183 - Innovation and fire safety with Vincent Brannigan

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Hello everybody, welcome to the Fire Science Show, welcome to 2025,.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Happy new year, everybody.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Thanks for starting your year with me.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I'm back with the podcast and I've promised you a good episode with Vincent Branigan on innovation in fire science.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>So here I am delivering this.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I've connected with Vincent once again and recorded part 2 to what was published shortly before the Christmas, and that's what you're going to hear in a moment.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>But before we go, I would like to reflect on some things that happened at the end of the year.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I've learned about the passing of Professor Jim Quintiere.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>That's very sad news for fire science overall.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Professor Quintiere was definitely a role model, a true authority in the world of compartmental dynamics and fire science, a titan, a giant of the fire science.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I don't know how to appropriately address Professor Quintiere, but important for me, he was a guest of the Fire Science Show.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>We had three episodes.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>It was such a joy to be able to talk and meet Quintiere for for those brief moments.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I've only met him there's a few times when we were recording and, um, yeah, even though those were just few moments, I'll cherish them for for the rest of my life because, yeah, he was just such an inspiration.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I'll definitely try to give proper tribute to Professor Quintieri later in the year in the podcast, but for now I just wanted to say that it made me very sad between the Christmas and the New Year.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Other than that, the time was very nice and calm.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I've relaxed, I've rested very well and now I'm ready to bring more fire science to you and in today's episode, as I've briefly mentioned, we're going to talk about innovation in fire science.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Professor Branigan he's an expert on innovation.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>He did his master thesis on submarines as an innovation.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>He studied history of technology, so he has a very clever point of view on what innovation is and how innovation and technology work throughout the history of human civilization.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>And actually this unique perspective is brought in the context of fire safety in this podcast episode.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>An important note the inspiration for this talk, or even a framework for this talk, was a lecture Vincent gave like 15 years ago at Edinburgh.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Talk was a lecture vincent gave like 15 years ago at edinburgh.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I've been told about this lecture many times by many people, so I thought okay, if 15 years later, people are still discussing the lecture, it means it has been good and it actually was.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>And the paper that accompanied that lecture is listed in the show notes, so if you would like a written form of what's mainly said in the podcast, that's in the paper.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>In the interview, vincent gives more details, goes deeper, has some more fresh thoughts, because 15 years has passed, we have new examples.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>So I believe it's highly valuable to both read the paper and listen to this podcast episode, and I will not stop you from listening.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Let's just spin the intro and jump into the episode.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Welcome to the firesize show.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>My name is Wojciech Wegrzyński and I will be your host.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>This podcast is brought to you in collaboration with OFR Consultants, a multi-award-winning independent consultancy dedicated to addressing fire safety challenges.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>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.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>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.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>2025, there will be new opportunities to work with  OFR.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>will grow its team once more and is keen to hear from industry professionals who would like to collaborate on 560 features this year.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Get in touch at ofrconsultantscom.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>And now back to the interview on innovations.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Hello, I'm joined today once again by Professor Vincent Brennigan.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Hey, Vincent, good to have you back on the podcast once again.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Hello, and now not separated by a table but by a few thousand kilometers, but still a pleasure to talk with you.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>And this podcast episode actually cannot start in any other way than mentioning our late Professor Jim Quintiere.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Jim has passed away recently.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>It saddened me a lot.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>He was a guest in three Fire Science Show episodes, which were, for me, the highlights of the podcast.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>So I know that you have a history of working with Jim, so maybe you would like to say a few things about him.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>Well, I have to say everything I know about fire testing that I use in my work in fire regulation.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>Fundamentally, I learned the basics from Jim Quintero.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>I had the good fortune.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>Fundamentally, I learned the basics from Jim Quinteri.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>I had the good fortune I was a law student at Georgetown and I got a job at the National Bureau of Standards.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>I was interviewed by Danny Gross I'm second generation fires, so they knew what a Brannigan was and he said to me what can you do?

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<v Vincent Brannigan>I said well, I was a stage manager.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>I can build anything that only has to last three days.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>And he said that's okay, we'll burn it on the second day.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>So they hired me and they assigned me to Jim Quinteri as his engineering technician and he was a little bit surprised.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>He had a law student as an engineering technician.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>But he found out I was not a complete idiot and I would learn anything and do anything he needed.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>And every single thing that I learned, one after another, jim Quintero and JQ explained to me in great detail.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>My favorite story was I was running the E162 Radian panel and to get the results I was using a Burroughs adding machine and I had to do these equations on an adding machine and it was pretty awful.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>And Jake saw me struggling and he brought me an HP 35 calculator with and this is the joke it had reverse Polish notation.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>I had to learn reverse Polish notation TSC HP 35, but I wrote it all out on a long strip of paper from a grocery store you know cashier receipt and I wrote my programs out.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>He checked the programs that I had them right and we got the results much faster.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>But I would make anything he needed.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>I would go down to the machine shop and work with the people there and produce any device.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>We needed coolers for the gas analyzers, we were working on the floor and radiant panel and I just learned so much.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>And then we kept in touch and eventually I got appointed in fire protection.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>I was first a adjunct faculty member in fire protection engineering.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>I went up through the ranks to full professor in consumer economics, teaching safety, and back to fire engineering at a campus reorganization and then Jim was brought into the department in fire engineering and the idea that I had the same rank of professor as Jim Quinteri was one of the most spectacular thoughts of my life.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>So of course I couldn't even approach his expertise, but it was kind of fun.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>And then we later were both professors emeritus.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>So he was a very close colleague and tremendously willing to tell me what I didn't know, which was lots of stuffbooks.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>You read his papers.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>You read his marbles models, everything MQH so on.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>That's the person I know.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>But also later, when I started making friends abroad, when I met people from Maryland, I've learned that he was just an amazing, funny, funny guy.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>He actually applied to my summer school this year.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>That was hilarious.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Like of nowhere we get the email from Jim Quintere Are you willing to take a very old postdoc for your summer school on fire science?

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>What a guy that was.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Maybe I'll make a tribute to Jim Quintere episode eventually with some good stories, because I guess there is so many stories to be told.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>Oh, there's lots more good stories All right?

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Well, let's leave that for the future and now let's try to focus for the topic that we've briefly mentioned in the previous podcast episode.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>So I wanted to talk about innovation blind spot innovation gaps.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I'm not sure if it was you who came with the term innovation blind gaps.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I've learned it from Guillermo Reyn.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>He's using it a lot.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>He also has a nice lecture on innovation and this terminology sticked with me.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I like it a lot.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Anyway, I know you've been researching submarines as an innovation, as an innovation tool.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Was that your PhD master's?

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<v Vincent Brannigan>Well, I can start from the beginning.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>When I was an undergraduate, I was a major fundamentally in the history of technology and very interested in law.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>I was going to go to law school and so I wrote my thesis on international law of submarines and how it was affected by developments in technology, and it had the grandiose title not grandiose work, but grandiose title of Law, morality and Power, a Study of the U-Boat in Two World Wars.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>And what I studied was how technological innovations occur within the legal system and how the society and the legal system try to grapple with innovations and the process by which they finally accept or reject the innovation or deal with it or don't deal with it as they move along.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>And just as a historical note, the lawyer, admiral Dönitz, who was the defendant at Nuremberg Kranzfuehler, was one of the most brilliant lawyers I've ever studied and his defense of Dönitz on the charge of illegal warfare was superb, including getting a letter from Chester Nemitz, the American admiral, who said he thought unrestricted submarine warfare was totally legal.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>You know, in other words, it was not a question of the United States also violated international law.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>It was a question that the United States believed it was not a violation of international law and that's why he was acquitted of all the charges related to submarine warfare.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>So I was fascinated by this process and while I was in law school I focused, as I started working on fire, on fire safety testing and technological innovation.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>And the original example which I worked on with Jim Quintero at least he taught me about it was when they developed the original carpet test.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>They had a very simple test that would essentially distinguish between cotton carpet and wool carpet.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>Cotton carpet failed, wool carpet passed, no problem.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>Then nylon carpet was invented and nylon carpet failed if there was low-density nylon and passed if it was high-density nylon.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>Now nylon burns.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>So how is it that more flammable material made you pass the test and less flammable material made you fail the test?

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<v Vincent Brannigan>Well, it turned out, there was a threshold effect, the methamphetamine pill which they had chosen for the test.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>Now you can think of the single burning item.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>It turned out there was a threshold effect.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>The methamine pill which they had chosen for the test now you can think of the single burning item, but it's real small had sufficient heat energy to ignite low-density nylon but not high-density nylon, because the phase change in the nylon absorbed all the heat.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>So the nylon was melting and it consumed the entire heat input, and then the nylon did none.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>So therefore they had a fire test that passed stuff that had near fire, near fuel, and this triggered my thinking and I started down the line of analyzing it, exactly the same way as the submarines, and what I came to the conclusion very quickly was that all fire tests that I could find and this is what I started teaching had this fundamental flaw not always the size of the fire, but there was something where the test was oriented to the technology that existed at the time the test was created and therefore was totally unsuited to any innovation in technology.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>And this was a generic problem in all fire tests, and the way that we finally refined it now this took years was that very few fire tests are what I will call fundamental science.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>A bomb calorimeter is closest to fundamental science, but almost all other fire tests are some sort of abstraction of the fire hazard, some sort of ignition, some sort of measurement, and if you exceed those parameters, you have no idea how the material will respond.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>And this is what I later put in the article that you were referring to.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>That was the Edinburgh conference article in 2010.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>That was the culmination of about 15 years of work in that article, so the fact that it's still good doesn't bother me at all.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>I kept looking at various fire tests and what happens socially commercially is a test is developed and then the industry gets a vested interest in the test because they can then develop new products that get a good score in the test, even if they're garbage in reality.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>When you mentioned the nylon case I was working in my head because recently, like maybe five years ago, I've seen the exact same thing happen, repeat itself.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>So colleagues from UCLan University of Central Lancashire, they've published a paper I think it was in Chemosphere.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I'm citing from that so I can be a little off, but basically the paper has shown that if you put a larger ignition source on a fire retardant mattress, I believe it's going to ignite.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>And it was just a paper.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>But then the industry replied to that paper very strongly in letters to editors that if they had used a smaller source of ignition, like the standard has foreseen, that the mattress would be perfectly safe and it will never ignite.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>And I'm like, wow, that's exactly the problem with fire safety today.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Oh yeah, Like we're passing a test, not doing fire.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>Well, if I tell you, when I was at NIST, at NBS, back in 1973, we had prison fires and they brought in fire retarded mattresses and the man was striking paper matches and dropping them on the thing, like 20 of them, showing it didn't ignite.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>And I said, gee, can I do that?

