Nov. 21, 2023

128 - Fire Safety Engineering with Dr. Ricky Carvel

128 - Fire Safety Engineering with Dr. Ricky Carvel
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Fire Science Show

Dear friends of the Fire Science Show, and listeners of the Smart Passive Income Podcast - today is some sort of a special broadcast. As I have just been featured in THE podcast https://www.smartpassiveincome.com/shows/spi/ I've chosen to create a lightweight episode on what Fire Safety Engineering is. I hope this is interesting to people who never heard about the term and a great reflection on what we do to all who practice the world's best job.

I'm unraveling this together with our esteemed guest, Dr. Ricky Carvel from the University of Edinburgh.  

Ever wondered about the role of fire safety engineers in technology? Or maybe you're curious about the future challenges posed by complex structures. This episode addresses these concerns and more, taking you on a journey through the multi-disciplinary nature of this vital field. We highlight the growing demand for fire safety engineers in areas like informal settlements and the wildland-urban interface and discuss the evolution of fire-related education. We also shed light on the success of the International Master of Science in Fire Safety Engineering program. 

If you look for more interesting episodes for a general audience, here you can find them: https://www.firescienceshow.com/category/interesting-for-general-audience/

Transcript
Speaker 1:

Hello everybody, my name is Wojciech and this is a special Fire Science Show broadcast. Welcome to the fans of the Fire Science Show and big welcome to people tuning in from the Smart Passive Income podcast. This episode is kind of special. It feels like Christmas to me. Technically you could be listening to this on Christmas, but for me it seems to be 22nd of November and I have just been featured at Pat Flynn's Smart Passive Income podcast. This is something that blows my mind. Pat is a very influential person all my life and I technically owe the podcast to him. It was his guidance, training, mentorship that led me to creation of this show, for which I'll always be thankful. And Pat has found out about this show and classified it as some sort of a success story. Fire Science Show is a small podcast if you measure it by the typical podcast measuring ways, but I'm pretty sure we're achieving here really great impact over the beautiful field of Fire Science and Engineering, about which you'll learn a bit in this podcast episode. So Pat was not only impressed by the subtle impact Fire Science Show is having on the discipline, but also the fact that I was able to professionalize the podcast at this scale I'm running. So to close up the story. Having run the podcast for more than two years 83 episodes I've decided that this needs some external support to continue. I didn't want to run advertisements for magical paints, concrete additives or some extinguishing devices in the show because I don't think it would be very genuine for me. So I was looking for someone who would be interested in a long term partnership and who would be sharing the same values, and I found a company of our consultants and we've learned that we're a very good match for each other. So they decided to cover all the costs and hours that I put into the show and just leave me with the creative freedom to keep making the podcast that Fire Profession really enjoyed thus far and this collaboration already continues for a year and there are more years to come. And, looking in, what connected us was really this idea that you can deliver the high quality podcast focus on very niche and very difficult interdisciplinary subject to rather small audience of engineers, but an audience that will truly, truly benefit from listening, and that the show will become perhaps number one way for them to increase their competency in the world of fire science. That is really not easy and in today's episode, because I don't want to drop hardcore fire science on you. If you want that, there's more than 120 other episodes of the show to follow and another one coming on Friday this week as a bonus episode. Today I wanted to take the opportunity that I have you with me in the fire science show. You probably hear about fire engineering for the first time in your life, so with my guess we will try to explain in what fire safety engineering is, how it's changing lives of people's, how it's impacting the growth of our civilization. Why are we such a small niche and how complicated it is? And perhaps by knowing the context and the environment in which the podcast runs, it will be much easier for you to understand how I measure my success and why I think fire science show is important and successful even at such a small niche. My guest today comes from University of Edinburgh, one of the birthdays of fire safety engineering. He's a beloved lecturer. I've never heard a single student say anything bad about him. He's also a legend in the world of fire safety of tunnels. So please join in welcoming Dr Ricky Carvel of the University of Edinburgh. Now let's play the intro music and after that let's learn everything about what fire safety engineering is and why it's a strong contender in the contest for the best shop on the planet. Welcome to the fire science show. My name is Vojci Węzinski and I will be your host. This podcast is brought to you in collaboration with OFR consultants, a multi-award winning independent consultancy dedicated to addressing fire safety challenges. Ofr is UK's leading fire risk consultancy. Its globally established team has developed a reputation for preeminent fire engineering expertise, with colleagues working across the world to help protect people, property and environment. Internationally, its work ranges from the Antarctic to the Atacama Desert in Chile to a number of projects across Africa. Ofr is calling all graduates, as it is opening the graduate application scheme for another year, inviting prospective colleagues to join their team from September 2024. By taking this opportunity, you'll be provided with fantastic practical immersion in the fire engineering and unique opportunity to work with the leading technical experts in the field, while learning the skills critical to become a trusted consultant to clients. This opportunity is tailored just for you and if you would like to take it, please visit OFRconsultantscom for further details and instructions on how to apply. And if you're not there yet because you don't even know what fire safety engineering is, well, in this episode you'll find out. Just about that. Let's go back to Ricky Carvel and fire safety engineering. Hello everybody, I'm here today with Dr Ricky Carvel from University of Edinburgh. Hey, ricky, hi there. Ricky is someone who is teaching the next generation of fire safety engineers and, as today, we have in the audience a lot of people who may not know what fire safety engineering is and why would anyone learn that? It's unravel the mystery, our secret society, of people being paid for setting stuff on fire. Ricky, do you get paid for setting stuff on fire?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah. I mean I've got the best job in the world. I get to set fire to things, I get paid for it and nobody sues me afterwards.

