159 - The WUI Problem with Michele Steinberg and Birgitte Messerschmidt

Transcript

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Hello everybody, welcome to the Fire Science Show.

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In this episode we're gonna try and answer a very difficult question what is the Wii problem and what are the pathways to its solution?

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That's actually a hell of a question, but I have a really good guest with me in this episode to help me answer that.

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Both are from NFPA, that's Birgitta Messerschmidt and Michelle Steinberg, and they're both passionately dealing with a wee problem.

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You can read their columns in the NFPA journal.

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You can listen to them at NFPA podcast sometimes.

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Anyway, I brought them here to the Fire Science Show because I hope that together we will be able to put a holistic bird's eye view on the issue of the wee problem, wild and urban interface, and I had a lot of scientific talks about the WE in the podcast so far.

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So we've talked about how the forest burns, what are the variables that influence that fire, but we've not discussed that much on the community or the building or the fire protection side, on how those communities can be prepared and buildings protected, and here we're not talking particular solutions but more like an ecosystem aspect of it.

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What makes people do safe homes, why they do not invest in that, how to build the regulations to allow for that.

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What are we lacking in terms of the testing regime and, yeah, as I said in the very first sentence, what the Wii problem actually really is.

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So a bunch of really good questions and even more great answers in this episode.

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And this episode also serves to convince you, my fellow FICEFT engineers, to convince you that there's future in we for all of us.

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And if you don't like it, that's fine, but I truly believe the future will arrive, no matter our feelings, and I think we should all get educated on we.

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It's a difficult subject, complicated subject, so I really hope resources like podcasts and interviews like this one can bring you up at speed to the best knowledge you can have on this issue, which will be highly, highly relevant in the future.

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Anyway, I think that's it for introducing you to the subject.

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I guess you need to hear it from Michel and Birgitta.

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So let's spin the intro and jump into the episode.

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Michelle and Birgitta, so let's spin the intro and jump into the episode.

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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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Hello everybody, welcome to the Fire Science Show.

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I am here today joined by Birgit Messerschmidt.

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Hello Birgit, welcome back to the show.

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Thanks for having me back again, Wojciech.

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You're very, very welcome and Michelle Steinberg, hello for the first time.

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Welcome, yes, thank you, glad to be here.

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And you both are representing NFPA and I'm really, really happy to guest you both in the show.

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We will be talking about things related to Wildland, urban Interface, wii Fires, so I'll drop a bump on you first.

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How do you define WII?

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Right.

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So we have been trying to define this wildland urban interface for at least 50 years and nobody can agree.

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Recently some fire protection engineers in the US gave a presentation called what is the WUI and it was fascinating.

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It was at our NFPA's annual conference a few weeks ago.

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People came in thinking they knew what it was and walked out thinking I don't know what it was and walked out thinking I don't know what it is.

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The point is, what we're trying to describe is a problem of homes igniting during wildfires and in fact not just a building but multiple buildings, whole communities, and we're trying to describe it in a way that defies kind of the scientific logic of it, if that makes any sense.

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So we're trying to draw a line.

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When you say interface that you assume there's sort of a line or a barrier or boundary.

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That is a nice neat definition for a very messy problem.

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The messiness comes when we're talking about what is causing the fire.

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So that wild land word gets in there.

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You can argue and I live in the Northeast of the US where many friends have told me we do not have wild land in this region which I'd argue yes, you do, but they see this.

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What is even wild land.

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We don't understand what that means, first of all.

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And then urban also has its own connotations of a city and people think well, cities don't burn down from wildfires.

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So what are you talking about?

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What I guess we're trying to get at is the exterior exposure from vegetative fuels to buildings, and typically what we find in the US is the residential buildings are the ones that primarily are the ones that are at risk, primarily the ones that burn.

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It doesn't mean that our commercial buildings are so well built.

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It just means there's a lot more houses than there are anything else and they've built in ways that make them very, very vulnerable to the exterior exposure from a wildfire.

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Even the word wildfire has its own set of definitions.

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But the presentation and why people get so confused is when we go beyond the sort of the why are things burning, how are things burning, which is our sort of scientific question.