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<v Vincent Brannigan>Yeah, I was just a kid looking at that.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>He said sure.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>So I took out of my pocket.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>I had a little metal canister of what are called Ohio blue tip wooden matches, two inches long wooden matches that I used for igniting the A162.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>I struck one of them, threw it on the mattress and it exploded into flames.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>Danny Gross had to pull the sprinklers.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>We had a mattress in the mattress to put the fire out and he said get that crap out of here.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>So we this was.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>This is one of the examples.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>I've used it in class and so forth for years, so it's nothing new.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>They get a vested interest in a test, they know the threshold of the test and they can design a product around the test and this is a major problem.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>And the exact thing that we're discussing here can be very well explained by fire science.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>There's a chemical reaction that has an energy of activation which is like a threshold value.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Like you said, it's a threshold value.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>You pass the threshold, the reaction accelerates, just goes on.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>So it's about knowing where the threshold is and then, yeah, you actually can do beautiful fire safety engineering, knowing the fundamental properties of your material.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>If you know exactly what your hazard is going to be like, imagine you're designing an industrial process, you know exactly the hazards, the amounts of fuel, the fuel type, fire load, not the fuel load, the fire load you can design around that.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>But if you're designing a hotel room and office, a car park, somewhere where people can come with random stuff and some crazy guy is going to bring their own matches to ignite, how do you design around that?

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>And it's kind of funny and scary that the history repeats all the time, all the time, like look, you were just mentioning 1970s, but take a look at the flammable facades and the use of SBI in Europe today.

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<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>It's the exact same thing.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>Oh yeah, oh yeah.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>It shows up in other areas.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>For example, the test that is used for flammable fabrics for clothing uses a single layer of fabric, but many people in wearing clothing and it's particularly women wearing skirts multiple layers.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>You ignite it, you get what the Germans, I believe, call a brand shack to fire chimney up between two layers of fabric and two layers of fabric, each of which individually pass.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>If you put them a centimeter apart and ignite them, they fail.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>In other words.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>So it isn't just the stuff, it is in fact the configuration of the stuff that can generate the failure.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>So this is where fire testing is incredibly and absolutely critical.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>To stipulate that no fire test can be used on configurations of material or on stuff that was not in the designer's contemplation of the test, the single burning item, I mean.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>This is why it's so terrible.

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<v Vincent Brannigan>It's so terrible not because it's a terrible test, but because it's used on things which did not exist in the test designer's mind.

00:16:55.951 --> 00:17:05.476
<v Vincent Brannigan>And this has to be an absolute formal stipulation on every fire test that you can only test the materials that were in the designer's mind.

00:17:05.817 --> 00:17:07.523
<v Vincent Brannigan>This flips over to a different area.

00:17:07.523 --> 00:17:10.596
<v Vincent Brannigan>Let's take Mont Blanc, the Mont Blanc tunnel, for just a moment.

00:17:10.596 --> 00:17:20.327
<v Vincent Brannigan>They used essentially the ignitability of flammable liquids to determine what you could put through the tunnel, rather than the effective heat of combustion of a truck full of the stuff.

00:17:20.327 --> 00:17:24.182
<v Vincent Brannigan>This was idiotic by any technical grounds.

00:17:24.182 --> 00:17:37.788
<v Vincent Brannigan>There's simply no technical rationale on which you can justify it, because once you have a small fire going, it's the heat of combustion, not ignition point, which is the hazard and this is in the article, of course.

00:17:37.788 --> 00:17:42.586
<v Vincent Brannigan>And it wasn't until after the fire that someone suggested anything.

00:17:42.586 --> 00:17:50.330
<v Vincent Brannigan>The heat of combustion of a load of the material to design the tunnels and they found the stuff they could put on a truck was unbelievable.

00:17:50.330 --> 00:17:56.737
<v Vincent Brannigan>It was up into the you know gigawatts of fire and and the no system would hold that so clearly.

00:17:56.737 --> 00:18:05.910
<v Vincent Brannigan>In that case, I believe that designers were attempting to get a test through, for whatever reason that would allow all kinds of highly combustible material in the tunnels.

00:18:05.910 --> 00:18:08.787
<v Vincent Brannigan>Now, whether with political pressure or otherwise, I have no idea.

00:18:08.807 --> 00:18:10.923
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I wouldn't even say it could be just like knowledge.

00:18:10.923 --> 00:18:15.365
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>You know, because, to be honest, fire science is often obvious after the disaster.

00:18:15.365 --> 00:18:17.527
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Like look at the facade in Grenfell.

00:18:17.527 --> 00:18:20.048
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Like how many people studied the flammability of vertical materials?

00:18:20.048 --> 00:18:24.086
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>It has been known for 50 years and yet it was put on a building and the fire science did not stop it.

00:18:24.086 --> 00:18:30.055
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>So I'm just saying fire science is sometimes not powerful enough to convince people they are doing things that are stupid.

00:18:31.001 --> 00:18:34.391
<v Vincent Brannigan>Well, we can get to what I'll call the underlying political question a little later.

00:18:34.391 --> 00:18:43.299
<v Vincent Brannigan>But, very simply, the regulatory system failed because it allowed things which were not well understood to be put on buildings.

00:18:43.299 --> 00:18:50.529
<v Vincent Brannigan>So that's a regulatory failure that I pointed out when I was teaching in Scotland in the 1990s.

00:18:50.529 --> 00:18:57.251
<v Vincent Brannigan>In other words, that England was allowing things, under their guise of performance-based design, that nobody understood.

00:18:57.251 --> 00:19:04.067
<v Vincent Brannigan>There was a reward for industry to be blind and stupid, and even today people are claiming oh well, how could we have known?

00:19:04.067 --> 00:19:08.026
<v Vincent Brannigan>Let me go back all the way to the Titanic to do a parallel.

00:19:08.026 --> 00:19:08.989
<v Vincent Brannigan>I'll go all the way back.

00:19:09.821 --> 00:19:10.607
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I'll just stop you for a second.

00:19:10.607 --> 00:19:15.213
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I need to make a comment to the listeners because you want to go to Titanic.

00:19:15.213 --> 00:19:22.148
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I really like interviewing Vincent because he's investigating not just the problem of innovation in fire safety.

00:19:22.148 --> 00:19:30.208
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>He's researching the problem of innovation overall like a human technology problem, and it, of course, reappears through the course of history.

00:19:30.208 --> 00:19:42.892
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>It reappears all the time, and all the time we're dealing with innovation, all the time we're dealing with new technologies that exceed previous knowledge, hence creating these innovation gaps, and that's exactly what I wanted to bring you, vincent, in the podcast.

00:19:42.892 --> 00:19:44.526
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Now give me Titanic, please.

00:19:44.807 --> 00:19:55.599
<v Vincent Brannigan>Okay, the Titanic was permitted to have fewer lifeboats than the number of people on board on the grounds that it had radio and could call other ships for help if it had trouble.

00:19:55.599 --> 00:19:57.567
<v Vincent Brannigan>That was the theory Fair thing, yeah.

00:19:57.567 --> 00:20:01.926
<v Vincent Brannigan>Unfortunately, there were several things that are required to make that work.

00:20:01.926 --> 00:20:06.672
<v Vincent Brannigan>One is that the other ships have to man their radios 24 hours.

00:20:06.672 --> 00:20:08.663
<v Vincent Brannigan>There was no such requirement.

00:20:08.663 --> 00:20:14.083
<v Vincent Brannigan>The other thing is that Titanic has to be required to know its position at all times.

00:20:14.083 --> 00:20:16.048
<v Vincent Brannigan>There was no such requirement.

00:20:16.528 --> 00:20:21.483
<v Vincent Brannigan>So when Titanic hit the iceberg, the radio starts signaling the wrong position.

00:20:21.483 --> 00:20:24.048
<v Vincent Brannigan>Because they didn't have to keep track of their position.

00:20:24.048 --> 00:20:32.866
<v Vincent Brannigan>It happened by chance that Carpathia was coming on a course that would make it cross the actual position earlier.

00:20:32.866 --> 00:20:41.549
<v Vincent Brannigan>You know, in other words, that was just pure luck, absolutely pure luck, and Titanic sent out several positions, all of which were wrong, which is why it was so hard to find the wreck.

00:20:41.549 --> 00:20:46.913
<v Vincent Brannigan>Because the wreck and they know the wreck was right where the ship broke in half, because the boilers went straight down.

00:20:46.913 --> 00:20:54.376
<v Vincent Brannigan>So it was 20 miles off, which, in the dark in the middle of the North Atlantic, could be on the moon, you know.

00:20:54.376 --> 00:20:58.519
<v Vincent Brannigan>In other words, you're not going to see it, and so these things.

00:20:58.519 --> 00:21:00.246
<v Vincent Brannigan>In other words, they don't close the loop.

00:21:00.246 --> 00:21:03.214
<v Vincent Brannigan>They make an assumption and then they don't close the loop.

00:21:03.234 --> 00:21:10.618
<v Vincent Brannigan>This goes right to your example of people bringing in stuff far greater than the fuel load that is assumed by the performance-based design.

