.
Mukesh Tomar:All you justify by a cfd simulation, by your fire hazard analysis, that what could burn, how it can burn and what level of smoke and soot and everything else can give. So you're running basically against a cfd scenario. I just hope like it's going to be that scenario in the real life if it has to happen. So those are the challenges for life safety as well.
Mukesh Tomar:And now if you talk about property protection, unfortunately unless you provide an active fire suppression and that's also some people will debate or is concerned because of having active separation in such facilities, it's not a good idea. But I'm pretty open, I do accept those solutions. So if you have to put one, you increase your chance of property protection and business continuity. I'm not saying that you will just eliminate, that will never happen but you reduce your, your loss in a way. So those are the general things, but there are a number of five engineering options by which you can enhance your property production and business content. You can provide or propose some horizontal compartmentation, which we are doing currently in one of the utility tunnels. We are putting compartmentation at an interval.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I'm asking that because some decision can be taken in an abstract space, Like you can say. It's better to compartmentalize this. And then the question is like okay, so every 100 meters, every 200 meters.
Mukesh Tomar:Exactly.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:In a general, broad sense, it's easy to come with a solution. It's just very hard to narrow it in the technical details that you know that it's feasible, that it's economically viable and it's going to like provide you. So I'll give you an example from my world. So we were designing a road tunnel it's not a fire example. So we were designing a road tunnel and the road tunnel had a massive ventilation station which is quite near a residential district, and the occupants of the district were very annoyed with the fact that there's a big ventilation building nearby, as they envisioned that they're going to be dying out of smoke very soon.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:As if the road was not in tunnel, they would not. Of course, the cars would then magically not emit any smoke. Cars would then magically not emit any smoke. But anyway, the public was very hard on the investor. You need to install filters. That was the message of the public, and we get that message Like what do we do with it?
Wojciech Wegrzynski:And I'm like to design filters. I need to know two things. One is what's my initial concentration, so how much the cars can emit, which I can calculate which, by the way, I did, and it's not very much, but still and two, what is my target? Like they want filters, tell me what level of air filtration do you expect me to have? Only then I can narrow down a technical outline of a solution that will take the concentration from point A to point B. And at this moment the discussions pretty much never followed because it was impossible to one narrow down the initial conditions. It was already hard, and the more we narrowed them down, the more it looked like we don't need filters. And the second thing was they were just unable to provide me the target.
Mukesh Tomar:Exactly that's the problem In the large infrastructure project. If you have your objectives clearly defined, what you need to achieve, you have already finished half of the job, believe me. Because they are not clearly defined, they are sometimes just not available. Sometimes it's worse. They are sometimes just not available. Sometimes it's worse, they are contradictory. They've been recommended in multiple sorts of documents and they're contradicting with each other. So that's another thing.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:And for resilience or property. How do you quantify the targets?
Mukesh Tomar:At the end of the day, we are a human being. We try to do as much as possible to keep the risk as low as as possible and but at the same time, we are also consultant, we have a contractual obligation. I mean, we should not be, we should not driving our thoughts by how we feel, but what is the right way of doing? If there's a way exist, so also in this project. I'll give you a nice example, without quoting the trend and the project. So we did a projects in middle east and we made the life safety requirement and if there are any property protection or resilience requirement, the client should tell us right, because you are, you are the operator, owner of the facility. You must know what you need to protect and what is your resilience. If you tell me that I'm supplying from this cable tunnel to a facility which should never shut down and this is the only source of supply, then I know that what you're talking about. But these details are never available.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:How would you define resilience? Perhaps we should define the term for the general audience.
Mukesh Tomar:Okay. So resilience is like, in a very simple layman's language, not having a single point of failure. Resilience to me I mean you can grow in a more complex manner, but in simple words, like if you take an example of that heat throw shutdown for 24 hours from a substation fire probably it was a case of resilience was not afforded to the project In some way. I'm not saying that it was not there, but it was not completely afforded to the project in that case. So if you have a single point of failure to a facility or to a function which is absolutely critical for an important reason, like it could be a connectivity to a country, it could be a strategical project or location or tunnel, or it could be a power plant which you cannot afford to shut down for even for a few hours. So in that sense, you need to tell us that, guys, we have this tunnel supplying to this critical facility and this northern end sea. If that's the case, we have a number of other ways to incorporate that resilience in the same project. But of course it will everything, every request will add up some sort of cost, right? So while every client is pushing towards a cost-effective solution which is fair and fine in all respect. But then if there's no clearly defined objective, we just can go a little far. So we ask them a number of times to the particular client that if you have any requirement for resilience of business, sometimes it comes from insurance. So if there's an insurance requirement, do let us know. But we just navigate it.
