149 - CROSS UK with Neil Gibbins and Peter Wilkinson

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Hello everybody, welcome to the Fireside Show.

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Today I have a pleasure to talk about a very important project that for many years is changing the landscape of the UK-based fire safety engineering, and that is CROSS UK.

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I'm joined by Neil Gibbons and Peter Wilkinson, who are the only two people who know the contents of the reports submitted to CROSS.

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They are the first line of verification when you submit your inquiry to CROSS.

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They are the first line of verification when you submit your inquiry to CROSS and then a lot of things happen to the inquiry and, as you can imagine, we will discuss all those steps in details how cases are reported to CROSS, what CROSS does with them and how CROSS makes sure that the outcomes of your worries do reach the general public.

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I think is a fundamentally very interesting model, a very needed thing.

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There is a lot of stuff happening in our industry and you know I'm very into no bullshit policy and in this podcast you won't find that, but in the real world there's a lot of weird stuff happening and we need vessels like Cross UK to help us talk about them, to allow us to discuss them, allow to indicate them and perhaps change them for better.

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So I highly appreciate the work done by Cross UK.

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In the show notes to this episode you can find links to their website.

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You can find the recent reports.

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I highly encourage you to become a reader of Cross UK, to sign up to the newsletters, to see what these people are up to, to see what interesting stuff comes out from Cross and perhaps one day become a reporter if you see something worth sharing with others.

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But at this point, let's just hear about what's Cross UK all about.

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But at this point, let's just hear about what's Cross-UK all about.

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Welcome to the Firesize Show.

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My name is Wojciech Wigrzyński and I will be your host.

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This podcast is brought to you in collaboration with OFR Consultants.

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Ofr is the UK's leading fire risk consultancy.

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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.

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Working across the world to help protect people, property and environment.

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Established in the UK in 2016 as a startup business of two highly experienced fire engineering consultants, the business has grown phenomenally in just seven years, with offices across the country in seven locations, from Edinburgh to Bath, and now employing more than 100 professionals.

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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 fire safety solutions.

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In 2024, ofr will grow its team once more and is always keen to hear from industry professionals who would like to collaborate on fire safety futures this year, get in touch at OFRconsultantscom.

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Hello everybody.

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I'm here joined by Neil Gibbons from CROSS.

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Hey, neil, hello.

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And Peter Wilkinson, also from CROSS UK.

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Hey, peter.

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Hello Wojciech, Great to meet you.

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We're going to talk about the mission and some of the technicalities of your organization.

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Cross UK apparently extends to collaborative reporting for safer.

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The mission and some of the technicalities of your organization, cross UK, apparently extends to collaborative reporting for safer structures, hopefully not just in UK but worldwide, and I know that for some years fire is a big part of Cross.

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In your calls for reports and everything you always highlight that you can report fires and structures.

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Was it always the case you?

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always highlight that you can report fires and structures.

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Was it always the case?

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Cross was founded in 2005 by the structural engineers.

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We're quite late to the party bringing fire expertise, but we've been receiving reports for three years now.

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Might seem longer for people that have been picking up all of our press releases and our pressures to try to get people to respond to us, but yes, just three years.

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I mean our origins go back to the mid-1970s when the Institution of Structural Engineers and Institution of Civil Engineers came together to form a standing committee on structural safety in Committee on Structural Safety and I think one of the key moments that led to that initiative was the Ronan Point disaster in East London, which was a gas explosion in a 22-storey tower block that led to the partial collapse of that only two months after it had opened and unfortunately four people died in that and 17 were injured in that event and it really did prompt soul-searching from a structural engineering point of view.

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I think it's worth reflecting on that because it was the tragedy at Grenfell Tower that really spurred the initiative to spread into fire safety as well.

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It's interesting Roland Point had the long lasting impact.

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You know, the progressive collapse of buildings and the way how we design structures in the modern world.

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Progressive collapse of buildings and the way how we design structures in the modern world.

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So, unfortunately, as many things in fire, especially they often come from tragedies.

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So here the organization is not to discuss tragedies, it's to prevent them.

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So let's talk about the current mission of CROSS, like what's the overarching goal of having such an organization that you're having?

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Well, ideally, grenfell shouldn't have happened, should it?

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Cross would have been working as it has been for structural engineers?

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If it had been working for fire and somebody would have said I really don't think we should be using this incredibly combustible material on the outside of these buildings, what would happen if that caught fire?

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Oh, by the way, it does happen.

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It happened in malmo, it happened in the middle east.

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They thought about it in this country and certainly didn't react to it yeah, you asked what, what, what is our mission?

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what, what, what are we about?

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And and really, we had a.

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We had a rebrand when we relaunched in 2021, so you mentioned our current acronym, which is collaborative reporting for safer structures, but our original name same initials, but it was confidential reporting and it's that it's that term confidential.

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That's really important.

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So we are an entirely voluntary scheme, but because of the confidential way that we deal with the issues that are reported to us, um, we feel it's invaluable to encourage people to tell us about issues that they've found or, um, hopefully, they've been able to solve, and our mission is to share these learnings with the rest of the construction sector, wherever that might be around the world.

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So let's talk about the process.

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What type of repos or what types of information is fit to issue a cross report.

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If someone sees something or experiences something and thinks that really shouldn't have happened, or if that happens again, we need to get in front of it.

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We need to learn from what has gone wrong.

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It's very hard to defy.

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We encourage people to read cross reports to get a feel of how the organization operates.

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We founded on a system that was built for the American aviation sector when their pilots were seeing things go wrong but couldn't tell anybody about it because they'd have been dismissed.