00:21:10.618 --> 00:21:14.701
<v Vincent Brannigan>This is why, interestingly, we can do certain things with hotels.

00:21:14.701 --> 00:21:27.602
<v Vincent Brannigan>The amount of stuff that people bring into hotels is very small, so we know what stuff it is, we know where it is in the room, so therefore we can use sidewall heads and fairly low density system to control fires in hotels.

00:21:27.602 --> 00:21:37.017
<v Vincent Brannigan>Hotel fires are about the easiest thing to control and that's why we sprinkler all the hotels in the United States and we retrofit the sprinklers, because it's easy.

00:21:37.397 --> 00:21:40.874
<v Vincent Brannigan>A couple of sidewall heads and you've got the problem essentially solved.

00:21:40.874 --> 00:21:45.715
<v Vincent Brannigan>You know you're not going to save the guy in the bed who kills himself, but you'll save anybody else in the hotel.

00:21:45.715 --> 00:21:48.742
<v Vincent Brannigan>A self-closing door and a hotel level sprinkler system.

00:21:48.742 --> 00:21:53.578
<v Vincent Brannigan>And that's what they did at Operation San Francisco back in 1999.

00:21:53.578 --> 00:21:55.884
<v Vincent Brannigan>I did speak there, yep, we did speak about that, yep.

00:21:55.884 --> 00:22:00.281
<v Vincent Brannigan>So this is where innovation you know sprinklers were an innovation.

00:22:00.281 --> 00:22:05.352
<v Vincent Brannigan>I mean, you can have safety innovations too, and we have to figure out where to safety innovations.

00:22:06.011 --> 00:22:08.733
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>And I think I want to go exactly where you wanted to go.

00:22:08.733 --> 00:22:15.757
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I mean, I feel the innovation pace is accelerating, like the amount of new stuff that's being implemented into buildings is unprecedented.

00:22:15.757 --> 00:22:24.780
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I also think the innovation in the way that we build buildings, like the shape of the buildings we're building, the tallest buildings, wonder buildings yeah, that's innovation.

00:22:24.780 --> 00:22:38.487
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Look how quickly this innovation pace accelerates and how we are still in the same spot with fire testing, phenomena, testing regulation that is effective in those terms, like it's almost impossible to regulate the new tallest timber structure right, it has to be performance-based, right.

00:22:38.626 --> 00:22:41.548
<v Vincent Brannigan>Well, let me give you an example, then we'll get to that.

00:22:41.548 --> 00:22:47.162
<v Vincent Brannigan>All right, the World Trade Center had the world's largest, tallest load-bearing walls.

00:22:47.162 --> 00:22:48.855
<v Vincent Brannigan>It was an innovation.

00:22:48.855 --> 00:22:52.650
<v Vincent Brannigan>It had lightweight trusses that held those walls together.

00:22:52.650 --> 00:22:55.955
<v Vincent Brannigan>If the trusses fail, the walls fail.

00:22:55.955 --> 00:22:57.398
<v Vincent Brannigan>Okay, by buckling.

00:22:57.398 --> 00:22:58.401
<v Vincent Brannigan>Okay.

00:22:58.681 --> 00:23:07.824
<v Vincent Brannigan>Now, at that time the fireproofing, as it was called, of steel required 50% more on columns than beams.

00:23:07.824 --> 00:23:17.230
<v Vincent Brannigan>That is because of what I'll call the Empire State Building design, where column collapse is catastrophic but beam collapse is strictly local.

00:23:17.230 --> 00:23:24.480
<v Vincent Brannigan>But the World Trade Center design introduced beam collapse as structural failure of the entire building.

00:23:24.480 --> 00:23:31.157
<v Vincent Brannigan>So when the beams collapsed due to inadequate fireproofing or whatever, they pulled the building down and everybody died.

00:23:31.157 --> 00:23:50.477
<v Vincent Brannigan>Now nobody recognized that having, in effect, massively structural lightweight steel beams I'll call them beams for courtesy was potentially lethal unless they were heavily protected against fire, and also the method of fireproofing the beams was vulnerable to impact.

00:23:50.477 --> 00:23:53.864
<v Vincent Brannigan>So we had multiple problems at the same time.

00:23:54.711 --> 00:24:00.532
<v Vincent Brannigan>So basically, that showed that I mean there's an older design innovation, that's, you know, 1972.

00:24:00.532 --> 00:24:14.422
<v Vincent Brannigan>I have to say, with some pride, my not on the beam issues, but the World Trade Center was built without sprinklers and my father protested the building of the World Trade Center without sprinklers and they changed the law in New York to require sprinklers in a building, local law five.

00:24:14.422 --> 00:24:19.883
<v Vincent Brannigan>So the idea that my dad protested the building of the World Trade Center, I think, is very interesting.

00:24:19.883 --> 00:24:23.378
<v Vincent Brannigan>So that was an innovation.

00:24:23.378 --> 00:24:27.140
<v Vincent Brannigan>There's no question, Some innovations are good and some innovations are bad.

00:24:27.140 --> 00:24:31.942
<v Vincent Brannigan>The Empire State Building was probably the best building to be in to be hit by an airplane of tall buildings.

00:24:31.942 --> 00:24:36.597
<v Vincent Brannigan>I mean it had a steel structure, you know, like Gage, and the World Trade Center was the worst.

00:24:36.597 --> 00:24:45.830
<v Vincent Brannigan>So this is where the whole question of regulation comes in and now we can move, whether called performance-based design or anything else doesn't much, yeah.

00:24:45.871 --> 00:24:47.237
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>But how do we deal with that?

00:24:47.237 --> 00:24:55.420
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Like, you can't trust the old system or the traditional system for innovative solutions or innovative hazards, and the innovative hazards will come to your buildings whether you like it or not.

00:24:55.420 --> 00:24:57.115
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Like I'll give you an example.

00:24:57.115 --> 00:24:58.676
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Some years ago we were designing subway station.

00:24:58.676 --> 00:25:01.558
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>We requested to have smoke control at the intermediate level.

00:25:01.558 --> 00:25:08.361
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>You know, people go from the platform to level and that level to the floor and the intermediate level is basically a concrete chamber.

00:25:08.361 --> 00:25:09.102
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>There's nothing in it.

00:25:09.102 --> 00:25:10.565
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>There's glass, concrete, that's it.

00:25:10.750 --> 00:25:12.917
<v Vincent Brannigan>They don't put stores in it the way they do in Germany.

00:25:12.917 --> 00:25:14.656
<v Vincent Brannigan>They don't fill it with kiosks.

00:25:14.849 --> 00:25:19.153
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Yeah, in some stations they would do, but I'm talking about simpler design in which they don't.

00:25:19.153 --> 00:25:31.891
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>And this actually is a more difficult case for us, because we told them you still need a smoke system for at least like one megawatt in there because if there's any reason the smoke goes there, that there's going to be a trap for hundreds of people.

00:25:32.553 --> 00:25:36.749
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>And look, five years later people carry megawatt fire design fires with them.

00:25:36.749 --> 00:25:51.880
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>It's called electric scooter ride and I'm not saying we have foreseen that there will be a time where innovation will bring us electric scooters as a hazard but we just left the space that we don't know something, and I would be comfortable leaving a design fire of at least one megawatt.

00:25:51.960 --> 00:26:04.143
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>So we at least have some sort of system in place and now that the future reached that point where this hazard is actually present, so even old wheelings, in my opinion, are prone to innovation hazards.

00:26:05.090 --> 00:26:16.435
<v Vincent Brannigan>The example which I use, which you might have the same but maybe not every open space in a building in the United States is considered as a place to host a wedding.

00:26:16.435 --> 00:26:28.896
<v Vincent Brannigan>Every single one, every single museum, every open aircraft carrier deck, any place where you can put a couple of hundred people at once, they will bring a wedding in there.

00:26:28.896 --> 00:26:30.601
<v Vincent Brannigan>And I have two daughters.

00:26:30.601 --> 00:26:40.654
<v Vincent Brannigan>I know this phenomenon and it is absolutely amazing the stuff that gets brought in when they have a wedding and the people and on top of things, they're often drunk.

00:26:40.654 --> 00:26:46.433
<v Vincent Brannigan>So these are spaces which are museums traditionally and they do sleepovers.

00:26:46.473 --> 00:26:48.721
<v Vincent Brannigan>I have an article on this, on museum ships.

00:26:48.721 --> 00:26:52.180
<v Vincent Brannigan>We have museum ships like Belfast in London is like one.

00:26:52.180 --> 00:26:59.604
<v Vincent Brannigan>We have a dozen of them and they have kids sleeping on these ships, these old buckets, and the fire safety is minimal.

00:26:59.604 --> 00:27:06.730
<v Vincent Brannigan>So every kind of place like that can be used inappropriately if you don't have a very tight regulatory system.

00:27:06.730 --> 00:27:09.336
<v Vincent Brannigan>Like that can be used inappropriately if you don't have a very tight regulatory system.

00:27:09.336 --> 00:27:18.182
<v Vincent Brannigan>So my answer to the basic question is you can either have innovation and low levels of regulation, or you could have innovation and low levels of regulation.

00:27:18.182 --> 00:27:19.406
<v Vincent Brannigan>You will have a disaster.

00:27:19.406 --> 00:27:22.675
<v Vincent Brannigan>So if you have innovation, you have to have high levels of regulation.

00:27:22.675 --> 00:27:34.213
<v Vincent Brannigan>You can have static systems and low levels of regulation, and performance-based design was sold on the idea you could have innovation and low levels of radiation regulation, which is why it's a disaster.

00:27:34.835 --> 00:27:38.955
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Well, I think it depends on the competencies of those who do it, but we've talked about that in previous episodes.

00:27:38.955 --> 00:27:40.160
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>The competencies are difficult, right.

00:27:40.550 --> 00:27:43.160
<v Vincent Brannigan>Let me just say the way regulation works.