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We get into politics, which is oh, if I'm defined, if my home or my community is defined as being in the wild and urban interface or in the WUI, then I either have to meet some kind of standard or I'm going to get higher insurance rates because I'm seen as higher risk or something bad is going to happen to me, as opposed to somebody who's not there thinking well, I have no risk from this problem because I'm not in the WUI.

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And we find over and over again that those definitions don't make sense in real life.

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And now, ironically, because our government is putting a lot more money into trying to protect homes and communities at risk, now people want to be in the WUI so they can get grants and they can get help, etc.

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Etc.

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So it's really ironic that we have people running away from and towards this definition.

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That in and of itself is not very helpful to describe what the problem is.

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But it's not just an area, it's not that you have a map, you know the boundary of the forest.

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You take a sharpie and draw a line five kilometers or five miles further, and on the left it's we, on the right it's not, because in many cases, like in your column, you wrote about the fire, the top spire, where it arguably destroyed 1,400 homes that were not even in a vegetated area right.

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So it's more like where the fire began and what it can danger.

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Is that the correct way?

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I mean, if you put it like that, it becomes a metaphorical problem, like what it is.

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Right.

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So the typical aerial map does not help us at all in this situation because it's trying to draw that line or boundary.

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I actually came out of professionally speaking floodplain management and so we have the infamous floodplain maps, the so-called 100-year flood maps that are.

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You know you draw the line and you know you could use some 3D modeling to communicate that better.

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But you more or less understand where you're going to have inundation.

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It's so much harder to deal with fire on this level of understanding how it's going to impact structures and where the actual risk of ignition is, because you have wind, because you have fuels that you move from.

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Let's say you've got a wildfire coming through vegetation, you get embers into the mulch next to your house or the shrub or the flatbed of a pickup truck that's parked next to a house and these all become fuel for the fire that is ultimately going to take the community down and you think, well, that's not a wildfire anymore, because if it's in the mulch and it's on the deck or it's in the pickup truck, those aren't wild lands, those are objects, common objects, around our homes and our yards.

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Or it's in the pickup truck, those aren't wild lands, those are objects, common objects around our homes and our yards.

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So it's super confusing to try to draw this line and the way we've tried to explain this to property owners, and that's the thing I think I'm looking forward to talking more about sort of the fire protection engineering role here, because we're trying to tell people who are already built in a highly hazardous situation with materials that aren't going to withstand this fire, we're trying to tell them, who are already built in a highly hazardous situation with materials that aren't going to withstand this fire, we're trying to tell them to do what they can do and what we know they can do and what they can control is the fuel which starts with their house and out to the extent of their property.

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That's what they have control over usually, and they can't control the wind.

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They can't control the national forest you know a mile down the road they can control what does my roof look like?

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What does the vegetation look like right around my house?

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What are the other things that could catch embers that I can modify so that when we have this inevitable fire coming, there's things I can do to prevent my home igniting.

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So that's getting down to that micro level.

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And then, oh, by the way.

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If my neighbor's closer than about 100 feet, I have to worry about them, and so we start to get people to work with their neighbors to reduce those potential fuel sources for ignition to homes.

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So just telling people look at a line on a map does nothing for them, and I have innumerable cases of homes within a city limit that burn, that people freak out because they couldn't understand.

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Well, they're not in the WUI, so how did that happen?

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The fire doesn't really care about the map.

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So Michel said that we have variables that we can control and that's perhaps a building.

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From your perspective.

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Having trouble to define this WUI, does it create challenges in defining how the building should be built or what materials should be used in that?

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How do you approach that problem and do you see light in the tunnel to solve it actually, or we really need to wait until they figure out the definition?

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Yeah, to start there, I think the problem actually lies in the word wildland, because people then immediately think big forest somewhere on the west coast of the United States and not looking out their window into the beautiful yard and trees and so on in the small town.

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I think actually, when I think about how ISO TT92 is addressing it, calling it large outdoor fires.

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Okay, yeah.

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It is a pretty good idea, because Outdoor is a nice word, yeah.