Speaker 1:

In Poland it's the arsonist is the person who sets the fire, which technically is usually my technician, so I'm liable free. But it seems like quite an interesting career path. But we're not doing it just for fun. We are doing it for fun, but also we're doing it for serious reasons, like delivering safety to society or protecting environment, buildings, people from harmful effects of fires. What does it even mean to engineer fire safety, Ricky? What goes into the process of engineering fire safety?

Speaker 2:

Okay. So what we have these days is we've got very complex cities that a lot of us live in, very complex spaces, complex buildings, and as soon as you bring complexity into something, unexpected things happen. And so you can take a perfectly ordinary sort of building technique. You've been doing it for many years. You scale it up and suddenly things happen in that building that you weren't expecting. A fire happens in a small building. Everyone survives. You scale it up, a fireback happens in a big building and all of a sudden we discover people can't get out. You know there's lots of problems and so on. So I think the job of the fire safety engineer is to some extent to understand the complexity and to look at the building or the transport system or the city centre. You might even be working on a sort of city scale to analyse the problem, find the places that aren't safe and find solutions to make them safe. And sometimes that does involve going into a lab and testing theories out and setting fire to stuff.

Speaker 1:

That's the best part. The fires have been with us forever. There's, like history of humanity, history of fire. There's even proofs that access to fire has changed how we spend time, consume, develop culture. So fire is an inherent part of human culture and every big city has the great fire of XYZ. You know Every I would claim every major city somewhere in its history has burned down completely. But in the recent years, taking down like war activities, we don't seem to be having this huge fires in major cities. We do have huge fires in, let's say, informal settlements, settings. We have huge fires in outdoor environment. So the reason why we don't see huge cities conflict rate anymore, that's kind of a product of fire safety engineering, right, in a way.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, if you go back to, obviously, as you say, every city, every country has its stories. I'm based in the UK, so I know the UK story is better than most. But if you go back to 1666 and the Great Fire of London, london before 1666 was a city of narrow streets, timber walls, thatched roofs, everything that can burn. And what happened after the Great Fire of London I missed other things is you know? They started creating standards standards for how wide the roads should be, standards for what the walls should be made of, standards for where you were allowed to have thatched roofs and where you were not allowed to have thatched roofs. So the fire safety standards in general historically have been a reaction to disasters and we still see that happening. I mean, if you ask people about the sort of fire safety regulation system over the past 20 years or so, you know there've been people throughout that time explaining what's right, right with it and wrong with it. But actually it took something like Grenfell Tower in London again in 2017, large fire, large loss of life, and suddenly the government cares enough to look at the standards and ask are the standards good enough? And basically came to the conclusion no, they're not. We need to do this a better way. Now, whether we've found the better way is still an open question, but what there is is there's a need for people that actually understand the problem to put their minds to it and to try and figure out a better way of doing things. And that's where the fire safety engineer comes in, because if we don't understand the problem, then globally we've got a much bigger problem.