00:27:43.160 --> 00:27:51.179
<v Vincent Brannigan>You can have regulation in the government or you can require private sector qualified regulators.

00:27:51.179 --> 00:27:52.963
<v Vincent Brannigan>That's a well-understood thing.

00:27:52.963 --> 00:28:00.863
<v Vincent Brannigan>In other words, you can have a small government that requires you to hire independent reviewers of high quality for a project.

00:28:00.863 --> 00:28:02.130
<v Vincent Brannigan>We do that all the time.

00:28:02.130 --> 00:28:03.351
<v Vincent Brannigan>They botched this.

00:28:03.351 --> 00:28:07.794
<v Vincent Brannigan>They botched this horribly in Florida the FIU bridge collapse.

00:28:07.794 --> 00:28:13.038
<v Vincent Brannigan>This was an innovative method of you know the Florida International Pedestrian Bridge Collapse.

00:28:13.038 --> 00:28:25.026
<v Vincent Brannigan>They had a private regulator supposedly appointed to review it, but the contract was inadequate and didn't provide for sufficient money to do an adequate review, and that was a regulatory failure.

00:28:25.026 --> 00:28:26.768
<v Vincent Brannigan>But it was a private regulator.

00:28:26.768 --> 00:28:33.878
<v Vincent Brannigan>They could have had a much better private regulator examine the thing and said don't build it this way or put these conditions in, and so forth.

00:28:34.339 --> 00:28:40.839
<v Vincent Brannigan>So if you're using in your regulatory system, if you're using private regulators, you have to prevent conflict of interest.

00:28:40.839 --> 00:28:42.972
<v Vincent Brannigan>You have to prevent underpaying people.

00:28:42.972 --> 00:28:49.355
<v Vincent Brannigan>You know words, they have to put enough money into the regulatory process, but that doesn't mean they have to be government workers.

00:28:49.355 --> 00:28:51.582
<v Vincent Brannigan>That's a totally separate question.

00:28:51.582 --> 00:28:55.378
<v Vincent Brannigan>Who does the regulation as opposed to the regulatory structure?

00:28:55.378 --> 00:29:04.513
<v Vincent Brannigan>For the most part and let me just say airplane safety regulation is heavily private reviewers who actually work for the company and are supervised and regulated by the government.

00:29:04.513 --> 00:29:09.662
<v Vincent Brannigan>In Maryland, in my state, we no longer have public inspectors of elevators.

00:29:09.662 --> 00:29:18.011
<v Vincent Brannigan>It's all private and there's a clerk in the office who makes sure that a qualified inspector is inspecting your elevator in your building.

00:29:18.011 --> 00:29:19.760
<v Vincent Brannigan>They're not government elevator inspectors.

00:29:19.760 --> 00:29:23.615
<v Vincent Brannigan>So there's complete flexibility between public and private sectors.

00:29:23.615 --> 00:29:26.181
<v Vincent Brannigan>But you have to have the regulatory system.

00:29:26.181 --> 00:29:34.115
<v Vincent Brannigan>You have to have the regulatory system and in the case of performance-based design, that regulatory system has to be continuous.

00:29:34.536 --> 00:29:36.378
<v Vincent Brannigan>Cannot have fire and forget.

00:29:36.378 --> 00:29:39.284
<v Vincent Brannigan>Must regulate the building cradle to grave.

00:29:39.284 --> 00:29:41.294
<v Vincent Brannigan>Regulate the building cradle to grave.

00:29:41.294 --> 00:29:46.053
<v Vincent Brannigan>Inspect the building, check the building, check what's in it, check how it's used.

00:29:46.053 --> 00:29:47.636
<v Vincent Brannigan>You check whether there's a wedding there.

00:29:47.636 --> 00:29:52.892
<v Vincent Brannigan>The analogy is generally counting the house in an assembly occupancy.

00:29:52.892 --> 00:29:58.794
<v Vincent Brannigan>If you have an assembly occupancy, it's very common for the fire department to come in and literally count the house.

00:29:58.794 --> 00:30:04.695
<v Vincent Brannigan>And if they can't count the house, then you have to have a system for knowing how many people are in the building and they insist on that.

00:30:04.695 --> 00:30:08.203
<v Vincent Brannigan>Otherwise you get terrible disasters in assembly occupancies.

00:30:08.203 --> 00:30:09.888
<v Vincent Brannigan>They get overcrowded and so forth.

00:30:10.913 --> 00:30:14.978
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I think at this point we've identified the innovation gap or the issues coming from the innovation.

00:30:14.978 --> 00:30:17.699
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>But I don't want to leave the listeners without answers.

00:30:17.699 --> 00:30:20.138
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I don't want to do just questions and good stories.

00:30:20.138 --> 00:30:38.982
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I know you have some good answers on how to approach the testing of innovative technology in a way that actually gives us a chance to account for those innovations, and in the paper the Edinburgh paper that you've mentioned there was a four-step model of test, development and use and I really actually enjoyed that model.

00:30:38.982 --> 00:30:41.438
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>So maybe we could go through that model, would you like that?

00:30:41.871 --> 00:30:47.782
<v Vincent Brannigan>Okay, I think that the main thing is let me even simplify it rather than do it that way.

00:30:48.230 --> 00:31:00.324
<v Vincent Brannigan>You have to have someone in a position to say halt before you do the innovation, and then you have to do adequate research on the innovation before you allow it to injure people.

00:31:00.324 --> 00:31:08.375
<v Vincent Brannigan>To use an example which I think is in the paper when bicycles were allowed bicycles we have bicycles on streets, that's great, we have bicycles.

00:31:08.375 --> 00:31:11.583
<v Vincent Brannigan>Then they invented the recumbent bicycle.

00:31:11.583 --> 00:31:18.273
<v Vincent Brannigan>The recumbent bicycle, where the operator is laying down and there's nothing in the bicycle that's more than one meter off the ground.

00:31:18.273 --> 00:31:20.699
<v Vincent Brannigan>That's an entirely new hazard.

00:31:20.699 --> 00:31:26.016
<v Vincent Brannigan>Even if it meant the technical definition of a bicycle, it's an entirely new hazard.

00:31:26.016 --> 00:31:36.561
<v Vincent Brannigan>Somebody had to look at recumbent bicycles and, for example this sounds so stupid they're required to have, like, a flag that sticks up about two meters from the bicycle so cars can see them.

00:31:36.561 --> 00:31:41.301
<v Vincent Brannigan>In other words, you need to do something when you have an innovative technology.

00:31:41.301 --> 00:31:51.018
<v Vincent Brannigan>So therefore, the mere fact that you mean technical definition of a bicycle doesn't mean that a novel bicycle should be allowed, and this is the tricky part of regulation.

00:31:51.018 --> 00:31:55.721
<v Vincent Brannigan>This is the tricky part is to say what is an innovation and what isn't.

00:31:55.721 --> 00:31:58.378
<v Vincent Brannigan>So in some cases you need approved lists.

00:31:58.378 --> 00:32:01.398
<v Vincent Brannigan>In some cases you need approved characteristics.

00:32:01.398 --> 00:32:06.762
<v Vincent Brannigan>In some cases you just need, as the food and drug does, somebody just looks at the new product.

00:32:06.762 --> 00:32:14.701
<v Vincent Brannigan>You can't do it by rule and so some sort of system for identifying an actual innovation.

00:32:14.701 --> 00:32:17.789
<v Vincent Brannigan>The Food and Drug Administration again is an example.

00:32:17.789 --> 00:32:28.800
<v Vincent Brannigan>If you change anything about a drug it's packaging, it's labeling, anything it has to go to the FDA, and you can't change the color of the pills without going to the FDA.

00:32:28.800 --> 00:32:38.809
<v Vincent Brannigan>Now, most of these are very simple desk reviews, but people get used to taking blue pills every day and all of a sudden you're giving them green pills and they say this could be a difference for some.

00:32:38.809 --> 00:32:45.002
<v Vincent Brannigan>So this is, you know, just have to have some sort of system for tracking every innovation.

00:32:45.002 --> 00:32:53.825
<v Vincent Brannigan>Second, you need proper inspection of the thing as installed, and this is where we fall down, totally Generally called detailing.

00:32:53.825 --> 00:33:06.901
<v Vincent Brannigan>As you get more and more complex structures, as we move from log cabins like they're in a wooden cabin, as we move to more complex structures, every step of the detailing comes very, very important.

00:33:06.901 --> 00:33:13.401
<v Vincent Brannigan>And things that go through firewalls or things that affect sprinkler systems or things that affect cameras.

00:33:13.401 --> 00:33:27.634
<v Vincent Brannigan>This is all detailing and it has to be not just specified in advance, it has to be inspected and checked by some sort of regulatory system, and this inspection has to go permanently through the entire thing.

00:33:27.634 --> 00:33:32.039
<v Vincent Brannigan>The reason is and the four-step process that I get is the way we develop fire tests.

00:33:32.039 --> 00:33:35.701
<v Vincent Brannigan>We develop fire tests by multiple levels of abstraction.

00:33:35.701 --> 00:33:45.295
<v Vincent Brannigan>First we think we think we know what the problem is, then we define the problem, then we abstract from the problem to some test characteristics and then we create tests.

00:33:45.295 --> 00:33:51.279
<v Vincent Brannigan>That's the four-step process I described, but it all starts at the beginning, where we know what the problem is.

00:33:51.890 --> 00:33:59.155
<v Vincent Brannigan>We did not anticipate lithium batteries None of our structures.

00:33:59.155 --> 00:34:05.950
<v Vincent Brannigan>When they talk about single stairways, whatever, none of it is based on the fact that people now have electric battery scooters they can park in the hallway.

00:34:05.950 --> 00:34:14.112
<v Vincent Brannigan>That innovation alone, in my opinion, makes a single stairway argument in any kind of building deadly.