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They would never have got work again.

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So the confidentiality part of it to protect those people think they've got something to share.

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Any issue regarding fire or structural safety, where something's gone wrong that perhaps wasn't expected or a standard doesn't appear to be fit for purpose or people are making the same mistake all of the time and they need to learn about this.

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These are issues that people should learn about as an individual and can possibly be used by regulators, standards creators, enforcers everyone to take the appropriate action to stop things happening again.

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Does it have like a minimum impact, that it has to have like, or you can literally submit anything and your team will evaluate that.

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You can literally submit anything.

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We do have some well, we'll talk about some example reports a bit later, I'm sure but we have some really quite substantial and weighty reports that are submitted to us from very clever people who are sharing some quite complex issues with us.

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But the other end of the spectrum, we can have some real simple issues, such as inappropriate fire stopping in a compartment wall, which might seem like quite a mundane issue.

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But when you take all these issues together and we collect statistics on issues that are reported to us, then these little things add up to be significant problems that we need to be reporting back on and telling the government about, telling industry, about telling the standards makers about.

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So no, there's a whole range of issues that are reported to us.

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Nothing's too small and nothing's too big.

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I'm asking that because when I was going through the database and there's, like the moment that we're recording, there's 99 under fire keyword you can essentially see some really big things like general issues with CLT or mass timber, like it's an entire industry, and then, as you said, fittings or simple detailing that can perhaps lead to bad outcomes.

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So it was first, for me it was interesting, that it's not just law requirements, it's not just the codes and standards, it's also the built environment, to be honest, everything that we do with our buildings, from building them up also to the way how do we use and maintain them right.

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Absolutely All throughout the the building life cycle, from conception, design, through construction, commissioning, occupation uh, even got to think about demolition and the end of the building's life cycle as well.

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Um, but you're right.

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We do receive reports from the the widest variety of people who are involved in that built environment, whether they are engineers, designers, academics, those who are involved in cutting-edge research, right through to building owners, building managers and the enforcing authorities and insurers who have a financial investment in building.

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I must say that, looking at the model of your company a thing that immediately came to my mind and perhaps I'm very nasty for the Polish building market but if we had a thing like this in Polish market, it would be no one manufacturer issuing hundreds of reports on his competition, on how bad their products is, and vice versa.

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How do you feel to that?

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That's a really interesting observation because we have an ethos within CROSS which is a no-blame ethos.

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Our reports are all about promoting the learning, promoting the good practice, and we really go to great lengths to make sure that there is no blame on any particular party with the reports that we publish.

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But yeah, that was a very good observation.

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And Neil, is it something that's consistent to the life of organization?

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Or you perhaps have went through some times where someone perhaps went too far and this had to be rethought Because, I mean, you're touching very sensitive subjects in those reports.

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Well, peter and I are the only two people that see the raw report.

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We're the only people that know who's reported and we look at who is reporting to us and sometimes you would say, well, they would say that, wouldn't they?

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They're definitely coming from a direction and we can filter those things out.

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We can speak back to the reporter if necessary, but we certainly wouldn't portray a bias.

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We wouldn't take reports from the concrete industry pointing the finger at the timber industry, without of course, it needs to be a real issue, and we're not the end of the trail because we might be the gatekeepers that let things in.

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But once we expose it to our expert panel, if the reporter is telling us a load of rubbish, the expert panel will feed that back and it may not get published or it might be a major to change, just to reflect the core learning.

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Tell me more about the expert panel.

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So you are the gatekeepers.

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The report is issued by anonymous reporter.

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You know who that is?

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Because you received the submission and I guess it has to be signed.

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But from that moment you anonymize it and if you think it has some merit, what happens later with the submission?

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So there are 72 steps approximately in processing a cross report from receipt to publication.

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It is quite complex to make sure that we end up with something that reflects the learning that's been shared with us, is accurate and safe, maintaining the confidentiality, and is likely to be easy to read to the intended audience.

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So we put a lot of effort into making sure that we distill the number of words down to the minimum.

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We use appropriate language for the professions that are involved.

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We use drawings, and that's quite difficult.

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We have to adapt because we can't share photographs that give away locations or anything that would identify something that shouldn't be exposed.

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It's a very, very detailed and challenging process.

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It takes quite a time, but we think at the end of it you've got a safe, credible product.

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A report can be relied upon to be independent, factual and worthwhile.

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And whilst it is incredibly detailed and there are lots of steps, it does boil down to six key steps.

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So you mentioned, wojciech, about the reporter submitting a report.

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Well, that's really easy for them to do.

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They can do it on our secure website.

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We just ask a few questions.

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And whilst all our work is anonymized we don't accept anonymous reports we do want the reporter to tell us who they are and what industry they're in so that we can verify that it is a genuine report that's being presented to us.

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But, as Neil said earlier, there's only the two of us that ever know the identity of the person who's submitted a report to us, because we are the very first part of the process and our role is to anonymize the report, and it's not just taking out names, it's also that de-identification, so making sure that no, no one can identify the project that's being talked about or any particular aspects of of a product or things like that.

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So so we start that process off by the anonymization and we also edit the report to make sure it's clear, and then we send reports off to our expert panel and we have a very well-developed expert panel on the fire safety side.

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They're all volunteers.

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I think there's about 20 in our panel at the moment that come from all areas within the fire sector and they come together on an entirely voluntary basis to give their expertise to enhance our reports.

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That's a two-stage process, passing these reports via the panels, so we receive their comments, we refine the report, send it out again for them to add any final comments to them.