Mukesh Tomar:And then, interestingly enough, we had a third representative who raised this question at the very last hour of the project, that we are fully okay with this project, that you meet the life safety, but have you made your client aware that there is a limited property protection or the business continuity or resilience offered by this design? I wow, someone is talking my language, so I got happy. But the problem is we welcome all sorts of inputs to the project, but it has to be the right time. And how would the client see that? So, while it was a very good point to be made as an authority representative, but as a client, it just became like it seems like someone has missed the spot completely.
Mukesh Tomar:And then we have to go in depth and telling them that how it works. And then we explain no, we said this, we asked this, we never get the feedback and we assume this, this, this, this, and therefore we end up in this design. Even now, if you tell us, like what is the objective, we're happy to incorporate. But the answer was okay, we'll come back to you and like incorporate, but the answer was okay, we'll come back to you and like, as you said, they will never end up in. Like you're not coming up with a clearly, uh defined object at what they need to achieve, because there isn't one. They have to work with different stakeholder of that project. It's a complex process, it's very complex it's not easy.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:That's why I like tunnels and risk, because I can set a quantifiable risk target to my tunnel. I can say I want the risk to be one, two minus four and I'm happy with that design. We're done. I've asked for clarification on resilience because a lot of people understand the term differently and I also understand it a little different than you and I also understand it a little different than you. So for me resilience usually was the ability to recover after the fire. So how quickly, how well and how completely I can.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:But I'm happy to embrace your definition of not having a single point failure. I mean, it's a very broad term and I don't think our definitions would exclude each other because they lead to very similar outcomes. Yeah, I'm happy to embrace your term. Okay, but you also work in industries like nuclear. Yeah, it's for me hard to imagine nuclear industry would not have objectives figured out. So perhaps it's a different world in there where maybe there's too many objectives or too many regulators. Poland, my country, is only entering the space of nuclear. So we're designing, poland is designing, not me. Maybe one day I would be like, if someone's listening, I'm open. But Poland is designing its first large nuclear power plant and even though we've just started, for years we already are into accreditation schemes. There's like national nuclear regulatory body that we have to get accreditation to even start talking about it. There's like layers and layers and layers of formalities, and there's not even drawing yet, you know. So I feel it's completely up. Tell me more about those types of projects.
Mukesh Tomar:All right. So when I started, I compared the real estate versus non-real estate. So if I have to put things in perspective, the real estate was, let's say, it's one kilometer run and then we were doing like five to ten kilometers on the infrastructure. This is a pure marathon, nuclear, it's a pure marathon. Okay, not half marathon, not half marathon.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:It's a full marathon. I mean it still could be Ironman or something.
Mukesh Tomar:I'll tell you a few of my experience. By the way, I'm not really an expert on the nuclear fire safety by any means, but I have worked on one of the projects and been involved in a few of the things. So I can say my experience, and this is only exclusive to my experience. So here it goes. Nuclear are very different in nature. So, as I said, in the real estate we have prescriptive codes and standards telling you what to do. In the infrastructure you have prescriptive to some level. Then you have performance-based things. That is quite established in the world that we live in currently. I mean, at least we know where to go, what to do, how to find and what to achieve. At the end of the day, nuclear is a very different one. So they need to first comply with the regulatory body or the requirements. So let's say an example if I'm building a nuclear plant in the UK, for example, at some point it's a building, right, it's a building, be it underground or above ground or whatever. In a broad term, it's a building that first needs to comply with the building regulations, which is, you can choose whichever route you want, adb or BS9999, same will be applicable to Poland. So the building should comply with the minimum requirement of the building regulation of that country. That is the first starting point. Now comes the interesting fact that there are a number of practices around the globe, and when I say globe, that goes from US to Europe, to UK, to the Russia as well and to the Japan as well. So it was my first project when I was reading the requirement and the practices around the globe on one project and I was so much excited to know what they do. But the problem is the excitement soon become a bit of like confusion, because it's good to know what so many people do, but then when it comes to what we need to do, we need to get a clear way of what are we going to do in this case. So in that project I read the requirement or the practice. It's not called requirement but we just call it practices. So we have a process called reasonable good practices, so RGB.