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Exactly, because what is the challenge here is that we are seeing an exposure from the outside and we have built all of our homes whether it's the wild and urban interface, suburbia, wherever else all the requirements we have to our homes are based on fire starts within the home.

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They're based on a fire starting in the corner in a room.

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If we go back to the good old SBI test, et cetera, and then how that we want to prevent that fire from growing big.

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We don't want it to then impinge on the neighboring building, et cetera, et cetera, here we have a completely different fire scenario.

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We have the fire coming from the outside, as Michelle was pointing to, the embers coming in igniting things around your building and then starting fire exposure directly on the outside.

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I don't think you will find any regulations around the world that has a requirement to fire spread and fire resistance on a regular suburban home if it's not considered the wildland, and that is a problem.

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We have to go away from only thinking of fire as starting from within and thinking of fire starting from the outside as well.

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I liked what Brigitte had to say about the outdoor fires and that outdoor exposure Because if you think about, you know my other background besides floodplain management is urban planning.

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And when you think about zoning and planning in the United States, zoning started from cases where businesses would just build these highly hazardous factories and things right in the middle and just people would be living around this.

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Seattle, for example, burned down because some guy was you know, everything's built out of wood and some guy is boiling glue or something, and the fire gets away and it goes everywhere and it burns the whole city down.

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So you have these terrible, noxious, fire-prone uses happening next to homes and next to other things that you really shouldn't have fire around.

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And that's when zoning starts.

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It says no, we're going to zone this for residential use, and that means you can't have crazy stuff in the middle of the residential area.

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We're going to put the factories over here, we're going to put the farms over here.

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So you're kind of drawing out like trying to have a measure of safety, but it comes from an exterior exposure to fire.

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That's our history.

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We had cities burning down for decades at the turn of the century from bad planning and zoning and also no firefighting infrastructure.

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And we've solved that.

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We've solved that with fire protection engineering.

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We've solved that with zoning and planning, and now with wildfire.

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If you go to certain states that don't like regulation, plan is a four-letter word.

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Zoning is bad, but it's.

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Do you really want to be putting your homes next to the glue factory?

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No, people see nature and they say, oh nature, it's a beautiful day.

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We take a picture and that's how it is.

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And what they don't realize is no, nature needs fire.

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This is a fiery landscape.

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Fire is going to come to it.

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You need to understand what you're living next to and that's been very, very difficult because, again, glue factory, you can pretty much guarantee you're going to have a pretty high frequency of fires.

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Forest has its own fire ecosystem, fire return interval, and that's way longer than most people think about.

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It could be a 20-year interval, it could be a 20-year interval, it could be a 50-year interval before you're going to get your natural fire.

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So there's a real dissonance there and it's difficult for us to grasp it because we think, you know, we've got the postcard snapshot in our mind of this is what this place looks like, this forest, and not realizing like, oh no, this needs to burn every 15 years Like this really needs to burn to be healthy.

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And yet we're going to build our wooden structures right up next to it.

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So what you're saying, Michelle, is actually we have taken the dangers out that used to be in the middle of our residential areas, removed those, but now we've taken the residential areas and put them right in the middle of the problem, of the fire problem.

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Pretty much, Pretty much, Pretty much, yeah.

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So we turned it inside out.

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That's really interesting, isn't it?

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I actually never thought about it like that, Michelle, Taking the fire away from the center of communities and instead we've taken the communities and putting them into the center of the fire.

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So that is an interesting way of looking at it and considering this planning thought and the challenge of fire come from the outside.

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I always like to make the comparison of our suburban areas, our wild and urban interface areas.

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Anytime we build a lot of one and two family home, I like to compare it to what we do if we were building an apartment building.

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So if I was going to build 100 homes and I was going to stack them on top of each other and get a high-rise building, I would have all kinds of strict requirements to what materials these homes could be built of, how each one could exit their home and getting out safely from this high-rise building If I instead buy a big piece of land out in this beautiful natural area and I'd place these hundred houses all out here in this beautiful area.

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They are now seen as a one-family home, so the requirements to fire performance of each of the homes are fairly limited.

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Often it's only the roofing, if even, and there are no requirements to.