00:34:14.112 --> 00:34:21.436
<v Vincent Brannigan>That people can now easily park a complete fire hazard in the hallway and they have reasons for doing it.

00:34:21.436 --> 00:34:23.501
<v Vincent Brannigan>And how can you justify?

00:34:23.501 --> 00:34:31.567
<v Vincent Brannigan>A lithium-ion battery scooter is all by itself enough fire to imperil in a single stairway building.

00:34:31.567 --> 00:34:35.860
<v Vincent Brannigan>So unless you can figure out how to ban that, you've got a real problem.

00:34:36.789 --> 00:34:46.862
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>In your four-step model you define some interesting definitions, you use some interesting wording, so you've put forward technological frame and technological model and I enjoy those.

00:34:46.862 --> 00:34:49.798
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>So could you briefly explain what's a technological frame?

00:34:50.110 --> 00:34:53.039
<v Vincent Brannigan>A frame is what you believe is the problem.

00:34:53.039 --> 00:34:54.416
<v Vincent Brannigan>Can you give a fire example?

00:34:54.416 --> 00:34:58.481
<v Vincent Brannigan>Yeah, you gave the example of an open area in the subway.

00:34:58.481 --> 00:35:03.260
<v Vincent Brannigan>In other words, the frame is we have an open area with no combustibles, with just a bunch of people walking through it.

00:35:03.260 --> 00:35:04.083
<v Vincent Brannigan>That's the frame.

00:35:04.083 --> 00:35:07.119
<v Vincent Brannigan>That's what is structuring everything, all right.

00:35:07.119 --> 00:35:11.001
<v Vincent Brannigan>Then you try to think well, what kind of fire could we have in that frame?

00:35:11.001 --> 00:35:14.820
<v Vincent Brannigan>And you say someone's suitcase could be on fire due to a lithium battery.

00:35:14.820 --> 00:35:16.637
<v Vincent Brannigan>You get a small fire.

00:35:16.637 --> 00:35:19.277
<v Vincent Brannigan>All right, that's your technological model, all right.

00:35:19.277 --> 00:35:23.440
<v Vincent Brannigan>So you abstract from your frame what you believe to be the problem.

00:35:23.440 --> 00:35:25.653
<v Vincent Brannigan>Now let's take a bigger and different one.

00:35:25.873 --> 00:35:34.057
<v Vincent Brannigan>When they built the World Trade Center, they thought about an airplane hitting it, but their frame did not include the fire created by the fuel on the airplane.

00:35:34.057 --> 00:35:36.994
<v Vincent Brannigan>All right, they thought about the impact but not about the fire.

00:35:36.994 --> 00:35:39.579
<v Vincent Brannigan>So their frame was inadequate from day one.

00:35:39.579 --> 00:35:40.201
<v Vincent Brannigan>All right.

00:35:40.201 --> 00:35:43.132
<v Vincent Brannigan>So let's now we can go to wildfires.

00:35:43.132 --> 00:35:44.273
<v Vincent Brannigan>We can find the same thing.

00:35:44.273 --> 00:35:46.376
<v Vincent Brannigan>What do people think of as the frame?

00:35:46.376 --> 00:35:50.201
<v Vincent Brannigan>And that is, in the case of wildfires, two things.

00:35:50.201 --> 00:35:57.800
<v Vincent Brannigan>One is how far you can throw burning brands in front of a fire with a wind of a certain size and actually ignite buildings.

00:35:57.800 --> 00:36:00.795
<v Vincent Brannigan>Well, this turns out to be a whole lot further than anybody thought.

00:36:00.795 --> 00:36:03.041
<v Vincent Brannigan>That's, the frame was inadequate.

00:36:03.041 --> 00:36:05.231
<v Vincent Brannigan>When the frame is inadequate, nothing works later.

00:36:05.231 --> 00:36:06.653
<v Vincent Brannigan>Absolutely nothing works later.

00:36:06.653 --> 00:36:24.362
<v Vincent Brannigan>So defining the frame is an absolutely critical step, and that's done generally by people who are outside of the traditional fire engineering community, because they're the ones who set the contract to the fire engineers to do the modeling.

00:36:24.362 --> 00:36:26.409
<v Vincent Brannigan>So we need people who are familiar with culture, behavior, what people do.

00:36:26.409 --> 00:36:29.358
<v Vincent Brannigan>Let me give an example, not much to do with fire.

00:36:29.690 --> 00:36:36.784
<v Vincent Brannigan>The instructions for getting off an airplane in the event of an emergency are leave your carry-on baggage behind.

00:36:36.784 --> 00:36:40.054
<v Vincent Brannigan>They tell you that when you get on the airplane, if they evacuate.

00:36:40.054 --> 00:36:41.038
<v Vincent Brannigan>Do people do that?

00:36:41.038 --> 00:36:47.891
<v Vincent Brannigan>No, I've seen people get off airplanes carrying suitcases, musical, know musical instruments, god knows what, going down the slide.

00:36:47.891 --> 00:36:53.072
<v Vincent Brannigan>So therefore and that's where you have flight attendants there to supervise them and say put that down.

00:36:53.976 --> 00:37:00.653
<v Vincent Brannigan>So the question of whether your frame is adequate for the particular circumstance gets a little tricky.

00:37:00.653 --> 00:37:03.701
<v Vincent Brannigan>Now I've done a lot of work on command and control.

00:37:03.701 --> 00:37:07.800
<v Vincent Brannigan>There are things which can command and control that you can't regulate.

00:37:07.800 --> 00:37:18.557
<v Vincent Brannigan>So you use command and control and if you've got the right people and this is where evacuations in wildfire areas, that you don't let people take horse trailers on dirt roads.

00:37:18.557 --> 00:37:19.702
<v Vincent Brannigan>They have to detach it.

00:37:19.702 --> 00:37:21.076
<v Vincent Brannigan>If the horses can walk, fine.

00:37:21.076 --> 00:37:26.755
<v Vincent Brannigan>The issue of evacuation buses and floods where people want to bring big dogs on the buses big problem of evacuation buses and floods where people want to bring big dogs on the buses Big problem.

00:37:26.755 --> 00:37:34.039
<v Vincent Brannigan>And, in other words, you have to figure out your frame has to take everything into account that you reasonably have to deal with.

00:37:34.630 --> 00:37:45.757
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>But when we discuss this reference creating test methods or accounting for some new hazard or innovation does this mean that this account is only valid for within this technological frame and within this technological model?

00:37:45.757 --> 00:37:50.541
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>So if a new model appears in your frame or the frame changes, the test becomes invalid.

00:37:50.561 --> 00:37:54.019
<v Vincent Brannigan>Right, the frame will continue to change over the time of the building.

00:37:54.019 --> 00:38:03.842
<v Vincent Brannigan>There's absolutely no question, which is why you constantly look at the models that you're built on to see if the frame is still, if they're still reflective of the frame.

00:38:03.842 --> 00:38:05.556
<v Vincent Brannigan>Now we can go to wooden buildings.

00:38:05.556 --> 00:38:07.094
<v Vincent Brannigan>Yeah, let's go to wooden buildings.

00:38:07.456 --> 00:38:09.315
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Yeah, sure, I'm in a wooden building right now.

00:38:09.896 --> 00:38:12.436
<v Vincent Brannigan>I know, I know my house is made out of wood.

00:38:12.436 --> 00:38:14.637
<v Vincent Brannigan>You know it's protected wood construction.

00:38:14.637 --> 00:38:15.619
<v Vincent Brannigan>I got no problem with wood.

00:38:15.619 --> 00:38:26.005
<v Vincent Brannigan>But when you start putting 3,000 or 4,000, 5,000 people into 20-story wood buildings, then you get into very interesting questions as to what I'm not very interested in.

00:38:26.005 --> 00:38:35.597
<v Vincent Brannigan>Oh, it could pass a panel test and the charring works, but will it work under all fire circumstances where, for example, what happens when the fire department starts work and so forth?

00:38:35.597 --> 00:38:39.536
<v Vincent Brannigan>And we have very little history on large, high rise wooden buildings.

00:38:39.536 --> 00:38:40.942
<v Vincent Brannigan>We just don't have it.

00:38:41.282 --> 00:38:42.648
<v Vincent Brannigan>And I was in the South Hampton.

00:38:42.648 --> 00:38:47.119
<v Vincent Brannigan>I published that picture on LinkedIn the South Hampton terminal for cruise ships.

00:38:47.119 --> 00:38:51.188
<v Vincent Brannigan>Thousands of people in a room with a gigantic wooden ceiling.

00:38:51.188 --> 00:38:56.942
<v Vincent Brannigan>Thousands of people in one room with a gigantic wooden ceiling with all kinds of combustibles below it.

00:38:56.942 --> 00:38:58.775
<v Vincent Brannigan>What happens if?

00:38:58.775 --> 00:39:02.130
<v Vincent Brannigan>What is the radiant energy that comes down if such a thing is burning?

00:39:02.130 --> 00:39:03.717
<v Vincent Brannigan>There's no sprinklers, there's no, nothing.

00:39:03.717 --> 00:39:11.264
<v Vincent Brannigan>And we know all right, and we're building wooden buildings and we will find out when they start burning what happens.

00:39:11.264 --> 00:39:15.918
<v Vincent Brannigan>So nobody has what's the biggest wooden building anybody's ever built and burned?

00:39:15.918 --> 00:39:17.733
<v Vincent Brannigan>You know a couple of stories tall.

00:39:17.733 --> 00:39:20.824
<v Vincent Brannigan>Then I remember out in California they were building.

00:39:20.824 --> 00:39:21.688
<v Vincent Brannigan>In San Jose.

00:39:21.688 --> 00:39:40.085
<v Vincent Brannigan>They were building wooden buildings on concrete podiums, podium construction where the lower four stories of the building are concrete and the upper 12 were wood, with the suggestion that fire trucks would drive up this four-story garage, you know, and store complex and they would fight the fire from the top of the podium.