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Then the next stage of the process is a very important one.

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It's a legal review.

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The anonymized report goes to again it's a legal firm in London who provide their services completely free of charge, make sure there are no concerns with publishing the report.

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We then share the final anonymized report with the reporter just to make sure that see if they've got any comments, make sure that they're happy with how we've interpreted their report, and then we publish it.

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The report is always published first of all on our website that's the best place to see all our reports and then, a short period of time after the report is published, all the information that's on our system relating to the identity of the reporter is deleted.

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And that's also very important because we want to make sure that reporters are completely confident that they can do that without any comeback If they want to tell us something that's happened in their business.

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There's no way of identifying the reporter with the issue, and we feel that's one of the best ways of encouraging more reporting so that we can all benefit and all learn from, from, from these, uh, these issues.

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So that that's our process in a nutshell and and it seems to work really well.

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It's a tried and tested system sounds like a lot of work.

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One thing that immediately comes to my mind and who's paying for that?

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Because you're not charging the reporters, you're not charging the listeners.

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How do you maintain the financial background of the organization?

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Was it independent?

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Until Dame Julie Thaki suggested that Kroshubic badly defied her.

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It was paid for by the institution of structural engineers, civil engineers and a very small payment from the health and safety executive.

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When the government decided that they were going to sponsor and back all of Dame Judith's recommendations, the relevant government department let a contract to CROSS to support its expansion and strengthening.

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So we devised the new website and we expanded it to FHIR and that was paid for by public money from government.

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So this is like a completely independent body, with engineers and the UK population being the benefactors and the users of it.

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That's a very, very, very interesting model, completely reliant on the goodwill of the expert panels, who spend several hours in a month looking at reports that we share with them, and the legal company Clyde Co will give their time pro bono to make sure that we don't end up exposing anyone or end up in court.

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Fantastic, and I know that also.

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Cross is not just UK.

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Now it's expanding to Australasia and the US.

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How does that expansion work and do you see benefits also for the UK centric point of view?

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Or you simply want to have a global organization that does the same job regardless of your geographical location?

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Well Cross has expanded.

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It's currently operational in the United States and Australasia, so that's Australia and New Zealand, but in those two jurisdictions it's purely a structural safety reporting system, so it uses the same model, but just a single discipline.

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We would very much like to expand fire into those regions as well, and that's something that we are working on behind the scenes.

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We just need to be able to establish the expert panels in those local areas, because we have the website, we have the infrastructure to make it happen.

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We just need to recruit and help to manage the teams of volunteers who would operate in those areas.

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But it's developed a nice model that can be, in theory, rolled out to any number of jurisdictions around the world, and I can see great benefit in learning from different regions of the world and sharing that information internationally.

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It makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?

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Well, neil just said in the introduction that fires of claddings have happened in the Middle East and elsewhere.

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You didn't have to.

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Well, you also had one big in KB for Grenfell.

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But technically, if this was a network operational worldwide, there's a greater chance someone will pick such a problem in general rather than relying on a smaller part of the world.

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I also wonder about processing those.

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I have no idea who's in the expert committee.

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I have no idea if you shared it, but it's regardless.

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I wonder, like, how do you judge if something is just a part of you know scientific or professional discussion and what a part of you know scientific or professional discussion and what's an issue?

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Now, because sometimes some people can show a specific issue oh, this is a big problem when in reality it's just about product performance or how do you apply the product or where is it fit and on the other hand you also probably should not be judging oh yeah, this solution is much better than that solution In Poland.

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Apologies to my colleagues again, but in Poland there is this never-ending battle between ethics people, you know, the police, tyrant people and the mineral wool people, and I mean it's like in a lens you can see this type of endless, endless fight.

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So how does the expert panel, how do you judge whether something truly is an issue for the safety?

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And something is just a part of the discussion.

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I suppose it's about having the right minds within our panel and having the broad expertise.

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We're very fortunate that both Neil and I you can probably see by the grey hair we're quite experienced in the profession.

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So we've been able to draw on contact from many years of working in the profession to draw together our panel and it's all publicly available on the website the panel members.

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But we have got experts from lots of different areas within the fire sector and it's that combination of views that gives us that, that kind of clarity, I think.

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But I mean, you were talking about different aspect of the industry who probably have a bit of a oh, oh, how do I describe it?

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A grudge, a grudge, that's the way of describing it.

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I have a grudge with other aspects of the sector.

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Well, because we have that no-blame culture, that kind of collaborative ethic, we want to be quite proactive.

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So if we receive a report that criticizes a particular, well, we'll probably come on to an example later where we've got a report about steel stud work, particularly the light steel frame and how it's tested, and there was reference in one of the reports to a guidance from the Steel Construction Institute.

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Well, that presented a great opportunity for us to discuss that with the Steel Construction Institute.

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Well, that presented a great opportunity for us to discuss that with the Steel Construction Institute.

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Give them an opportunity to contribute to some of the wording that was published alongside the reports and open up some pretty good quality dialogue so that we all know where we stand and we all benefit from that learning.

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So I think being proactive and involving those sectors is also very beneficial.

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It goes back a bit to that word culture as well, doesn't it About what we're here for and what people expect from Cross?

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They don't expect us to be slagging off anybody or anything.

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They expect us to be factual and professional and sharing something that makes sense.

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The longer that I'm listening to you, the more this model makes sense, because I think everyone has a need and everyone benefits from independent body where you can just report when you think things are really going bad.

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One another thing that comes to my mind when thinking about the entire ecosystem of Cross and what your organization is doing there must be quite a psychological cost perhaps for you know, exposing something or issuing a report.