Mukesh Tomar:So if you have, since you are in academia, you know like whenever you do a research you do a literature review. This is exactly the same. You do a literature review, like what others have been doing so far, where the industry is, and then you get the understanding. That is the first and very good basic step. But the problem is after that. If I say, for example, no US have done in a way and France has done in a completely different way, and Japan is another third different way, and Korea in fourth and the UK is fifth, what am I going to do in Poland? Am I going to try one of them or am I going to have a new, sixth way?
Mukesh Tomar:That is the problem and this is why these countries, when they plan to build a number of nuclear schemes because it's a very important piece of infrastructure, it is an infrastructure of national importance, if you know what I mean. So they must have very clear guidelines what the objectives are, and then we fire engineers know how to achieve those objectives. So we had some requirements from insurance bodies, in addition to the regional and the regular practices around the world. So when we combined them all, we got a blurred picture. You know what I mean A blurred picture. There's so many information, but what are the objectives?
Mukesh Tomar:Now the main issue is that was only for information to understand how things work in nuclear. So now you know the practices around the world. Now, if you go in your building or plant, floor by floor, room by room, and check what is in that room. So if that room has batteries, just for as an example, what type of batteries, how they are stacked, how close they are to wall, how many cables are going with them, what are the cable sizes, what are the armor, what are the supply of voltage? I mean you have to go check every single thing that you can imagine or not imagine.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I see a massive trap in this. Yeah, you know what's the trap? It's that an expectation. I'm not saying yours, but in general an expectation is that someone comes up with a set of requirements. Now I would assume that for a project like a nuclear, it must be the government. It's not like a private guy building his own nuclear power plant so.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I assume the investor is the country, the project is national, so there must be a governmental agency for that. Now, not offending anyone, but it's very unlikely. They have competency in that because this is the first time a nuclear power plant is being built in my country. So I assume, even though there may be people who have some experience from abroad and that would be amazing, but on a larger scale, the institution does not have an institutional experience in that. If you know what I mean, Now you go into this reasonably good practice analysis. People, because they are non-confident with the design, because they're doing it for the first time, may try to cherry-pick. You know the best safety parts of all different codes.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:And you end up with a Frankenstein monster of safety layers and safety margins and your project is just ridiculously over-designed. Or perhaps you choose wrong some things that are incompatible, right.
Mukesh Tomar:So I'll tell you my experience. So exactly this is what happens really that you go and cherry-pick things and at the same time we have in our back of mind that we have to always comply with the building regulation of the local authority. So that is there. But what is keep moving is what we need to do in general. So when we do the cherry picking I hate this word, cherry picking, but it just it does happen on the projects and I have to admit that it does happen. So when we do the cherry picking, we know what we are doing. But, as you can imagine, the nuclear projects are run by the process engineers. They are, like, quite expert in their own field or domain and they love to go in a very small detail of everything. So when I go and ask him that I need this battery room to be one hour or two hour fire rated from the surrounding, they don't buy this argument for just on an email or on my site. You have to build a case.
Mukesh Tomar:Exactly. I have to make a proper document or report or safety case to justify that which is okay, but that's good If they're process engineers.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:They understand risk, they understand hazards.
Mukesh Tomar:So risk analysis, hazard analysis, should be the way you can. So we do the risk analysis, a lot of risk analysis, hazard analysis, lots of hazard analysis. And then we talk to process engineer. We try to convince or like spread the message among the wider audience who is working in some sense on the project. So if they're all OK, I would be given go ahead. Ok, go with your two hour rating on this, but I mean, as good as it sounds interesting, this is equally frustrating if you have to do this for every room, every floor and the whole project. And it's just an iterative process, it's not a simply straightforward process. So this is what you probably see like the nuclear project runs for five to seven, ten years in the consultancy period, only for design which is not bad, which is not bad.