Speaker 1:

And we fire safety engineers are behind most of the modern, developed technologies. I mean, in my short career as a fire safety engineer I remember an episode where we couldn't take cell phones into the planes because some of them have been a little bit much eager to set themselves on fires. I remember Poland purchased Dreamliner planes some years ago and that was supposed to be a huge jump in quality of air travel but it didn't happen because they got grounded for like one or two years, allegedly due to fire issues. Now, if I watch news, what I see? If these are gonna kill us, lithium-ion batteries are gonna kill us, and not to even mention facade fires that you brought up. Perhaps that went a little down on the media, but I assume in UK it has been a very significant social problem because after Grenfell Fire people realized there are thousands of buildings with seemingly similar systems, so it's not just a whole building that burns down. There are many aspects of technology that require fire safety to actually be useful. If you have the best phone in the world but it explodes in your pocket, that's not a great phone to be used, right.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think that's one of the things that perhaps has changed, certainly during my career is when I came into the world of fire safety, it was very much a building focused industry. I mean, for very obvious reasons it still is a very building focused industry. But we're now graduating fire engineers who are not just going to the traditional sort of building projects, they're going to transport projects, they're going to work in aerospace, they're actually going to work with forestry services and look into the forest fires sort of wildland fire problem. Anywhere there's a fire there's a fire engineer these days, and I don't think that was the case a few years ago. The forest fires, the engineers weren't anywhere near them. I'm not even sure why it's changed, but what has definitely changed over the time of my career is suddenly the fire engineers are getting a hand in and trying to fix all the fire problems of the world, not just the ones in buildings.

Speaker 1:

I saw job postings from the best places in the world, really opening for a fire safety engineer for SpaceX to design fire safety of the spaceport. How cool is that? I know personally multiple people who work for Apple. There's good fire group at Tesla. There's like every single car manufacturer or battery manufacturer has a fire R&D group nowadays. So the career choices are abundant. And even if you think about buildings, you know the way how we design buildings these days compared to 20, 30 years ago. You know I come from Poland and what you can imagine how Poland looks 30 years ago. It's very gray, built with these communist block buildings everywhere. At least they had great outdoors, to be honest, and big space between them. You have to give that to communists, but the buildings were ugly. Now you look at those beautiful let's talk Google headquarters in London beautiful piece of architecture, a giant building built with timber and and concrete, a hybrid solution, really beautiful product of actually fire safety engineering. Because if you could not fire safety engineer a building like that, it would never be built, it would never be approved to be used by the public if it was not fire safe. So I would say when I was entering this business, let's say when I started dedicating myself as a fire safety engineer. It was a blind choice. I had no idea what I'm getting into, and today, every day, I see something exciting happening around.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely, and I think that's what I find with our students. So, edinburgh, we have a number of students that come to be fire safety engineers and there are very small number of students in the grand scheme of things. But we also our courses are open to mechanical engineers, to civil engineers, to chemical engineers as well, and increasingly what I'm seeing is people that have done fire courses as options are leaving or graduating at the end of their career and going away to do a job in structural design or something, or mechanical engineering, whatever it is, and then a few years down the line they think that was this cool thing I did at university. That's better than the job I'm doing now. Can I get back to that? And sure enough, yeah, a few years down the line, even though they may have graduated as a fire safety engineer, they've got the fire safety engineering knowledge they can transfer. And we're seeing certainly I see of my graduates, a number of them doing things like that Because it's a fascinating job that we have. I mean, I respect people that build structures and I just don't find concrete as exciting as some of the things we get to play with.

Speaker 1:

Actually, when you put enough heat on, concrete starts exploding and we call it spoiling and is one of the most interesting things to study. So everything gets more exciting when you put heat into that. I guess that's a really slow guess. Everything's more excited than I temperatures. I promise there will not be hardcore science in this episode, anyway it's also. We seem to be enjoying our jobs, but it's also job of huge responsibility, and especially when we talk buildings and those of the people that are perhaps potential victims of fires. You are known for your expertise with the world of tunneling and you've entered the space in a very particular time because You've entered the fire safety in tunnels at the times of the moon blank fire, the big tragedies that were happening at that time in different european road tunnels, which had multiple casualties, big damage, huge loss to society, etc. Etc. Now, as an engineer, when you're given the responsibility to engineer safety of, let's say, a tunnel, like what exactly goes to your job? Like, how does one Create the products that you could call safety?