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Nor can we ensure that everyone can get out in case of a fire, because nobody has thought about the situation where a wildfire comes in and everybody in these hundred homes have to leave at the same time.

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So this beautiful little cul-de-sac with a hundred houses and one road in and out is going to turn out to be a disaster.

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So we have to start thinking of this as a scenario that has to be designed for not just in what we traditionally think of wild and urban interface, but in many places around the world.

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And I like the concept.

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But if you think about building regulations, okay, I see your point, that our paradigm, that we consider a single building because that's a legal responsibility of the single investor and that's where we can put laws and our requirements.

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For I think it comes more from the convenience and the way how a legal system is built rather from any technical reason why it's organized like that.

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But I mean, even if you build buildings inside of a city, you have those requirements the fire shall not spread to neighboring structures.

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So we already had some of those to some extent at least, the fire starting from the inside of the building shall not spread to the neighboring constructions.

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How is this threat different from that scenario?

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So if you have a fire that starts from within right and it goes to flash over, we will see the fire venting through the window and we can then have an exposure of the neighboring building.

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That is something we have designed for and regulated for.

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Here we're not talking about a flash over fire out of a window.

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We're talking about a flash or a fire out of a window.

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We're talking about a whole building on fire.

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That's the difference.

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So you now have not just one building, but several buildings, because it's not like all the embers decide to just land on one house and ignite that house and get that burning.

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We're talking about several houses that are potentially starting to burn and burn together, and then we start the configuration.

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Then the building starts burning, creates its new embers, it spreads to the next building, et cetera.

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It's not just fire from within.

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It's one room burning in one building, exposing the neighboring house here.

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It's many buildings burning at the same time, exposing many different houses.

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I did have Professor Simone in the podcast exposing many different help.

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I did have Professor Simone in the podcast and the one thing that he told me that really stayed with me is that once the fire coming from the wildfire, once this fire reaches the first house, it changes everything because suddenly the stuff produced in the fire of that house, plus the stuff from the wildfire itself, is a completely new hazard.

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How do you see that, how big issue is that and how much we should care about it?

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Huge, huge.

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Each of our homes are such a condensed fuel package.

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So you go from a natural fuel that's spread more evenly into extremely condensed fuel packages that start igniting and create a fire that is much more intense in that little local area compared to a wildfire in the same size area.

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So I did a bag of an envelope calculation saying I'm going to build a house that's approximately 200 square meters, 2000 square feet, and do it in the traditional American way.

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You would have more than 30 tons of combustible materials in that building.

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And that was even without whatever content people put in.

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This was just a construction material.

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It was unbelievable.

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So that is why, when each of these buildings starts burning, you go from a completely different fire.

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It's no longer a wildland fire.

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It becomes this wildland urban interface fire.

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It becomes an urban fire.

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It's no longer a wildland fire.

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It becomes this wildland urban interface fire.

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It becomes an urban fire.

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It becomes a conflagration if it's not stopped in its track.

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And you may want to also have Jack Cohen on this podcast at some point.

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Okay, noting, yeah.

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Dr Cohen is a retired Forest Service fire scientist who continues to preach his wisdom around his hometown of Missoula, montana, and other places, but his work and others, you know, is sort of the seminal work on home ignitions during these events and what he found, along with other scientists, in the International Crown Fire Experiments in 1998, they went up to the Northwest Territories of Canada, and they had these plots of, you know, these beautiful tall pine trees.

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They were able to light these plots on fire and watch these crown fires.

00:21:08.890 --> 00:21:22.095
Just go, you know, you've got 50 foot trees with 100 foot flame lengths, like very dramatic, but what he was testing was these make a wall out of wood, you know, make a roof line, put a person, a dummy, a mannequin out there.

00:21:22.095 --> 00:21:28.369
Just see what happens, see what happens to the gear, see what happens to things, and put the cameras out.

00:21:28.369 --> 00:21:30.457
This is low-tech in 1998.

00:21:30.457 --> 00:21:38.411
Put a camera protected by something, and then you'd see so many things where the fire would get close enough to shatter the glass on the lens in the camera.

00:21:38.652 --> 00:21:47.074
Very dramatic, and so what they were showing, though, was the fire moving through that fuel, those tall trees with the magnificent, crazy flames.