Mukesh Tomar:But just like again what I'm trying to say from the beginning, if there was clearly defined rules or document from the government or by a committee I mean it could be a committee for certain country, could be European committee, could be, you know, I don't know they can come together, work on this report or document. In a few years they can come up with a set of requirements for that area. It will be much easier, we'll save time, we'll save a lot of time and we will reduce the risk for everyone who is involved in this project. So that's what is the experience on the nuclear.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I observed this in my own country. Like the public is generally outraged that it's gonna take 10 years to design, or seven, eight years to design a power plant. Like what's so hard about designing a power plant? But now, as you bring now you understand well I mean I, I resonate with what you say and I see how it overly complicated.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:If you have to do a safety safety case for everything you do and explicitly show the reasoning behind your choices, make them align with each other, work together with people who come from a different technical culture. Because there is no Polish manufacturer of power plants, we don't have one. You need to work with Korean, french, american. There are manufacturers of those devices, so you have to team up with them and they will bring their own experience.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:They have their own requirement they will bring their own requirements and on, and on top of that you have a very, let's say, primitive fire safety code that just relates to buildings. Yeah, and they and they will say, oh, you know what? Your reactor room is 26 meters tall, so tall. So it's a high-rise building. We had that in many power plants in Poland. There were these energetic pylons going up. There had a staircase inside and they were qualified under the building law as a super tall building. We had to pressurize the staircases. That led to nowhere. They connected to a room on the bottom and another one at the height of 100 meters and you worked on that project like it was a hotel skyscraper. It was ridiculous. I forgot about that experience and now you brought it up and I don't like it.
Mukesh Tomar:Just to add one more thing on this nuclear Whatever you do at the end of the day as a fire engineer on this team, there is also a big, big input from the team who's working on blast resistance. So you may end up in saying that I need one hour fire resistance and like, let's say, 100 mm thick wall, and he may come out and say, no, I need 600 thick, 600 mm thick wall for the blast reasons. And or you cannot use your silicate fire damper because and say, no, I need 600-em thick wall for the blast reasons.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Or you cannot use your silicate fire damper because it's going to crush yield to the blast something like that.
Mukesh Tomar:And apart from the blast, there is another so many security-oriented requirements which I cannot talk. So this is very complex, but you cannot make any decision. To be, in short, in your isolation, which is good for the starting point, but when it reaches to the end point, it just becomes so frustrating.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I'll ask you a more like trivial engineer's question. So for the cable tunnel, for nuclear, that must also be a case. Let's assume you choose to design a feature for the building and you choose the fire engineering route. So I would assume the fire engineering is not that different. Like you would do some cfd you do like. Perhaps everything has a different level of uncertainty, every choice is different. But that's what I want to ask, like how do you come up with a design fire, for example for a cable tunnel or for nuclear? I mean there is no howard morgan up with a design fire, for example for a cable tunnel or for nuclear. I mean there is no howard morgan's book on design fires for nuclear facilities that you can say. Howard morgan said in 1990 that is five megawatts. No, how do you make a? How do you get to the numbers?
Mukesh Tomar:okay, so since you raised it already, I have to have to say something about it. So let's say about the cables. And interestingly they both get related to this point because the rules or the guidance that we use to define the cable fire sizes, it comes from the nuclear industry, from states, and there are new regulations, so they have certain recommendations so you can use those reports or technical documents to calculate what you should be working to and then you get a file size. But this is only a starting point and it generally gets debated a lot in the industry. That isn't the real representation. So I mean, at some some point we were so much into the project we have to literally talk to someone called a cable engineer and I was like, oh, do we have a cable engineers as well in indonesia? They are cable engineers.
Mukesh Tomar:And then we go into very much detail. And the problem with the detail is like the more you go into detail, the more you get lost and confused if you don't know what exactly you need to stop. So then onward, like what we generally do. So if it's a purely cable tunnel, we take a section of cable. So if in general it's going to be stacked on the cable trace or some supports. So we take a portion of the cable to be compromised. So if you put those number of cables and their length, it varies. Actually it varies. So I'm not giving you the right number because someone may, you know, use that number in future for some very conscious?