Speaker 2:

if there was a one size fits all solution and that was guaranteed to work everywhere, then then can we be out of a job. But actually the problem is we are dealing with complex systems with with multiple variables and multiple drivers. So I mean, it would be really, really easy to design the perfect fire safe tunnel. You just don't put any vehicles into it. Look, unfortunately, the point of a transport tunnel is to take vehicles From point A to point B. So as soon as you introduce vehicles, you introduce potential for an incident, potential for a fire, and so you have to consider, you know, what are the options available to us. Do we want to Restrict that tunnel to traffic? Only one move, moving in one direction, because then the most certainly the possibility of a head on collision doesn't drop exactly to zero, but it was very low and that's one of the you know, call it head on collisions between vehicles start fires. So if we remove that possibility, we remove one of the possibilities of fire. But then you've got the problem of rear end collisions. Those can still happen. So maybe you want to control the speed. If you reduce the speed in the tunnel, the severity of an impact is less, but the problem is. Maybe it's a high speed tunnel, maybe you actually want to get people through from one side of a mountain to the other side of a mountain as fast as possible and you can't restrict the speed. So you have to start considering other things. So maybe you're going to use ventilation for smoke control. But the problem with the tunnel is it's it tends to be shaped like a pipe and if you blow in one end, whatever you're blowing in one end comes out the other end, and if the smoke halfway along, then maybe you're filling half the tunnel with smoke. That could be a real problem if there are people there. So you have to start thinking, well, how do people behave, how do people move? And suddenly what was a purely sort of mechanical system suddenly has to involve bits of human behavior, psychology, understanding what people do, when, with the information that's before them, then you've got. You know it's not just ventilation. We could put sprinkler systems in, but when I certainly when I entered the world of tunnel fires, the industry was 100% against sprinklers and tunnels. The World Road Association has a document published in 1999, just before the Mont Blanc tunnel fire, which basically says sprinklers are not a life safety device. They cannot be considered a life safety device. And that was based on well, I have to say, it was based on reasoning by non fire safety engineers. It was based on reasoning by people that didn't understand the problem. Okay, because actually one of the problems with a fire is that it has the potential to grow, and if you spray water around a fire, it's got nowhere to grow to, so it might not go out. And that was one of the problems. Is sprinklers don't extinguish fires. Yes, maybe they don't for vehicle fires, but they can contain a fire. They can actually protect people and the structure from the effects of fire. If you're focused on extinguishment is the only solution, then sure enough, yeah, they can't put out reliably 100% the time they can sometimes, but if your focus is on protecting the people, protecting the structure, then yeah, we can do that. We can do that with a water spray, and so I actually took Engineers to come in and think about the problem and think about all the aspects of the problem and to come to show, actually, that what the old standard says was wrong, and people don't like to be told the standards we've been using are wrong, are we all?

Speaker 1:

gonna die now because we were wrong.

Speaker 2:

No, because we we improve them, we continually improve them, and sometimes it takes a disaster to show us that we need to improve them. But actually, if we've got enough people out there Working in fire safety engineering, hopefully we'll be able to actually advance the standards before the incidents happen, before the tragedies happen. And I always say when people say what is my job, my job is making the world a little bit safer than it was. You know, I'm not gonna solve everyone's problem, but if I can solve tiny little problems here and there, then the world gets a little bit safer.

Speaker 1:

So in your in even in your simple, let's say simple I know tunnel engineering is perhaps one of the most challenging aspects of fire safety engineering, but you actually made it sound simple In your simple example. You've already had like traffic engineering, you had risk analysis, you had fire development for growth, you had some aspects of smoke production, smoke production, toxicity, smoke spread, mechanical systems to extract the smoke. Also, know, you have to detect it first. So let's add the text into the table perhaps water, water, fire, smoke interaction and all the hydraulics, how to put the water in the reliably in the exact place where you want it to be, a structural behavior and a little bit of human behavior on top of that. So that's quite a complicated mix and I very second your opinion. It's the fire science is kind of a science of complexity if you wanted to put it into a box like is it a civil engineering science? Is it mechanical engineering science? Is it environmental engineering science? Is it a safety science? Because I'm sometimes I'm a big issue to my scientific society because they cannot box me, you know, effectively. So I just close myself in the box of civil engineering and yes, I'm a civil engineer now. But what about you?