00:21:47.074 --> 00:21:50.289
You don't want to be anywhere near that because you will die right.

00:21:50.289 --> 00:21:55.330
A human being will instantly be killed by radiant heat from those flames.

00:21:55.330 --> 00:21:56.333
You don't have to have the flame touch.

00:21:56.420 --> 00:22:09.228
The radiant heat was what they're testing, but what they saw was if you had that piece of wood wall only 30 feet, 10 meters-ish, away from the flame, the edge of the fires, it didn't ignite.

00:22:09.789 --> 00:22:16.108
You might get a little scorched, but it didn't have enough sustained radiant heat to ignite and continue to burn that wood wall.

00:22:16.108 --> 00:22:18.741
So they said, okay, we've solved part of this problem.

00:22:18.741 --> 00:22:46.730
If you're worried about the fire impacting the home, radiant heat isn't that big of a deal, because if you can get that siding the sides of the house, the vulnerable parts of the exterior, to be away from that, so this idea of what they like to call defensible space another arguable term but this idea of space between the flaming front of the fire and the wall, okay, then you've eliminated the radiant heat problem from that source of fire, which is really great.

00:22:46.730 --> 00:22:48.013
So this was very exciting.

00:22:48.013 --> 00:22:57.063
What, of course, we're talking about, with a lot of the impacts to home, though, is not the fire coming and blowing up the home and all this mythology we have.

00:22:57.063 --> 00:22:58.463
It's not the radiant heat.

00:22:58.463 --> 00:23:06.991
In most cases it's the embers or it's the small flames that are running through uninterrupted vegetation to the house or to a fence or to a deck.

00:23:07.976 --> 00:23:12.463
You also mentioned those secondary items, trucks and everything that you can have outside of your homes, right?

00:23:12.763 --> 00:23:18.114
Mention those secondary items, trucks and everything that you can have outside of your homes right Fences, flat wooden decks.

00:23:18.114 --> 00:23:35.010
I mean we joke that you can design the perfect house and then the unlicensed contractors meaning everybody who wants to do it themselves don't get a permit and they go out to Home Depot or Lowe's or whatever and buy the stuff and tack a nice big flammable wooden deck to the house, big flammable wooden deck to the house.

00:23:35.010 --> 00:23:41.910
So it is that pathway of the fire spread are again things that now scientists are looking at much more carefully, because we've already solved for the radiant heat, we already get it.

00:23:41.910 --> 00:23:45.160
Okay, we don't want big flames near our house Cool, we can usually accommodate that.

00:23:45.160 --> 00:23:55.140
But we also can't have any flame touching the house and that's where you get fire creeping through the grass, fire igniting a wooden fence and carrying it like a wick or a fuse right up to the house.

00:23:55.140 --> 00:24:04.047
So it's these appurtenant structures, it's these things that don't even catch our attention when building and designing residential structures to think about.

00:24:04.047 --> 00:24:06.308
But it's the first thing and it's interesting.

00:24:06.409 --> 00:24:15.445
There have been now work on flammability of fence materials and arrangements and so forth, mobility of fence materials and arrangements and so forth, and you know the people who are experiencing it.

00:24:15.465 --> 00:24:16.691
We work with the communities, we work with the fire service.

00:24:16.711 --> 00:24:23.387
It was sort of our duh moment of yeah, we watch it all the time, we see it, but nobody's tested it in the lab.

00:24:23.494 --> 00:24:41.440
So we need to verify, which is really key, because otherwise the scientific community is not going to get the message, because the firefighters the first thing they did in one of the first things they did in the Waldo Canyon fire in 2012 in Colorado Springs community just into this fire siege was run in and start to knock down wooden fences.

00:24:42.021 --> 00:24:58.025
That's one of the first things they did to triage to try to save homes was they knew if the fire reaches this fence, these homes are gone because it was connecting them all like a, like a fuse, and we see that anecdotally over and over again in fires where firefighters have enough time to get in.

00:24:58.025 --> 00:25:02.963
That's one of the first things they're going to do is get rid of that link from the fire to the house.