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I can assume in many cases people would be doing a particular solution until they realize that it doesn't work or it doesn't apply or it should have been replaced.

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But it doesn't mean they've stopped doing that.

00:25:06.087 --> 00:25:10.422
Perhaps they were continuing until eventually they issue a report.

00:25:10.422 --> 00:25:18.362
I guess this is the reason for your confidentiality and no-blame policy to actually look for that.

00:25:18.362 --> 00:25:28.165
People who want to come out with something they found rather than live in denial and just continue as usual, right, yeah, absolutely.

00:25:28.835 --> 00:25:54.742
Yeah, couldn't agree more White, more why she keeps just moving people by education, by giving examples, by being accurate, and that it again comes back to the, the skills of the panel to make appropriate comments and the, the processes that cross goes through to ensure that what we put out is is in a safe place.

00:25:54.742 --> 00:25:55.786
It's, it's not.

00:25:55.786 --> 00:26:04.816
Until we're influenced by anything that's not accurate, we definitely avoid the politics and say to the professor well, those behaviors that you were talking about.

00:26:04.855 --> 00:26:05.856
We check, we're so.

00:26:05.856 --> 00:26:09.782
We're trying to encourage engagement on two levels.

00:26:09.782 --> 00:26:14.371
So, first of all, we want people to be consumers of Cross output.

00:26:14.371 --> 00:26:20.188
We want people to sign up to receive our reports online.

00:26:20.188 --> 00:26:27.823
We want them to sign up to receive our newsletters so that they can use Cross as a contribution to their continuing professional development.

00:26:27.823 --> 00:26:31.045
It's part of the cultural change.

00:26:31.045 --> 00:26:40.105
It's about them learning and sharing that knowledge with other people in the office as well and then having chats about an interesting report they've read.

00:26:40.105 --> 00:26:42.983
So it's about consuming the information.

00:26:42.983 --> 00:26:46.755
Then the next stage we want people to contribute to this body of knowledge.

00:26:46.755 --> 00:26:57.623
We want people to submit their own reports to us and that's the real way that this is going to grow and for the benefit of all is to get more reports submitted to us.

00:26:58.595 --> 00:27:14.701
So it's kind of like building a relationship with the user by providing them factual knowledge and perhaps mobilizing them that perhaps you can also contribute and we will make sure that this knowledge that you provide to us will be cross-checked and provided to others like you.

00:27:14.701 --> 00:27:16.361
Okay, that's really interesting.

00:27:16.361 --> 00:27:24.105
And another thought that I have like I'm a researcher, I'm a scientist In science, the science always moves forward.

00:27:24.105 --> 00:27:30.242
At the end of the 19th century, people were worried that there will be no place for scientists because everything was already invented.

00:27:30.242 --> 00:27:30.503
Right.

00:27:30.503 --> 00:27:41.474
It's a cycle that repeats and repeats, and repeats, and it's for me obvious that most of the theories, most of the assumptions that I have today will eventually be superseded with something better in the future.

00:27:41.474 --> 00:27:53.211
Yet I don't have any responsibility for using an old theory until a new one took its place and became the industry standard.

00:27:53.595 --> 00:28:01.684
In the world of engineering it perhaps is not that direct, because we would have liabilities and stuff like that.

00:28:01.684 --> 00:28:15.840
I also know that the best scientific discoveries happen in the moment where you figure out something so simple and obvious that it's ridiculous that we were doing it in a different way.

00:28:15.840 --> 00:28:27.398
So my question is is it possible that in some aspects of our engineering we are all in the wrong and there perhaps is one person who's right and we are all in the wrong.

00:28:27.398 --> 00:28:35.772
I, I mean we can all collectively be wrong, and that's probably the places where we would need to cross the most right very difficult that's.

00:28:35.813 --> 00:28:38.018
That's quite a hard question to answer.

00:28:38.018 --> 00:28:44.915
Yeah, what we find is that there are so many facets that can lead to a failure.

00:28:44.915 --> 00:28:47.239
Really, it's the one thing.

00:28:47.239 --> 00:28:59.480
Very, very rarely Overarching titles competence, oversight, responsibility, knowledge, but I don't like to think of anything.

00:28:59.480 --> 00:29:02.467
Peter, but I couldn't have been a silver bullet.

00:29:04.237 --> 00:29:10.845
No, there's no such thing, and you know, wojciech, from your work as I know you're a scientist, but also your work as an engineer.

00:29:10.845 --> 00:29:29.990
There are different perspectives on what success is, and so you know, we've got life safety objectives, we've got property protection and mission continuity objectives as well, and I would like to talk about a couple of examples that really sort of speak to those kind of different perspectives.

00:29:29.990 --> 00:29:32.681
But also memories fade fade, don't they?

00:29:32.681 --> 00:29:38.357
These lessons that we, we learn um can quite often get forgotten, um, quite quickly.

00:29:38.357 --> 00:29:59.185
I, I lecture to some architecture students and I talk about grenfell tower to them, and then I I have to remind myself well, that happened a considerable number of years ago now, and these, these students were actually teenagers at school at the time, so that their understanding and recollection of the events we've moved on, haven't we?

00:29:59.185 --> 00:30:03.217
So it's very important to keep reminding people about these things as well.

00:30:03.217 --> 00:30:09.285
I mean, one particular example I'd like to touch on is fires in multi-story car parks.

00:30:09.786 --> 00:30:13.691
Back in 2017, there was a fire in Liverpool.