Speaker 2:

So I think in many places and many places where fire safety engineering has been studied as an academic discipline, historically it is sat within civil engineering because certainly in the 1970s and 80s it was a building focused thing, so naturally it came from civil engineering. But actually what I actually spend most of my time doing is when I'm educating the students who, many of whom, start out as Mechanical engineers and civil engineers. I have to and I'd very deliberately do this at the start Of my course I give them chemistry and I say the chemistry you need isn't hard, but you can't, you can't, get to the end of this course without understanding the chemistry. So it is very much a multi disciplinary field in and of itself and I think the real role of the fire safety engineer sometime is to know a little bit about all the disciplines Mm-hmm but also to know their own limitations so that when we get a really complex problem that requires Complex chemistry, the engineer knows enough to know who to call and who to bring in To actually do the really complex chemistry. Because with the best will in the world we can't educate someone to be a chemistry expert and a human behavior expert and a structural behavior expert. How are you?

Speaker 1:

numerical simulations of structures, yeah, and at the same time understand traffic, right, exactly.

Speaker 2:

It's too complicated a task. So actually, I think in many aspects, in many of the problems we end up working, the fire safety engineer is the person at the middle, if you kind of imagine the middle of a flower, a daisy perhaps, and with with multiple petals off it. The fire safety Engineers the circle in the middle. But we have to, we have to work with all the people in all the petals and pull them together To bring in the expertise when it's required. Now, sometimes you might have a simple problem and the fire safety engineer knows enough to solve that problem by themselves. But as buildings, as systems, as environments get more complicated, we need more people at the table and to some extent is the role of the fire safety engineer to understand who it is that we need sitting next to us and most are like contemplating what would be the future for fire safety engineers.

Speaker 1:

Of course, we have complex structures, more complex than ever. We have a massive move towards timber in construction industry and that brings us a ton of new challenges that we actually have a quite good grasp on, but it's Extremely difficult to bring those challenges to architects and explain them where exactly they lie. So we are just thrown the same and same issues all all over again. But also, let's face it, the modern fancy sky scrapers are pretty much safe structures. I also see this huge need for fire safety outside of where it was typically used. So people have money to engineer safety in buildings, but there's like one billion of people living in informal settlements who are Uncapable of spending money on safety because safety is far down the list of things that they need at the particular moment. We have a huge chunk of planet living in something we call to wildland urban interface interface. We called we, and that's the worst shortcut ever I've heard. We need to come up with the better one. Guys, come on we. That's horrible, but while an urban interface is something a lot of us live on and Even if you don't know that, and that's a space where big fires that are, in a way, fueled by human action and climate change Come closer and closer to cities and then and danger more and no more people. There's a reason why you, new York, had orange air this summer, right? So I feel that fire safety engineers of the future, they will be in the buildings. They will be doing the exciting job designing new, modern buildings, but there are so many new fields where we need them to solve the issues of the planet that there's such a market for for this type of professional like never before. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2:

I mean, that's one of the things that so I teach a class in fire dynamics to master students at the University of Edinburgh and Historically, if you, if you look back at what was taught in that class 20 years ago when Dougal Drysdale Started started off of started it more than 20 years ago, but when Dougal Drysdale was teaching, the compartment fire was the sort of central thing in the course and understanding how a fire behaves in a confined space was Central. What I'm found and I'm a says started teaching that this class 10 years ago. What I found over the last 10 years is I've had to change the focus because the compartment fire was the history of Fire safety engineering and there's still a lot of work happening in the built environment and in the sort of small compartment. But compartments are in our buildings are getting larger and to the extent that they're no longer Compartments anymore. So the the concepts that were so central a few years ago are now it's not that we've need to forget about them, but we need to understand this bigger problems. So nowadays I found that the my emphasis has shifted to the questions of fire spread. Actually, fire spread certainly was a Small part of the compartment fire discussion. But now fire spread is so much more central where, where our graduates are going to work, they're looking at fire spreads on facades, they're looking at fire spread through the wild lands, interfaith urban interface, through wild land. In general, issues of fire spread are Everywhere and it's that, I think, that the the next generation of fire engineers really needs to get to grips with, because if we can solve the problem of fire spread, then fires won't spread, and that's that's as simple as it. Of course, there's a lot of work to be put into. You know, how do we engineer a forest? That's a question that you know. Various attempts have been tried, but we still we're still working on it. How do we? How do we engineer an informal settlement, which by its very definition, is something that's informal, that that we've got no control over? I mean, I've got colleagues at the University of Edinburgh, here and in South Africa that are collaborating Looking at fires and informal settlements. It's another level of complexity compared to what we used to have. We used to be quite happy to study a single box and a fire in a single box for decades. We probably put some polymethyl methacrylate in it, because that's the plastic we understand the best. Now we're looking at thousands of boxes, no two of which are the same, with all sorts of random fuels in them on a landscape which isn't flat. You have to deal with questions of topography and weather and wind and things like that. The complexity is just immense. But that's not to say we can do nothing. There's almost literally everything we've still got to do, but we are working, as I say, with partners in the Global South to try and work out what can we do. What advice can we give people in informal settlements?