00:39:40.085 --> 00:39:41.655
<v Vincent Brannigan>Well, they had this design.

00:39:41.769 --> 00:40:06.442
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>The fire department said to hell with that, we're not doing that, we're not putting our people there, and the whole fire protection design of the building was terrible yeah, particularly that projects like that are becoming very popular and we've been involved in some of them in london and the idea is that you buy a building, you put more floors with clt technology because it's light, you know you can then sell down a bigger building, so that's a new practice that's very popular.

00:40:06.442 --> 00:40:20.934
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>But the amount of engineering, the fire safety engineering, the considerations that go into those projects is actually insane, including full-scale testing of the entire compartments for those buildings, but testing that is actually considering the technological frame and the technological model.

00:40:20.934 --> 00:40:26.998
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I would say Perhaps we've not used the same terminology that you did, but that's the thing we're doing.

00:40:26.998 --> 00:40:30.039
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>What can be the worst fire that could happen in that building?

00:40:30.039 --> 00:40:34.619
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>What can be the worst circumstances at which the materials are stored in the building?

00:40:34.619 --> 00:40:35.914
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>What's the worst configuration that?

00:40:35.954 --> 00:40:36.277
<v Vincent Brannigan>can happen.

00:40:36.849 --> 00:40:41.797
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>And then we just build it up, burn it down, observe the consequences, try to figure out from this single experiment.

00:40:41.797 --> 00:40:43.490
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Well, there's actually also a problem.

00:40:43.490 --> 00:40:44.371
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>It's a single experiment.

00:40:44.371 --> 00:40:48.896
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>You don't have a range of outcomes, but from that you can engineer some really good answers.

00:40:48.896 --> 00:40:53.719
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I'm not saying it's the best or the perfect approach, but I think it's good enough for the problem.

00:40:53.719 --> 00:40:57.943
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>But we're not going to stop the investor from building buildings, so that's the best we can do.

00:40:58.425 --> 00:41:00.045
<v Vincent Brannigan>Well, the regulators do?

00:41:00.045 --> 00:41:01.547
<v Vincent Brannigan>Regulators simply stomp.

00:41:01.547 --> 00:41:03.710
<v Vincent Brannigan>Look at the Berlin airport.

00:41:03.731 --> 00:41:13.632
<v Vincent Brannigan>Okay, they tried to bully their way past the regulators and the regulators said no, yeah, and, and so if you have regulators with backbone, now that is a problem in England.

00:41:13.632 --> 00:41:20.659
<v Vincent Brannigan>We know that in England I'm saying specifically England now is that the regulators have neither authority nor backbone in the circumstances.

00:41:20.659 --> 00:41:31.485
<v Vincent Brannigan>And so therefore, uh, we called them cowboys when I was lecturing at Caledonian and eventually, I mean, you know, disasters are slow in coming.

00:41:31.485 --> 00:41:41.702
<v Vincent Brannigan>Second, almost all those buildings are sprinklered and we know from the United States that if a building is properly sprinklered and the sprinklers are maintained, you're not going to have a catastrophic loss.

00:41:41.702 --> 00:41:42.585
<v Vincent Brannigan>We know that.

00:41:42.585 --> 00:41:47.922
<v Vincent Brannigan>We know that from a lot of buildings, with a lot of experience with really crappy buildings with good sprinkler systems.

00:41:47.922 --> 00:41:58.541
<v Vincent Brannigan>And if I could quote my dad again, he always said at the university that sprinklers give professors academic freedom, that no matter how arrogant and stupid they are, they can't burn the building down.

00:42:00.634 --> 00:42:08.070
<v Vincent Brannigan>So we have been relentless about sprinklering buildings in the US, and that's why our loss figures on such things are very good.

00:42:08.070 --> 00:42:10.637
<v Vincent Brannigan>All of our losses are in unsprinkled buildings.

00:42:10.637 --> 00:42:15.635
<v Vincent Brannigan>Basically, what we know is that for most fuels, most fires, most problems.

00:42:15.936 --> 00:42:17.661
<v Vincent Brannigan>I'm going to leave exterior cladding.

00:42:17.661 --> 00:42:18.590
<v Vincent Brannigan>I'll talk about that in a minute.

00:42:18.590 --> 00:42:20.376
<v Vincent Brannigan>Sprinklers work very well.

00:42:20.376 --> 00:42:30.695
<v Vincent Brannigan>We lost a brand new building here in Maryland, seven-story stall, fully sprinkler, not yet occupied Brand new, getting ready to occupy and we lost it to an exterior.

00:42:30.695 --> 00:42:37.594
<v Vincent Brannigan>Fire Went right up the outside right to the roof, burned the whole building down from the top and that was down.

00:42:37.594 --> 00:42:46.422
<v Vincent Brannigan>It was a number of years ago down in Prince Frederick and what they simply found was that sprinklers did not protect against exterior exposures.

00:42:46.422 --> 00:42:59.257
<v Vincent Brannigan>They just weren't designed that way, so that the relevance of this is to wildfires Shifting, and I'm going to use the technological frame of wildfires for a minute as an example of where we have to do things differently.

00:42:59.829 --> 00:43:16.592
<v Vincent Brannigan>Basically, what happens out west very heavily, although not totally, is a wildfire acts as a multiple ignition source for single-family homes or small multifamily homes, multiple ignitions that the fire department can't deal with.

00:43:16.592 --> 00:43:28.650
<v Vincent Brannigan>As soon as you have ignitions that the fire department can't deal with because there's too many of them, you then burn the entire city down Because our cities, many of our cities, are very vulnerable to exposure fires.

00:43:28.650 --> 00:43:33.702
<v Vincent Brannigan>That is, building to building, spread of fires because our exteriors are highly combusted.

00:43:33.702 --> 00:43:41.414
<v Vincent Brannigan>So we essentially have built a lot of buildings, particularly low-rise apartment buildings where we can get the people out.

00:43:41.414 --> 00:43:46.784
<v Vincent Brannigan>We don't lose people in these fires, but we lose the buildings, so our wildfires.

00:43:46.784 --> 00:44:06.661
<v Vincent Brannigan>There are towns that lost hundreds and hundreds of houses, where the trees were not done, that were between the houses, that the fire spread from house to house to house, so convincing people that we have an urban conflagration problem, not a wildfire problem, that essentially anything that ignited a half dozen houses at once.

00:44:07.166 --> 00:44:21.893
<v Vincent Brannigan>Most cities can't handle more than two building fires at once absolutely the fire departments aren't, and so if you ignite six widely scattered houses due to a wildfire a mile away, you can burn down the whole city in some of these areas.

00:44:21.893 --> 00:44:26.523
<v Vincent Brannigan>So we need to harden cities against exposure fire from other buildings.

00:44:27.788 --> 00:44:29.132
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Yeah, that's a question that we've posted.

00:44:29.132 --> 00:44:32.434
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>A few years ago we were trying to get a research grant, which was unsuccessful, unfortunately.

00:44:32.434 --> 00:44:37.177
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>The question was like are the urban configuration I think, of the past or temporarily on hold?

00:44:37.177 --> 00:44:49.106
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>And the second question, the second question that the company did is it better to invest you know, I don't know pacify protection of your buildings, for example, or maybe just build more fire departments in your city to have more manpower to handle the fires?

00:44:49.106 --> 00:44:56.211
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Because I don't think anyone ever looked at it from an urban scale, like what exactly is the risk profile of a city?

00:44:56.211 --> 00:45:01.576
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>And investing in what particularly will give better outcomes.

00:45:01.976 --> 00:45:04.398
<v Vincent Brannigan>Just a few examples and I don't think it's answered either.

00:45:04.398 --> 00:45:07.420
<v Vincent Brannigan>I was recently out in Yellowstone National Park.

00:45:07.420 --> 00:45:09.443
<v Vincent Brannigan>I don't know if you've ever been out there in the American West.

00:45:10.644 --> 00:45:11.126
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>No, but I would love to.

00:45:11.146 --> 00:45:12.650
<v Vincent Brannigan>A rustic building in the middle of nowhere.

00:45:12.650 --> 00:45:15.195
<v Vincent Brannigan>Shall we say they're 200 miles past?

00:45:15.195 --> 00:45:18.615
<v Vincent Brannigan>Nowhere, I mean there's no mutual, there's no fire service at all.

00:45:18.615 --> 00:45:22.710
<v Vincent Brannigan>The historic buildings of the Yellowstone Lodge and whatnot have exterior sprinklers.

00:45:22.710 --> 00:45:29.532
<v Vincent Brannigan>They have exterior sprinklers against wildfires and the buildings were fully sprinkled 100 years ago.

00:45:29.532 --> 00:45:31.516
<v Vincent Brannigan>I don't know when the exterior sprinklers went in.

00:45:31.516 --> 00:45:37.637
<v Vincent Brannigan>I was trying to find that out, but all of the important buildings have a built-in fire protection system.

00:45:37.637 --> 00:45:48.309
<v Vincent Brannigan>Probably, given there also they use some, they cut back vegetation and whatnot, they can probably save the historic buildings in the event of another Yellowstone wildfire like the 89 fire.

00:45:48.971 --> 00:45:51.130
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>There's a village in Japan it's called Shirakawa-go.

00:45:51.130 --> 00:45:53.367
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>It's like the 89 fire.

00:45:53.367 --> 00:45:54.432
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>There's a village in japan it's called shirakawa go.

00:45:54.432 --> 00:45:55.195
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>It's between takayama and kanazawa.

00:45:55.195 --> 00:46:10.347
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Probably doesn't mean uh much to people, but you can go with that and they have like hundreds of old houses, old farm houses, very big, and they're like very, very unique, uh, built with natural materials hay, timber, natural shedding and and stuff like that and uh, it's a unesco heritage village.

00:46:10.347 --> 00:46:29.018
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>So they really want to protect those buildings and they have this system of monitors fire monitors spread around the city that spray water everywhere and those are hidden in different pieces of architecture and if there's literally any sign of fire around the village, they would just flood the entire village with those monitors to protect the buildings.