Wojciech Wegrzynski:yeah, you can calculate, you can come up exactly you can calculate.
Mukesh Tomar:you can calculate a length of that, the tunnel that you can sacrifice and like how many cables you have, the diameters, and then, using those Nurex guides, you will end up to a number and, believe me, sometimes it just goes to crazy number, like in recently we found it to be reaching 10 megawatt. I was surprised. There's no way, no way. But again, as I said, like it only when you go in detail of this thing and then you recognize that this is this, you know such a hard thing. But the one that I was saying like was a utility tunnel and fortunately, there were very least amount of cables. There were mainly, like, some utility pipes and you know the the water pipe, seaways, wastewater and drinking water, whatever you call it and very few cables. So it was easier because the fire load was almost nothing, so we could allow people to go for two kilometers or one kilometer for the exits. So, in fact, there's no rule.
Mukesh Tomar:That's what I'm surprised in the like. We're living in 2025 and every country has a number of cable tunnels. No one has put together a proper set of requirements and this is just amazing, right? So it's an area, a big area to develop for people who work on writing the course and standard, or the insurance companies or the clients, because you are pumping in multi-million, if not billions, of euro or pound in a facility billions of euro pound in a facility.
Mukesh Tomar:I'm not sure if I should say things that could be seen bad by the cable industry for it being the biggest client of my institute in terms of my research.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:But yeah, we've done a lot of cable stuff, and cables can be very challenging, especially if you have large numbers of cables. And you know, what's most worrying me is that, look, we discussed this here in this podcast right now in terms of some really non-typical, let's say, crazy big, complicated projects. It's like as complicated as it can get in our fire engineering world, but you have them already in your residential buildings. You want to have a few megawatts of chargers in your car park. How are you going to supply it with electricity? It's not going to magically appear in your car park. No, you are building a very heavy industry electrical network inside your residential or office building. And this is what's really frightening to me, because, while the expertise in the industry is there and the realization about the risks and hazards is there, it's inherent to the industry. They had massive cable fires. They know how bad it can be. They've learned the lesson.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Today you're building a car park underneath the residential. Yes, you're 20 chargers, 800 kilowatts. Let's go Easy move. That is really true, but it's a different discussion. I want to ask you some few more questions before we end, and I really want to get to them. So you've worked on very big projects. You mentioned some massive airports, nuclear. Those must be massive projects. Fniawm.
Mukesh Tomar:FNIAWM.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:FNIAWM. Okay, that little tunnel in Saudi Arabia? Yeah, we heard about it.
Mukesh Tomar:It's not the tunnel only Like we had Oxagon, the old floating port, and then we had Trojada.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:But tell me, how is this working on those mega projects? Like, is it different than designing your office in central?
Mukesh Tomar:oh yeah, yeah, yeah, it's just not the opposite. The fundamentals are still the same. To be honest, it's like it's like two plus two is equal to four. It's the same thing. It's just like how to find the first two and the second two to come to four. It's the problem. So let's say, like, if you have to compare very, very traditional project like a high-rise building in central London and this mega project, let's say, somewhere in Saudi Arabia, without naming anyone, so in the London project, the office building, you know what you need to apply the S999 or EDB to whatever you have the requirements, and then you have all the requirements for the means of egress, alarm, file service, access compartmentation.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Related to the building. Exactly, yeah easy.
Mukesh Tomar:I mean, you have the tables, you find the requirement, you apply. Wherever you cannot apply, then you choose the file engineering. Here I cannot have one hour data at all. Can I do a study of the radiation, whatever? And then you justify those cases and then it's easy, good to go.
Mukesh Tomar:Now you talk about that massive project in Saudi Arabia. You have, first of all, it's not a building, it's a city with a number of facilities. So in that building you may have residential, commercial, just one part of that project, and then you can have I mean, if you have airport, then it's a massive city. You have everything that you can imagine inside the airport, from hotel to hospital to jail, I mean to everything that you can expect inside the airport terminals, cargo warehouses, Then, most importantly, the infrastructure to support this all. When you work on one building, you just comply with the codes and you make a fire engineering design.