Speaker 1:

Improve their safety just a little, because just a little will save lives and to emphasise, engineering is not about removing cars from tunnels, trees from the forest or polymers from the entire built environment. It's about working out how we can still achieve someone's else objective, which is having cars move through the tunnel, which is having a forest as a healthy ecosystem, or having an energy efficient building, but not create a fire hazard while doing that right.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, absolutely. I think if the engineer's solution to the wildland urban interface was to cut down all the trees and remove all the grass, then we've got a problem. We're helping to design systems which are inherently fire resistant and can hinder fire spread, and they have built-in resilience so that when fires happen, we can get them back to as good as they were before in our rapid period of time. I mean, that's where engineers are working these days, all over the world, in places where we didn't used to be. It's a great opportunity, I think.

Speaker 1:

Okay, now I have a question and be honest, would you recommend this career to a young person? Absolutely.

Speaker 2:

I mean, as I say, I deal with people that came to university to be mechanical engineers and to be civil engineers and I can't say that I persuade all of them to become fire safety engineers. But increasingly I'm seeing people finding that actually fire safety engineering is this really interesting career path that I had never heard of when I was 17. And now that I'm in my early 20s or whatever, I know what I want to do and it's a job that will take me interesting places.

Speaker 1:

Someone told me if we could advertise fire science as a career pathway to seven-year-olds. Like children get inspired I want to be a soccer player, I want to be an astronaut. Perhaps we need to target this audience of six seven years old to show them that you see, that's a fire, we can tame this beast and do good things around it. Perhaps we would not have an issue today with insufficient amount of fire engineers. I had a chat with Arnaud Truvet, the chair of fire engineering at University of Maryland, one of the biggest fireplaces in the world, and he told me that US majority of fire engineers are either Maryland or Massachusetts citizens, because Maryland, worcester, polytechnic Institute these are two universities that teach fire safety engineering. Okay, there's OSU and others, but majority would come from those places and it's kind of funny that the safety of their own countries based on this local population of Maryland and Massachusetts people who seek higher education in their local space because it's not known to society that such a career path exists. If it was known and people would be seeking it. Oh, they would find great places to study fire safety engineers and become fire safety engineers, like international masters that you are having at Edinburgh.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so we have this program called the International Master of Science and Fire Safety Engineering. It's taught jointly between the University of Lund in Sweden, university of Ghent in Belgium, upc in Barcelona in Spain and University of Edinburgh with other partners around the globe. But we're the four main universities and this is a European success story, I mean despite the fact that the UK had its interesting change of alliance with Europe a few years ago. We won't go into that. The program was a European Union, erasmus-mundus funded thing and Erasmus-Mundus still considers our program to be one of their success stories. What we're doing is, largely through to the generosity of a number of partner companies and the European Union, we are able to offer scholarships to students from around the world and it's truly an international program. So we deliberately recruit students from everywhere in the world that we possibly can and we bring them to Europe and we educate them in fire safety engineering across the four partner universities and beyond, and then we send them back out into the world again to hopefully make the world a better place. This year we've got students studying in Edinburgh having come from Paraguay, from Indonesia, from India, from China. The ones are from someone else, from South.