00:46:29.018 --> 00:46:39.572
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>It's quite lovely their videos online, because there's a festival I think it's in March, I think where they test this system every year.

00:46:39.572 --> 00:46:42.695
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>So you probably can go there and see this on your own.

00:46:42.695 --> 00:46:46.615
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Maybe I'll go there one day to make a Fire Science Show episode on that.

00:46:46.985 --> 00:46:50.532
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>But anyway, we got distracted from the main topic, which is crafting a good test.

00:46:50.532 --> 00:46:55.724
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>So I would like to go back to the question of a good test and the good testing methods.

00:46:55.724 --> 00:47:00.757
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>So I captured one sentence from your paper that really resonates very brilliantly with me.

00:47:00.757 --> 00:47:08.197
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I'll read the sentence the real difference between a bare path and a clear path may not be captured in the test.

00:47:08.197 --> 00:47:12.255
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>And I love it because that's exactly what I see in the laboratory.

00:47:12.255 --> 00:47:22.518
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>If I test a wall and it collapses like one minute after the test finished and there's another test and the wall collapses 29 minutes after the test has finished, they have the exact same rating right.

00:47:22.518 --> 00:47:24.432
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>They have the exact same number attached to it.

00:47:24.432 --> 00:47:25.568
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>People don't know the difference.

00:47:25.568 --> 00:47:26.833
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>No one knows the difference.

00:47:26.833 --> 00:47:28.606
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Only the manufacturer knows the difference.

00:47:28.606 --> 00:47:37.460
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I know the difference, but I'm on the NDA so I'm not allowed to say about that but the manufacturer is not interested in talking about that that they barely passed the test.

00:47:40.045 --> 00:47:41.146
<v Vincent Brannigan>So this knowledge doesn't really propagate, right?

00:47:41.146 --> 00:47:43.972
<v Vincent Brannigan>What do we call the person who graduated at the bottom of their medical school class?

00:47:43.972 --> 00:47:45.835
<v Vincent Brannigan>A doctor, doctor?

00:47:45.835 --> 00:47:47.778
<v Vincent Brannigan>Okay, all right.

00:47:47.778 --> 00:48:02.789
<v Vincent Brannigan>So this is a generic problem in all testing systems, all driver tests, everything, which is that pass-fail tests, have this as a fundamental core problem, and it's true even on another level.

00:48:02.789 --> 00:48:16.278
<v Vincent Brannigan>Let me just say the blood alcohol concentration for drunk driving, whatever it is, is a very arbitrary number because in fact there's some evidence that alcoholics can have higher levels because they're used to it.

00:48:16.278 --> 00:48:20.311
<v Vincent Brannigan>They can have higher levels of blood alcohol and still drive effectively.

00:48:20.311 --> 00:48:31.954
<v Vincent Brannigan>We find this is it is one of our that people who don't drink at all I don't drink at all right now you know they get drunk much faster on very small amounts of alcohol because their systems aren't used to it.

00:48:31.954 --> 00:48:38.795
<v Vincent Brannigan>So all testing, this is a generic problem of all testing, particularly fast-fail testing.

00:48:38.795 --> 00:48:56.550
<v Vincent Brannigan>But even testing that puts levels on it and I realize this might be a diversion, you might edit this out, but I give my engineering students the question of why grade point averages are useless and you know, useless as engineers and they ponder and they can't figure out why.

00:48:56.550 --> 00:48:57.853
<v Vincent Brannigan>I tell them they're useless.

00:48:57.853 --> 00:49:07.085
<v Vincent Brannigan>It's very simple Averages depend on the equal interval hypothesis in mathematics, that is, the gap between a 1 and a 2 is the same as between a 2 and a 3.

00:49:07.347 --> 00:49:08.849
<v Vincent Brannigan>That's the equal interval hypothesis.

00:49:08.849 --> 00:49:11.572
<v Vincent Brannigan>You can't average it unless those are true.

00:49:11.572 --> 00:49:17.960
<v Vincent Brannigan>But nobody tells the professors to maintain an equal interval between an A and a B and a C and a D.

00:49:17.960 --> 00:49:21.094
<v Vincent Brannigan>There's no pretense that those intervals are equal.

00:49:21.094 --> 00:49:26.737
<v Vincent Brannigan>So therefore, averages of those letters, they're like averaging gold, silver and bronze medals at the Olympics.

00:49:26.737 --> 00:49:28.590
<v Vincent Brannigan>Nobody knows what those mean.

00:49:28.590 --> 00:49:38.420
<v Vincent Brannigan>They mean nothing, and so what we do is we apply arbitrary numbers, grades of good, better and best, and we just end up with garbage.

00:49:38.420 --> 00:49:48.929
<v Vincent Brannigan>And so this is a problem that occurs even if you don't have the pass-fail issue, unless you have a method of maintaining the intervals, and we usually don't.

00:49:50.045 --> 00:49:54.753
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>But you introduced another term in your paper, which is reification, and I think it relates to that.

00:49:54.753 --> 00:49:55.454
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Oh, reification.

00:49:55.704 --> 00:50:00.565
<v Vincent Brannigan>Now that is actually very, very important and I probably don't spend enough time on it in the paper.

00:50:00.565 --> 00:50:16.340
<v Vincent Brannigan>Reification, the usage of the language, the way I use it, and I realize that in political science it's slightly different, and so you will find people in political science Marxist political science that have a different approach to what reification is.

00:50:16.340 --> 00:50:28.655
<v Vincent Brannigan>To me, technical reification is confusing the score or the name of the thing with the underlying material itself, and it has to do with how we put things in boxes and classify them.

00:50:28.655 --> 00:50:34.748
<v Vincent Brannigan>So when we talk about wood or heavy timber or something, in other words, people say, well, that's heavy timber.

00:50:34.748 --> 00:50:44.411
<v Vincent Brannigan>I said, yeah, but it makes a whole lot of difference how smooth that timber is, how much it's chamfered, how much you know, in other words, but we reify it as heavy timber or whatever.

00:50:44.813 --> 00:50:54.467
<v Vincent Brannigan>And so reification is the use of is to pretend that the abstract definition of something is the same as the thing and they're just not.

00:50:54.467 --> 00:51:01.715
<v Vincent Brannigan>They're just not and this is the whole argument totally unrelated to fire that we have over transgender people in the United States.

00:51:01.715 --> 00:51:15.231
<v Vincent Brannigan>In other words, people reify chromosomes into two genders and that's it and nothing else will be accepted and so forth, whereas the biological scientists say it's a whole lot more complicated than that, and but nobody wants to listen to it.

00:51:15.231 --> 00:51:16.630
<v Vincent Brannigan>So this is reification.

00:51:16.630 --> 00:51:20.105
<v Vincent Brannigan>Is you confuse the abstraction with the reality?

00:51:20.105 --> 00:51:22.530
<v Vincent Brannigan>And this is where this is where.

00:51:22.570 --> 00:51:33.556
<v Vincent Brannigan>When they were in Capran, where and this was in German so the they said oh, everything was brand fest, that is, everything had passed a test and therefore was fireproof.

00:51:33.556 --> 00:51:36.213
<v Vincent Brannigan>No, it just means it passed that test.

00:51:36.213 --> 00:51:42.496
<v Vincent Brannigan>Passing the single burning item test doesn't mean anything other than how it would respond to a fire.

00:51:42.496 --> 00:51:46.211
<v Vincent Brannigan>The size of the single burning item test Doesn't mean anything else.

00:51:46.211 --> 00:51:54.418
<v Vincent Brannigan>And so what you find endlessly are people convert passing a test into a quality of the material.

00:51:54.418 --> 00:51:56.411
<v Vincent Brannigan>Okay, and that's just nonsense.

00:51:57.646 --> 00:51:58.791
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I've seen this at home as well.

00:51:58.791 --> 00:52:07.052
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Actually, one tunneling project we were doing smoke control consulting again, and we've received technical documentation of the tunnel and I see there's some odd material on the walls.

00:52:07.052 --> 00:52:08.911
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I asked them what the hell are those panels?

00:52:08.911 --> 00:52:11.030
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>And they're like oh yeah, they're HPL.

00:52:11.030 --> 00:52:12.514
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I'm like what?

00:52:12.514 --> 00:52:13.356
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Like HPL?

00:52:13.356 --> 00:52:18.934
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>That's like high-pressure laminate, that's basically… Formica, what we would call Formica right, yeah, it could be.

00:52:18.934 --> 00:52:21.713
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>It's like squished cellulose layers.

00:52:22.184 --> 00:52:26.329
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Anyway, I'm like Jesus, haven't you heard about the King's Crossfire?

00:52:26.329 --> 00:52:30.454
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Like it's extremely dangerous to put a flammable material on walls of a tunnel.

00:52:30.454 --> 00:52:33.237
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>And they're like no, no, it's Euroclass B, it's an excellent material.

00:52:33.237 --> 00:52:35.760
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>And I'm like oh my God, and what they did?

00:52:35.760 --> 00:52:40.166
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I've sent them a video.

00:52:40.166 --> 00:52:46.728
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I've done some experiments with Professor Rain and Matt Bonner on facades and we build like a facade with just the Euroclass B materials and they actually burned quite like hell.

00:52:46.728 --> 00:52:52.079
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>And I've sent them the video and they're like oh, oops, I guess we'll reconsider this material because it doesn't look bad.

00:52:52.079 --> 00:52:53.690
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>But that's the exact thing.

00:52:53.690 --> 00:52:57.474
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>The problem, they would consider this material being Euroclass B.

00:52:57.474 --> 00:53:03.385
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>That's an extremely high class and Euroclass system which passed the SBI test, brilliantly beautiful material.

00:53:03.385 --> 00:53:05.954
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>But a tunnel fire is not a corner fire.