Mukesh Tomar:When you work on this kind of project, you have to make sure what you put as a design in one building this works with the infrastructure that's been provided for the larger project and they are coming to the same level. They do communicate with each other. So there's one thing called concept of operation and this is a very interesting thing and I would like to go on. So when you let's say, in one of the projects we had one building and then we have another, let's say 50 building, and then we have larger site and so many site-wide facilities, it's just not the only fire hydrant as you can think of site-wide facility or firefighting, access for the road and the turning road.
Mukesh Tomar:It's just not that. There's so many things to that. This is only a basic and primary thing. You need to think of your utilities, utilities which runs for the whole site, your water supply and if you have a central facility, how they're going to know that there's a fire in one of the terminal building? So you need to connect, you need to talk to each other right, so that that level of interaction and the coordination is a fundamental key in this kind of project. So is it to define the objective for a building perspective, individual building and for the site, but how they communicate with each other, that's a mess. That's a mess.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:In a project of that scale, you're not going to build, let's say, neom in one go. It's not a three-year project, you're going to build. So if you're building a massive airport, we're in the middle of designing a massive airport in Poland. Again, we as Poland not myself, or maybe am I, I don't know, but there's a massive project you expect it to be delivered in stages. You expect it to grow over years. How do you manage the growth years? How do you manage the growth? It's not that you're designing one final piece of infrastructure which may be delivered in 20 years. You're designing something that starts in five years and then grows until it reaches its final form after 20. So how do you secure those 15 years of operations and growth and what do you have to do for those years?
Mukesh Tomar:That's a brilliant, brilliant question and I was expecting this and you know, and that's why I'm a huge advocate of like the golden thread, of like making file engineering complete digital. So I want one expansion of projects. I was working on Dubai airport, so they have to go under expansion. Expansion are a nightmare for all the respect that you can think of, operation-wise, space-wise. So the first task if I have to break it down in simple way, like for a layman like you are talking about that the airport needs to expand its number of passengers from, let's say, 100 million to 120 million. A very simple example.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:So what you he's laughing because I just like facepalm, like about the numbers, like 120 million, it's insane.
Mukesh Tomar:Yeah. So for those additional 20 million now you need everything. You need extra parking, extra plane parking, extra apparent space or maybe extra the facility for their luggage, for their baggage handling system and their leisure facilities, launches. So whatever you can think of, you just need to extend your existing airport by a few percentage. So now you need to go first ask if there's to understand what is existing.
Mukesh Tomar:I mean, seeing is one thing, but you have to check the same thing on drawing, because ultimately you're an engineer, you're going to work against something right. So it is only luck if you can find correct drawing for an existing infrastructure project because maybe it was completed 15, 20 years back and those drawings may be not just not available and maybe only like partially available, and sometimes it just does not match with what you see on site because there has been so many changes, small, small changes. So someone has changed something small at one location in two year, then something again in five year, then something again in five years, then something again in 10 years, and those records are not well kept. So what you are seeing now from a 20 year old drawing to the site existing condition, they just don't match. That's one thing. And then you have to make them that okay.
Mukesh Tomar:If we have to make what is currently available to what I need to achieve, it requires a lot of effort to finding those problems first of all, and then making a solution for those problems. And then you go and tell your client that we need this, this, this in this space. And then there are so many other challenges and, believe me, the existing fire strategy of that space airport. They have so many restrictions that you can't do this, you can't do that, so it airport.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:They have so many restrictions that you can't do this, you can't do that, so it's just so much complex. On expansion, I received a very long letter from you, uh before the interview and uh, there was a significant part on airports.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:There's a reason why I didn't ask many airport questions in the episode, because I fully intend to do an airport exclusive episode maybe yeah airports are like a different, different world and because, uh, I'm using this podcast to train myself and we're building a big airport in poland, I'm very happy to accumulate more knowledge on airports. Uh, I've just designed, you know, uh, fire safety in the airport that handles like five million passengers. So it was for us, it was huge, but anyway, we, let's say, you have this building that was built 20 years ago or 15, 10 years ago. 10 years ago, in terms of technology, is few epochs, ridiculous difference in technology. How do you make it compatible, like I mean, you cannot just assume that you will have the same smoke alarm, fire alarm system. You cannot have the same voice system.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:They're not available anymore. It's been decades.