Speaker 1:

America and the students is like a piece of domino that pushes more people around.

Speaker 2:

The idea is to bring people from the whole world into the few places that actually study fire, Because fire is a tiny research community, a tiny group of universities on the world scale. But if we can bring people from elsewhere and then send them back out again, we can establish centres of excellence around the world. And that is our long-term goal is to actually make the whole world a safer place, not just Massachusetts and Maryland. We want to improve safety for the world and I think that may sound like a grand scheme, but I think ultimately that is actually what we want to do. We're now more than 10 years into the IMFSE programme. We've seen graduates from hundreds of countries going out there and going back, some of them going back to their home countries, some of them not, some of them going elsewhere and making a difference in the world.

Speaker 1:

Fantastic. Well, ricky, thank you so much. I always wanted to have a resource that I can send out to my uncle when they ask me, like, what is fire safety engineering? You are a firefighter, right, most of us usually respect the yes, it's complicated, but let's assume yes, because we don't want to go into that discussion too deep Today, I would send them the podcast episode. That would make life so much easier and, given that from my personal experience, I would say 95% of the people in the industry come here by accident, I really hope we have made a lot of interesting accidents right now with this podcast episode, inspiring people for this career path. So thank you for that, and we're about to switch on to another discussion where we're going to talk about box and what happens in it when it doesn't have enough oxygen to support combustion. So if you enjoyed what we think fire science is, please join us in the next episode to see what fire science really is, okay thanks.

Speaker 2:

See you in the next pod.

Speaker 1:

Cheers and that's it. I hope you've enjoyed our take on fire safety engineering. Whether you've heard about it for the first time or you are a seasoned fire engineer, I hope we have touched some things that you've really enjoyed. Fire safety engineering is definitely a vast discipline, very exciting, but filled with a lot of responsibility about human life and environment and everything we care about. Fire safety engineering is required to progress our civilization ahead. It seems that everything we discover recently, every great idea that we're having that can change the world to a little better place, it kind of is unsafe from the fire perspective. So if you don't work it out with us, if you don't work it out with a fire engineer, you're probably gonna have a bad time, because it's really challenging to discover all the intricacies that lead to something being unsafe in a van the fire. You really need to have this broad holistic overview over the whole discipline to really tell if one idea is bad and another one is really good. If you don't have that, it's very challenging to design a fire safe product and if your product is not fire safe, then it can take down even an entire company and we know stuff like that has happened or has almost happened to real big global players in the past. If you're interested more in fire safety engineering, there is a bunch of podcast episodes that could be interesting to more general audience, which I will put all up into a list of podcasts interesting to general audience, which I will link in the show notes. So if you'd like to have a taste of what fire safety engineering is, without going into too big details over particular technical subjects, I have a list for you. If you're a fire safety engineer and you want the hardcore fire science that's why you are here Then I have some good news. With Ricky, we did not stop there. We just recorded the first half of the episode and the other half is exactly what you want it to be and that is hardcore fire science. This time we're talking about underventilated fires, back trough, written in a correct English manner. We're making fun of back trough movie stuff like that. So I really hope you will enjoy the sciencey fire science episode and in this week, unusually because of this special episode, I'm moving the launch of that sciencey episode to Friday and you'll get your science done. And next week back to normal operating schedule. We will see each other on Wednesday. Remember, the Book of Fire is still open for beta or if you're listening this after like in December that it probably already launched. But if you want to be there when it starts my big course on the resources for fire safety engineer, the Book of Fire the at thebookoffirecom is open for signups, launches 27 November in the beta phase. If you want to be there, go to thebookoffirecom, sign up. I'll send you an email when it's open and I will see you there. And that's it for today's episode. I'm going to celebrate my presence in Smart Passive Income Podcast. This is really milestone bucket list item. You cannot imagine how much it means to me and I'm very thankful that you being here, you supporting me, you sending me your nice emails, you cheering for my success, has brought me up all the way in here, maybe not the top of the world, but definitely a place I want it to be. I love to be in and I can only promise you I will keep delivering really great fire science to you, without dumping it down as raw and useful as it can be, in a form that perhaps is a little easier than to digest and journal papers. So yeah, let's make a world a little bit safer place together every single day. Thank you for being here. Cheers Bye. This was the Fire Science Show. Thank you for listening and see you soon.