00:53:05.954 --> 00:53:10.070
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>A tunnel fire is a completely different technological frame, completely different technological model.

00:53:10.070 --> 00:53:14.760
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>And yet again we're in the place where something is being applied beyond the scope it was tested for.

00:53:15.686 --> 00:53:21.438
<v Vincent Brannigan>Even let me just the one that I worked on years ago, putting carpet on a wall.

00:53:21.438 --> 00:53:26.757
<v Vincent Brannigan>If you put nylon carpet on a wall you have a nightmare fire.

00:53:26.757 --> 00:53:33.739
<v Vincent Brannigan>In other words, on the floor, on the ground, fire spread relatively slowly even on nylon carpet.

00:53:33.739 --> 00:53:39.068
<v Vincent Brannigan>You put it on a wall and it goes right up the wall like a rocket, and you know it.

00:53:39.068 --> 00:53:40.873
<v Vincent Brannigan>Just nobody tells people.

00:53:40.873 --> 00:53:41.956
<v Vincent Brannigan>Don't put carpet on walls.

00:53:41.956 --> 00:53:44.251
<v Vincent Brannigan>It's really unbelievable.

00:53:44.251 --> 00:53:53.990
<v Vincent Brannigan>And in other words, as soon as you change the configuration, this goes back to the lady's dresses with the two layers the configuration, this goes back to the lady's dresses with the two layers.

00:53:53.990 --> 00:53:58.925
<v Vincent Brannigan>And as soon as you change the fire configuration, as I pointed out, all of the assumptions that fuel load can be described in.

00:53:58.925 --> 00:54:10.414
<v Vincent Brannigan>You know, kilograms of wood per meter, yeah, but a kilogram is one solid log of 50 kilograms and Celsius carved into little slices and packed up.

00:54:10.414 --> 00:54:12.239
<v Vincent Brannigan>Those are totally different fires.

00:54:12.239 --> 00:54:15.313
<v Vincent Brannigan>The fuel load to fire load doesn't work.

00:54:16.244 --> 00:54:21.849
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>So, to finish up this interview, I would like to put in some positive thinking Because you know, I see opportunity in what you propose.

00:54:21.849 --> 00:54:31.815
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>With the technological frame technological model verification, validation, verification of the test you can actually start trying to understand when some measures become good.

00:54:31.815 --> 00:54:32.556
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Safety innovations.

00:54:32.556 --> 00:54:37.653
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Also a way you can measure the impact of any innovation on safety that you propose.

00:54:37.653 --> 00:54:44.373
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>And we're not only living in a world of continuous hazard innovation, but we're also living in a world of safety innovation.

00:54:44.373 --> 00:54:47.192
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>There has been so many new technologies out there.

00:54:47.985 --> 00:54:50.208
<v Vincent Brannigan>Oh yeah, and lithium batteries being a perfect example.

00:54:50.208 --> 00:54:52.146
<v Vincent Brannigan>Here's the situation.

00:54:52.146 --> 00:55:00.813
<v Vincent Brannigan>What we need to do when we do fire test development is document the technological frame and the model that support the test.

00:55:00.813 --> 00:55:12.304
<v Vincent Brannigan>They have to carefully document it so that nobody suggests, going to your example, the tunnel, that this test rating has any meaning outside of this technological frame.

00:55:13.688 --> 00:55:19.818
<v Vincent Brannigan>The corner test or the single burning item test is essentially a trash can fire, that's all it is.

00:55:19.818 --> 00:55:28.237
<v Vincent Brannigan>It's a waste paper basket on fire, and if that's the only hazard you have around, it could be a good test.

00:55:28.237 --> 00:55:32.114
<v Vincent Brannigan>If you have a bigger hazard around, it could be a worthless test.

00:55:32.114 --> 00:55:35.313
<v Vincent Brannigan>And this is what we have never done.

00:55:35.313 --> 00:55:49.353
<v Vincent Brannigan>We've never documented the technological frame and the model that supported it for the abstraction to the test, and that's why the carpet test fails, that's why the clothing test fails, all these Poie Mont Blanc fails.

00:55:49.353 --> 00:55:54.246
<v Vincent Brannigan>Nobody sat there and said this is the frame that we're dealing with.

00:55:54.246 --> 00:56:03.653
<v Vincent Brannigan>They just come out with a test and then everybody runs with the test and puts it wherever they want and does whatever they want, and that is that's the problem.

00:56:03.653 --> 00:56:16.411
<v Vincent Brannigan>So the cure is to do the science, is to do the social science, which is the frame, and the modeling, which is physical science, and to do it and document it as part of the test.

00:56:16.911 --> 00:56:17.434
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Brilliant, brilliant.

00:56:17.434 --> 00:56:22.833
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>It's just one sentence, but it really summarizes the entire thought process, the answers, the science.

00:56:22.833 --> 00:56:23.635
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Thank you, vincent, for that.

00:56:23.635 --> 00:56:35.094
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>And we'll end up on this and, as you know, 31st of December, so wishing you all the best for the rest of 2024, which is not really a lot of that left.

00:56:35.655 --> 00:56:37.338
<v Vincent Brannigan>I'm sure it will be fine.

00:56:37.338 --> 00:56:42.228
<v Vincent Brannigan>It comes later here than there, but everything will be fine.

00:56:42.228 --> 00:56:43.632
<v Vincent Brannigan>And I'm going on.

00:56:43.632 --> 00:56:49.614
<v Vincent Brannigan>This Friday I'm going on a 25-day cruise to the Caribbean, but the last time that I put it up on LinkedIn.

00:56:49.925 --> 00:56:53.813
<v Vincent Brannigan>The high-pressure water mist system went off in the kitchen about 12 feet away from me.

00:56:53.813 --> 00:57:04.476
<v Vincent Brannigan>I thought they did it for me personally, so, as an oven had overheated and the system went off, you know, I went over and took a picture of my car and I just thank you very much for the demo.

00:57:04.476 --> 00:57:07.715
<v Vincent Brannigan>You know, it's really, really good, stig Brodersen brilliant, brilliant.

00:57:08.005 --> 00:57:09.347
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>So you're starting 25 with a banger.

00:57:09.347 --> 00:57:09.768
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Brilliant, brilliant.

00:57:09.768 --> 00:57:11.130
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>So you're starting 2025 with a banger.

00:57:11.130 --> 00:57:14.713
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I'm also having a lot of fun in here, so all the best for 2025.

00:57:14.713 --> 00:57:18.139
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Please enjoy your cruise and see you in the new year.

00:57:18.298 --> 00:57:19.099
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Vincent, thank you very much.

00:57:19.099 --> 00:57:26.931
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Take care, thank you, bye-bye.

00:57:26.931 --> 00:57:28.293
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Released in 2035.

00:57:28.293 --> 00:57:32.699
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Happy New Year, everybody, and thanks for being here with me.

00:57:32.699 --> 00:57:35.789
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I hope you've enjoyed this episode with Vincent.

00:57:36.429 --> 00:57:41.889
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>The paper that we've talked about, which was the framework for this interview, is linked in the show notes.

00:57:41.889 --> 00:57:44.878
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>It's really good and I highly recommend reading to it.

00:57:44.878 --> 00:57:57.300
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>This is a very interesting read and I think Vincent, with his background on studying innovation in general, has nailed a few very, very good points and issues with fire safety.

00:57:57.300 --> 00:58:02.237
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>It is actually very interesting to look on the entire concept of fire safety through his eyes.

00:58:02.237 --> 00:58:13.201
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I'm not saying I'm agreeing with everything Vincent says and obviously some of the things that he says are very emotional, but he makes a lot of sense.

00:58:13.201 --> 00:58:27.599
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>If you try to understand it from his perspective, it makes a lot of sense and those things, those issues that he identified, are very sharp and they truly exist in the world of fire safety and innovation, especially the ones related to limitations of testing.

00:58:28.085 --> 00:58:35.565
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>We are very commonly using test methods beyond what they were meant to represent.

00:58:35.565 --> 00:58:44.105
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>We are often connecting entire behavior of a specific material with a specific outcome of a test.

00:58:44.105 --> 00:58:55.931
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Like the HPL panel Euroclass B I brought up, we connect the performance of that panel with that single marker, which in some contexts is very inappropriate.

00:58:55.931 --> 00:58:57.976
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>So we really need to understand better.

00:58:57.976 --> 00:59:01.916
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>And I really liked his last sentence.

00:59:01.916 --> 00:59:03.800
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>It was just one sentence.

00:59:03.800 --> 00:59:11.155
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>I probably should have followed up on the interview on that sentence, but he said that the answer is science.

00:59:11.155 --> 00:59:17.153
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>The answer is social science to investigate the context, and the physical science to understand the fire.

00:59:17.153 --> 00:59:25.447
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>And if you think about it, that truly is the only answer, and in a podcast such as Fireside Show, that's the best answer one can receive.

00:59:26.469 --> 00:59:29.175
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Anyway, I'm not going to summarize this anymore.

00:59:29.175 --> 00:59:31.905
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>It was a very interesting, thoughtful conversation.

00:59:31.905 --> 00:59:33.106
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>There's a very interesting, thoughtful conversation.

00:59:33.106 --> 00:59:34.286
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>There's a paper that accompanies it.

00:59:34.286 --> 00:59:37.710
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>The paper is 15 years old but it's still fresh, to be honest.

00:59:37.710 --> 00:59:45.394
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>So highly highly recommended read after this, and I can only invite you to the Fire Science Show next week, next Wednesday.

00:59:45.394 --> 00:59:49.617
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>It's 2025 and Fire Science Show is still going strong.

00:59:49.617 --> 00:59:53.659
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>You'll receive your weekly dose of fire science every Wednesday.

00:59:53.659 --> 00:59:56.742
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>That's my promise to you and see you there.

00:59:56.742 --> 01:00:23.114
<v Wojceich Węgrzyński>Thank you, bye, thank you.