Mukesh Tomar:Okay, so let me tell you that there are two things to look at, like what you are trying to achieve as a client and how far we can take you as a fire consultant, right? So let's say you want to completely change the occupancy and make it modern and just to look like what we have. You know, in general these days the problem is that you cannot be fully code compliant If you start with that first fundamental principle of this project that you need to be. Generally, if you build a new one, then you need to be fully compliant with the regulation, which is easier to achieve in the new projects, in the existing one, because maybe that time there was a different code or regulation. Now we have different. They do allow. So all the codes do allow. Existing projects are not forced to meet the new regulation. But there is a very interesting thing you shouldn't be making things worse. Advisable, yeah, worse, and there is a very thin line of what you call making things worse. Let's take an example. If there was a space which was used for a big hall, now we are putting an auditorium in that. So we are of course putting more people in there. We are trying to improve on the number of exits but suppose we cannot fully comply with the number of exit requirement. We are doing a CFD to justify that. The people have got asset and asset.
Mukesh Tomar:Someone will come and say you're making things worse, but I can say, like not really. Yes, earlier there was no people, so you can't come. I mean if, like comparing apple to a orange or like you know, to a car, different things, so you can never say that you're not making things worse, and it depends on can never say that you're not making things worse and it depends on how you define what you mean by making things worse. So if you are making things worse in one way, but as, overall, you are achieving your objective, you are as close as to comply with the latest regulation, then it's not making things worse. Hence, you can say it's a very complex one, to be honest, like it's not a single line answer, but this is the starting point. You should not make things worse. You look at these spaces, the uses of them and what you are going to propose, how. But so we, yeah, think on as low as reasonably practicable, try to reduce your risk, try to improve on the system so you can rely on them. Add more compartmentation, something which you cannot change. Say, for example, you cannot change the structural fire resistance of the existing building, because it's not possible. You can't remove the roof and the column and beam, so you then need to reduce your fire load so that it can work with the existing one. And if you can't reduce the fire load, add suppression, add something else, at least make it safe for people evacuation, if you can't achieve the whole property protection. So you know, as I said, there's a number of objectives, we can work towards them, but if the ambition is to fully comply, that will not work. And this one very important aspect, at least I want to touch on this as well before we call it off. Not one and this is one very important aspect, at least I want to touch on this as well before we call it off.
Mukesh Tomar:The PRM everywhere, right on the projects. So there isn't really a clear guideline on the, even including on the real estate projects. So forget about infrastructure projects. But they're quite serious about it. Everyone is serious and we are serious as well.
Mukesh Tomar:But the problem lies from the starting of the term PRM. There are people they don't find it a good word. They feel this is like. You know, this is objectionable, this is derogatory. In some respect, this is like not, it creates discrimination in some sense. Right, the problem is that you cannot make a proper definition of PRM. I tried using few standards where they say it can be a physical condition, mental condition, an emotional condition which reduces your way of thinking using that facility. Now, how far you go with that definition. And when they have an example, when they calculated something for the PRM, they just use people on wheelchair. So there's no coherence in what you said earlier and what you are trying to say. So the client sometimes don't know when they say if it's safe for the PRM and I was like, do you know who the PRM are? And then you know it's a long topic.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:We've lost some PR battles, really Like we succumbed to engineering solutions to satisfy that requirement which is an objective.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:I mean, if politicians are the ones who are pulling the strings, then it becomes quite a valid objective. It's as valid as fire resistance is for you as a fire engineer. Unfortunately One more. We should wrap it up, but one more question. It's a technical question and possibly a stupid question, but I'll try anyway. If you have a project this big, can you still design for one fire in the premise? That's an underlying assumption of fire engineering that you learn first day as a fire engineer. We design for one fire in one building. This is the remit at which we do for engineering. If you have building of that scale, do you account for possibility?