00:30:13.691 --> 00:30:28.988
It was called the Liverpool Echo Arena multi-story car park fire, and that was a particularly interesting fire because thousands of cars were destroyed and the fire was so intense that there was significant structural damage and structural failure.

00:30:28.988 --> 00:30:35.070
So that piqued the interest of of cross and a safety alert was produced.

00:30:35.070 --> 00:30:42.748
And the safety alert was aimed at those who own, commission, design, construct or maintain multi-story car parks.

00:30:42.748 --> 00:30:49.684
It described some of the research on car park fires that that was uh was known at the time.

00:30:49.684 --> 00:31:04.405
It gave some design tips for existing multi-storey car parks and for new multi-storey car parks and, in summary, it said that fires in multi-storey car parks do occur and are usually extinguished rapidly.

00:31:04.405 --> 00:31:20.575
However, the Liverpool fire provides compelling evidence that this is not always the case and steps should be taken by fire engineers and structural engineers, as well as by owners and managers of similar facilities, to consider the potential impacts of fires in car park structures on both life and property.

00:31:20.575 --> 00:31:25.768
And it talks about disastrous fires and what is unacceptable to society.

00:31:25.768 --> 00:31:30.019
So that was published in February 2018.

00:31:30.019 --> 00:31:30.460
So that happened in.

00:31:30.460 --> 00:31:31.721
That was published in February 2018.

00:31:31.741 --> 00:31:40.071
And then we received a cross safety report from a concerned reporter in October 2020.

00:31:40.071 --> 00:31:55.428
And a reporter is concerned by the reluctance of the industry to voluntarily take on board and proactively react to the lessons learned from the fire at the Echo Arena car park in Liverpool.

00:31:55.428 --> 00:32:08.116
So this reporter was frustrated by people perhaps adopting the bare minimum in terms of fire protection for a multi-storey car park and thinking back just three years earlier to a fire that happened where there was such a loss.

00:32:08.116 --> 00:32:09.318
That happened where there was such a loss.

00:32:09.318 --> 00:32:17.049
And then, if we think to 2023, there was a fire at an airport multi-storey car park in Luton.

00:32:17.049 --> 00:32:36.005
That multi-storey car park was designed and constructed after the Liverpool Echo Arena fire, so that fire incident should have been known about by the people who were designing the car park in Luton, and yet that fire took place.

00:32:36.005 --> 00:32:46.808
It closed the airport for nearly 24 hours and we've now got one of the major airports on the outskirts of London without a multi-story car park.

00:32:46.808 --> 00:32:50.599
That's a significant loss of amenity.

00:32:50.619 --> 00:32:53.083
But were the lessons introduced into that design or not?

00:32:53.083 --> 00:32:55.026
Or was it the part of this reluctancy without a multi-story?

00:32:55.046 --> 00:32:55.247
car park.

00:32:55.247 --> 00:32:56.307
That's a significant loss of amenity.

00:32:56.307 --> 00:32:58.211
But were the lessons introduced into that design or not?

00:32:58.211 --> 00:32:59.192
Or was it the part of this reluctancy?

00:32:59.192 --> 00:33:00.434
No, they weren't, they weren't, they weren't.

00:33:00.434 --> 00:33:03.568
So that's when I talked about different perspectives, because some people would say, well, what was wrong with that fire?

00:33:03.568 --> 00:33:05.240
Nobody died.

00:33:05.240 --> 00:33:19.609
I mean, there were, sadly, some firefighters sustained some injuries in tackling it, but from a life safety point of view it complied with the regulations and it had the minimum standards that we expect in multi-story car parks.

00:33:19.609 --> 00:33:32.521
But because the people who commissioned that car park didn't think about mission resilience or think back to an event that happened only a couple of years ago, we're in that situation again.

00:33:32.521 --> 00:33:34.461
I think that's an interesting example.

00:33:35.075 --> 00:33:35.496
With car parks.

00:33:35.496 --> 00:33:59.746
You're touching my soft spot because in 2015, we've published a book in Polish about the safe design of car parks for smoke control mainly and in that book we brought up that you cannot risk losing an entire building that has something on top of it or is important in general, and a few thousand car park in front of an airport certainly is, isn't it.

00:33:59.746 --> 00:34:10.688
You cannot risk losing it to a simple car fire, which may or may not occur, and we face so much backlash from the industry that car parks do not burn, that no one died in a car park.

00:34:10.688 --> 00:34:14.744
And now do you have any feedback?

00:34:14.744 --> 00:34:24.365
We were a few fires after that one, so there was a massive one in Cork, one in Stavanger, there was one in Japan, one in America, one in Warsaw.

00:34:24.365 --> 00:34:27.623
There was like 10 big open car park fires.

00:34:27.623 --> 00:34:34.027
Since then, anything changed with the industry, or is the report still a pending thing to be implemented?

00:34:34.974 --> 00:34:36.280
No change in standards.

00:34:36.280 --> 00:34:41.059
But there's been an increase in chapter in the press about that.

00:34:41.059 --> 00:34:42.925
It was not learning lessons.

00:34:42.925 --> 00:34:48.163
We've made column inches in the Times, which is quite unusual for Cross.

00:34:48.163 --> 00:34:56.186
It crops up in Inside housing and the building magazines quite often, but we don't make mainstream press.

00:34:56.186 --> 00:35:03.846
But this time our reporters got the ear of their editor and said that Luton fire, we don't really like it.

00:35:03.846 --> 00:35:10.884
And Alistair Sloan, structural engineer, and myself interviewed that and we'll put some words into that.

00:35:10.884 --> 00:35:18.320
No change in standards, though we're still got all the requirements for, excuse me, 15 minutes protection to the structure.

00:35:18.320 --> 00:35:19.737
Who's your?

00:35:20.661 --> 00:35:21.003
audience.

00:35:21.003 --> 00:35:22.719
Is it the government?

00:35:22.719 --> 00:35:24.355
Is it just the engineers?

00:35:24.355 --> 00:35:30.422
I assume it's a mix, but if you want to create good content, you have to create it with one person in mind.

00:35:30.422 --> 00:35:35.764
I know who is my listener and I create the pop for that person.

00:35:35.764 --> 00:35:35.983
Who's?

00:35:35.983 --> 00:35:39.050
Who's your key receiver?

00:35:40.336 --> 00:35:55.282
that's a good question and that's something that does influence how we present the information in our reports, because we are conscious that there's a wide variety types of of user of this information.

00:35:55.282 --> 00:36:13.202
Essentially, the the main bulk of our readership is the professional engineer, whether that's a structural engineer or a fire engineer, um, but we're keen for readership from far and wide and there are plenty of other engineering disciplines who are very interested in cross-reports.

00:36:13.202 --> 00:36:24.784
But also there's a relevance to professions, you know, architects, building designers, fire and rescue service, those responders and regulators.

00:36:24.784 --> 00:36:32.306
But, like I say, that influences how we present our information and we always present our reports in a consistent way.

00:36:32.306 --> 00:36:33.481
They start off.

00:36:33.481 --> 00:36:45.764
If you had a look at our website, you'll see that each of our reports has a number, a report ID, so we can uniquely identify them, and there's always a publication date associated with them.

00:36:46.295 --> 00:37:08.335
Actually, before you even go to the report, there is a very well-written summary on the web page that gives you the most important bits with the background, and that's the first thing I see when I enter, and I really appreciate that way of presenting data because that gives me a really good overview of is this relevant to myself?

00:37:08.335 --> 00:37:10.289
Can I learn more from that?

00:37:10.289 --> 00:37:23.016
Or perhaps it's an issue that I've never seen in my life and I can just read it out of curiosity if I have time absolutely, yeah, the the overview, the report overview, is very important for just just those reasons you've.

00:37:23.135 --> 00:37:30.617
You've mentioned um, we also have have have a title, a report title that contains a lot of words, but that that's.

00:37:30.617 --> 00:37:39.402
That's important, because that helps with search engine optimization so you can really focus in and you get all the reports that are associated with a particular topic you're searching for.

00:37:39.402 --> 00:37:44.505
But after the overview we present key learning outcomes.

00:37:44.505 --> 00:37:45.626
You may have seen this.

00:37:45.626 --> 00:37:53.050
It's a highlighted box called key learning outcomes and we try to draw out the key learning outcomes for various different professionals.

00:37:53.050 --> 00:37:55.257
So I'm just looking at a couple of examples here.

00:37:55.257 --> 00:38:02.382
We've got key learning outcomes for designers, for fire engineers, for structural design engineers and for firefighters.

00:38:02.882 --> 00:38:08.365
And you know we try and keep these quite short, pithy bullet points for key learning outcomes.

00:38:08.365 --> 00:38:15.121
But if a person's just reading the overview and reading those key learning outcomes, then they're taking a lot away.

00:38:15.121 --> 00:38:17.503
They're getting some good learning from that.

00:38:17.503 --> 00:38:30.420
They may want to delve a bit further and go into the full report, which is the edited version of the report that's submitted to us, and then the reports always finish off with expert panel comments.

00:38:30.420 --> 00:38:40.081
So any thoughts or additions that our expert panels members have have given to that particular topic are presented in the report as well.

00:38:40.081 --> 00:39:08.838
So to answer that question again, I think a wide variety of people from the construction sector can get a lot out of the overview and those key learning outcomes if it applies to them, and then then those with a particular interest or a specialism in a particular topic can delve deeper into the report and the meat of the report and the expert panel comments that follow it are the expert panel comments also filtered, or is it consensus among the experts what gets published?

00:39:09.460 --> 00:39:11.706
it's quite a challenging job bringing them together.

00:39:11.706 --> 00:39:17.668
We very, very, very rarely have significantly different opinions.

00:39:17.668 --> 00:39:23.748
We get good support and different angles, but not clashing.

00:39:23.748 --> 00:39:30.409
It's making sure that their points are given appropriate priority and are not missed in the process.

00:39:30.409 --> 00:39:34.626
It's very rare that everyone in the panel would have a comment.

00:39:34.626 --> 00:39:38.324
They stick to their specialisms and their area of knowledge.

00:39:38.324 --> 00:39:47.327
They might well read to make sure that the appropriate people have checked over that report before they'd say something themselves.

00:39:47.327 --> 00:39:51.746
The expert panel is also interested in helping project the learning.

00:39:51.746 --> 00:39:55.045
You ask well, jake, about what's our audience?

00:39:55.045 --> 00:39:59.978
Well, we've got a member of the building advisory committee.

00:39:59.978 --> 00:40:14.478
We've got a member of our external who is a, an architect, and we try to make sure that we've got that broad representation in the skills in the team so they transmit back into their section.

00:40:14.478 --> 00:40:19.068
If we had a eureka, we know that it won't be transmitted appropriately.

00:40:20.016 --> 00:40:22.862
You've previously used the term.

00:40:22.862 --> 00:40:25.307
You make those reports easy to read.

00:40:25.307 --> 00:40:39.702
And it really rings a bell for me because I'm about to go for an SFP conference with a keynote on communication and why I think communication is perhaps the most lacking skill among fire engineers.