Mukesh Tomar:yeah, I'll, I'll tell you so again, like, uh, going by the book, you are allowed to. We are allowed to just consider one scenario, but you absolutely it is the good point. We do have building where the client says number of building as one building and this is, they can get some relaxation in so many things, right. So they say, okay, these 15 buildings are one building, and then you know that actually, you know what? There could be a few fires at the same time. I mean, I don't want to say this are some cases, but it could be a very many case in some countries, right. So then why not? And if there's like two fire, then you don't have any cover. Do you really like it? And then we had some conversation with very few people who understand the complexity, and we are trying to implement this in one of the projects which I'm currently working on. Hopefully, we will be going for at least more than one file scenario, maybe two, if not three or four, but at least two file scenarios.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:At some point you just cannot add to the snowball of systems together because there starts to be a point at which those systems do not benefit from interacting with each other. If you have smoke alarm in two buildings a kilometer apart from each other building. A doesn't have to know what's happening in building B, exactly so there must be some imposed granularity in the project at which it makes sense.
Mukesh Tomar:Whatever you add as an extra layer of safety, it should increase the safety level in the building. But as you said, after a certain point it just becomes overengineering and it's not adding any further value. So there is generally a ceiling, or it decreases value. Yeah, really True, it could decrease as well. Yeah, that's an interesting aspect to look into. Yeah, it can also decrease.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Man, there's so many more I want to do, but let's agree on, you're going to give me an airport episode in the future.
Mukesh Tomar:Yeah, 100% Near future.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:That was a very interesting discussion. I mean it definitely is a different world, but I mean you seem a happy person, you seem to enjoy it, so I guess it's not like a criminal sentence for life to do a large-scale engineering industry project. There is some fun in it and definitely a lot of joy when you deliver this massive, massive thing.
Mukesh Tomar:You see, like that, you've been a big part of it right it's only a passion like which keeps us, like you're working so hard in the industry, to be right now. Because you know, because if you have real passion for fire engineering, you will go at this far, yeah, in the fire engineering as we'll be, simply, you know, working on your scope and just finishing it and going with your dog on the wall.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Which is fine, which is fine as well, but it's an interesting world and thank you for taking me to that world.
Mukesh Tomar:It's a pleasure of mine as well, like I was trying to do this for a long time, but thank you for this opportunity and I really appreciate this.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:Yeah, it was fun and that's it. Well, if you have objectives, you're 50% there. That's something that kind of resonates with me. This is the true challenge in those mega projects where the objectives are not clearly specified and the world of fire safety is a world where you have to figure out a lot. When it comes down to life safety, okay, we have the ability, we have capability to simulate evacuations, we have the well-established ACID-R-SET method. There's a lot of things you can routinely do to even if you do not have objectives. You can just say you want everyone to be able to escape from the building and then apply some classical fire safety engineering act to calculate if the people can escape your building or not. But if we're talking about stuff like business continuity, resilience, if we talked about strategic energetic lines that just cannot be broken, strategic supplying chains that cannot be disrupted, setting up objectives for those aspects of those mega projects it sounds like an extreme challenge and I would not say in tunneling we have the same. So in tunneling a lot of those would be actually defined and we would get them, and they're negotiable with the stakeholders. And the stakeholders actually in here are already pretty experienced in those types of projects, so they know what questions to ask and who to listen. And there's a lot of things you can do. But again, we're entering the world of building a nuclear, we're entering a world of building a mega airport in Poland and so many questions are open. So it's such a difficult world to establish those. But without establishing good core objectives and core goals of DeFi safety engineering, it is just impossible to DeFi safety engineering.
Wojciech Wegrzynski:And another funny thing that mukesh brought is the presence of the building acts where you're building your goddamn power plant. It's a very special kind of a building and then someone comes and tells you it's a high rise because just because your building is very tall, even though you have one story, even though the story is completely filled with machinery, even though it's a specific type of engineering, still you have a high-rise. Give me this, this, this and this, because high-rise buildings need that. That's kind of really funny. In Poland we solve this through derogations, which is not easy process but achievable. But I can imagine many parts of the world that being a big, big trouble. Anyway, I love talking to fire safety engineers about fire safety engineering and that's what we did in this episode. In the next episode I'm going to bring you more fire safety, engineering, fire science. That's what you can expect from the fire science show, so I hope to see you here again next Wednesday. Thank you very much. Bye, thank you.