00:40:39.702 --> 00:40:51.126
And good communication and I'm not talking about communicating to a fellow fire safety engineer Boy, that's easy, but go ahead and communicate to the firefighter, architect, investor and the government at the same time, right?

00:40:51.835 --> 00:41:03.871
How do you make this content approachable to non-fire experts who may need to have a general understanding of the issue?

00:41:03.871 --> 00:41:12.726
Because perhaps if you're issuing a report on CLT actually the CLT report is an excellent example the cross-laminated timber in multi-story buildings.

00:41:12.726 --> 00:41:29.123
It was a loud story a few years ago when you published it, because it quite brutally tells people that CLT and ADB is not your typical building, that you would apply ADB, and I assume that has far-reaching consequences.

00:41:29.123 --> 00:41:45.110
How do you make and this message has to reach fire engineers okay, sure, but there's the timber magazine or whatever magazine the architects have on timber that says timber is stronger than steel and they are in the denial of any fire issue.

00:41:45.110 --> 00:41:47.583
How do you reach those people with your message?

00:41:48.474 --> 00:41:57.469
Interestingly, we published a report about CLT in tall buildings and we got some feedback on our website that sent us cold.

00:41:57.469 --> 00:42:05.065
It was so chilling that the people that had read the reports and made comments didn't understand what we were saying.

00:42:05.065 --> 00:42:13.963
So we crafted the individual report, the special edition report, that says hey, anyone dealing with CLT?

00:42:13.963 --> 00:42:15.757
We've heard since that.

00:42:15.757 --> 00:42:18.726
That paper, the theme page, was it, peter?

00:42:18.726 --> 00:42:19.327
Help me out.

00:42:19.327 --> 00:42:20.960
It probably got in front of you.

00:42:21.501 --> 00:42:21.842
I haven't.

00:42:21.842 --> 00:42:23.804
Was it a safety alert that we put?

00:42:23.844 --> 00:42:23.925
out.

00:42:23.925 --> 00:42:25.380
We put out an alert.

00:42:25.380 --> 00:42:35.565
Thank you, yeah, and we've heard that that's been taken by building control officers into meetings to justify their sounds.

00:42:35.565 --> 00:42:37.922
Look Cross says you can't do that.

00:42:39.516 --> 00:42:43.266
That's good, but it's still crafting the message.

00:42:43.266 --> 00:42:47.186
I mean, you don't rely on the skills of the reporter, right?

00:42:47.186 --> 00:42:55.329
It's your editing and you are fitting that message to come out to the more general audience, right.

00:42:57.255 --> 00:43:00.019
Yes, I don't think there's any particular secret in what we do.

00:43:00.019 --> 00:43:24.961
We are becoming more and more experienced in doing that, but we are still benefiting from the guidance of alistair soan to the scheme back in 2005, and I know I think neil uses the term where we're standing on the shoulders of giants there but we really are with Alistair because he's still importing a lot of guidance to us and we are still refining what we do.

00:43:25.563 --> 00:43:26.443
We still need it.

00:43:28.507 --> 00:43:28.989
Great, great.

00:43:28.989 --> 00:43:39.501
You said you have a ton of examples to discuss, so let's try two or three more, because perhaps we can get more out of discussing specific issues.

00:43:40.063 --> 00:43:42.527
Yeah, absolutely Well.

00:43:42.527 --> 00:44:02.344
I highlighted the one about the risk of collapse of multi-story CLT buildings during a fire because that was a particularly interesting one that led to that safety alert having to be issued to clarify what we were saying, and that was a bit of a sort of a milestone for us.

00:44:02.344 --> 00:44:03.920
Really, that was really interesting.

00:44:03.920 --> 00:44:14.927
But it's another example of how people can submit comments after they've read the report and, subject to us reviewing them before they're published on the website.

00:44:14.927 --> 00:44:21.605
They can be then published on our website as feedback and that sort of adds to the conversation.

00:44:21.605 --> 00:44:35.384
It's also worth saying that our reports are often shared on social media, linkedin particularly, and that's another good way of getting the message out, disseminating the message but also growing the message.

00:44:35.384 --> 00:44:41.974
There's a lot of discourse that goes on with people adding comments on on linkedin, so, uh, that that's all encouraged.

00:44:42.878 --> 00:44:46.869
Another good example is fire protection to light gauge steel frame walls.

00:44:46.869 --> 00:44:48.594
Um, I mentioned it earlier.

00:44:48.594 --> 00:44:52.222
Um, it's report I d 1116.

00:44:52.222 --> 00:44:54.326
You see it's structured in the usual way.

00:44:54.326 --> 00:45:32.034
It's got a good overview, which is a disagreement between fire engineers and manufacturers on testing for load-bearing performance of a light-gauge steel frame wall in the case of fire was reported to us and it goes into a lot of detail about the information that was provided by the manufacturer and how this particular reporter had to delve a lot deeper to get to the truth, and it touches on some published guidance from the Steel Construction Institute and talks about that in some detail.

00:45:32.657 --> 00:45:35.085
It's an unusual report because it's quite long.

00:45:35.938 --> 00:45:55.222
It's probably longer than we'd like to have them because we like our reports to be quite snappy, but this was an important issue, so we afforded, we've got the flexibility to give it that space and I encourage your listeners to take a look at it because it talks about fire testing in a lot of detail.

00:45:55.222 --> 00:45:56.041
But what's interesting about this?

00:45:56.041 --> 00:45:56.688
Fire testing in a lot of detail.

00:45:56.688 --> 00:45:57.373
But what's interesting about this?

00:45:57.373 --> 00:46:13.702
One attracted a lot of comment from our expert panel, but we actually went to see representatives of the steel construction institute and we've published their response to this report, which, which I think was a really good way forward.

00:46:13.702 --> 00:46:31.860
It was a really positive experience, a positive exchange between us as CROSS, who had these concerns that were reported to us, and the SCI was able to consider those concerns and actually come back in a really positive way with their response.

00:46:31.860 --> 00:46:33.733
So that's a long report.

00:46:33.733 --> 00:46:44.143
It's quite unusual in its length it shows that being proactive and discussing things in a collaborative way is there for the benefit of all.

00:46:44.143 --> 00:46:45.420
We all learn from that.

00:46:46.637 --> 00:47:12.699
Yeah, what caught my attention perhaps you remember that when I was going through timber and cladding, because these are the things that interest me and then there was a report about some sort of using timber as a cladding material, that went down into some rabbit hole into papers from you know 1960s and someone like reading three A's as like seven A's or something like some you know issue.

00:47:12.699 --> 00:47:14.965
That's like half a century old.

00:47:14.965 --> 00:47:27.746
And then now in the 21st century, apparently in your regulations it calls the wrong number of what's safe, so that one went a really long way to cross-check that.

00:47:28.717 --> 00:47:30.864
But in the end wow, that's a magic number.

00:47:30.864 --> 00:47:48.041
And you know what I'm in CN committees for smoke control and you would not believe how many times we end up looking for an origin of something and it ends up with Howard Morgan Sesso in like 1993 meeting in whatever city and then since then it was not changed.

00:47:48.041 --> 00:47:59.648
He was a genius and I would trust him with everything, but yet we as a community, we so often have lost the capability to trace back the origins.

00:47:59.648 --> 00:48:01.342
It's really disturbing.

00:48:01.994 --> 00:48:03.442
No, you're absolutely right, roycek.

00:48:03.442 --> 00:48:06.478
I've picked this report as well For your listeners.

00:48:06.478 --> 00:48:11.583
It's 1194, which is the report ID, and it was published later on last year.

00:48:12.295 --> 00:48:13.119
Yeah, it was a recent one.

00:48:13.119 --> 00:48:13.280
Yeah.

00:48:13.875 --> 00:48:22.603
A reporter relays a concern that guidance to the building regulations regarding the use of timber cladding may be the result of a misinterpretation.

00:48:22.603 --> 00:48:23.425
And you're quite right.

00:48:23.425 --> 00:48:42.648
It goes back to the works of, you know, fire Research, note 8 from 1965, and talking about publications by Thomas and Margaret Law and Malhotra so yeah, great, great names of the pioneers of fire engineering from the 60s and 70s.

00:48:42.648 --> 00:48:47.804
But you're quite right, and that report has gained a lot of interest.

00:48:47.804 --> 00:48:58.179
It got some really nice additional comments from our expert panel and it's an example where, you know, maybe the guidance does need looking at again.

00:48:59.177 --> 00:49:00.262
I mean it's an example.

00:49:00.262 --> 00:49:06.518
I mean Margaret Lowe or Thomas or Howard Morgan or whoever of the giants that were before us.

00:49:06.518 --> 00:49:07.463
They were just humans.

00:49:07.463 --> 00:49:15.362
It's okay that they could mistake Like we can make a mistake and hopefully someone will eventually catch up and fix.

00:49:15.362 --> 00:49:28.847
But if we believe that the collective knowledge is 100% accurate and factual and there's no bumps and holes in it, then we perhaps are defending the incorrect.

00:49:28.847 --> 00:49:31.684
That also goes back to my question can we all be wrong?

00:49:31.684 --> 00:49:33.300
Can we collectively be wrong?

00:49:33.300 --> 00:49:35.643
Because there are more and more examples.

00:49:35.643 --> 00:49:42.625
The more you dig in, the more we figure out that the bases are not as sound as we would like them to be.

00:49:42.625 --> 00:49:44.943
And it's not because someone was wrong.

00:49:44.943 --> 00:49:50.481
It's about limitations, it's about culture, it's about the background at which someone was working with.

00:49:50.481 --> 00:49:59.277
And you need to assume a paradigm that we all need to move forward and only then we can be safer, right?

00:49:59.297 --> 00:50:03.306
We're starting to receive more reports from the fire and rescue services.

00:50:03.306 --> 00:50:11.106
Okay, you really don't want the fire service to be telling you that your standards are wrong.

00:50:11.106 --> 00:50:12.253
That's far too long downstream, isn't it?

00:50:12.253 --> 00:50:13.960
But that is the fact.

00:50:13.960 --> 00:50:31.273
Fire and rescue services are sending us quite valuable reports about incidents that they are concerned about, about fire spread, about behavior, materials, and there hasn't been such a positive route available before cross was set up.

00:50:31.333 --> 00:50:43.371
as well, yeah they'd produce their reports and, unless they catastrophic, which meant that they got into government, they would get lost amongst the experts inside the fire service.

00:50:44.255 --> 00:50:46.443
This is absolutely fantastic.

00:50:46.443 --> 00:50:56.911
In Poland, there must be a fire in which multiple people die and then the regulations change overnight and there's suddenly a thousand buildings undergoing control in the next week, and so on.

00:50:56.911 --> 00:51:02.706
So, but generally, firefighters have reasonable concerns about some of the systems and engineering that we do.

00:51:02.706 --> 00:51:14.103

149 - CROSS UK with Neil Gibbins and Peter Wilkinson

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