00:25:02.963 --> 00:25:09.267
And if we put that in our planning, maybe we think about hey, why not use a different material?

00:25:09.267 --> 00:25:11.018
Maybe we don't need a fence here.

00:25:11.018 --> 00:25:21.601
Let's not create ways for the fire to get to our house so the firefighters aren't running around having to do that while they could be doing other things and while they could be fighting more effectively and more safely.

00:25:22.375 --> 00:25:25.281
I wonder where, at what scale, the solutions are there.

00:25:25.281 --> 00:25:28.364
Are the solutions at the single house level?

00:25:28.364 --> 00:25:32.358
Are they at neighborhood, community level, district level planning?

00:25:32.419 --> 00:25:37.723
I don't know federal level yes, I mean, I have a feeling they're on every.

00:25:37.723 --> 00:25:38.329
That's the immediate answer.

00:25:38.329 --> 00:25:38.734
Right, all of them.

00:25:38.734 --> 00:25:40.480
But look at all of them.

00:25:40.480 --> 00:25:42.705
You have different stakeholders involved.

00:25:42.705 --> 00:25:54.288
You have basically different people who would have to pay money for the solution, and if one of those fail to pay money for the solution, the others will not work in an optimal way.

00:25:54.288 --> 00:25:54.808
Right?

00:25:54.808 --> 00:25:56.398
For me, that's a hell of a problem.

00:25:56.779 --> 00:26:01.037
Right, and this goes for other fire problems and other life safety problems.

00:26:01.037 --> 00:26:13.667
But I think we're running up against it's very true in the wildfire space the idea that the strong notion that everything has to be free, cheap, affordable, I think is going against fire safety.

00:26:13.667 --> 00:26:17.741
But to me you're not in a sustainable or safe environment.

00:26:17.741 --> 00:26:22.039
How can you say to people you've got to choose between safety and affordability.

00:26:22.039 --> 00:26:23.202
I mean, how can you do that?

00:26:23.202 --> 00:26:25.627
That's to me very criminal.

00:26:25.627 --> 00:26:33.340
In other words, we want to house people but let's put them in high rises in an inner city that we're not going to do any kind of fire safety.

00:26:33.340 --> 00:26:35.906
You know we're going to let people just take their chances.

00:26:35.906 --> 00:26:47.105
To me it's the same in the wild and urban interface where arguably many, many communities that are built there are more affluent and people think they're buying, they assume they have safety when they buy a home.

00:26:47.105 --> 00:26:54.058
You know, in these areas, especially if it's an expensive, nice area, and they aren't getting safety and they have no idea that they're not getting safety.

00:26:54.460 --> 00:27:00.565
I think that, michelle, you're talking really upon the 2% or 98% problem, as you call it right.

00:27:00.565 --> 00:27:18.921
Our new build rate is very small, so 98% of the buildings that are standing today will be standing for a long time and therefore we need to figure out how to make them perform better in those situations.

00:27:18.921 --> 00:27:30.396
And you're absolutely right If one person in a neighborhood does everything right, it does not mean that that one person has all the safety because he's dependent on what's going on in the neighborhood.

00:27:30.396 --> 00:27:35.508
It's dependent on the neighbors and then taking action as well.

00:27:35.915 --> 00:27:41.327
And the community is also dependent, perhaps, on state or federal government taking care of their lands.

00:27:41.327 --> 00:27:51.382
They're dependent on the fire infrastructure, they're dependent on the municipal and state government that funds the fire service and funds the building officials to do the inspections and funds the building officials to do the inspections.

00:27:51.382 --> 00:27:59.789
And when people say, you know this stuff costs too much, oh, we don't want, you know, we're not going to continue to, let's say, raise wages for the firefighters in our community.

00:27:59.789 --> 00:28:06.199
It costs too much and I'm not advocating for that right here at this moment.

00:28:06.199 --> 00:28:08.766
But when people think that short-term thinking, well, it costs too much.

00:28:08.766 --> 00:28:15.219
Well, compared to what is my question, it costs too much compared to what losing the whole community.

00:28:15.239 --> 00:28:29.585
So that's the frustrating thing for me is I struggle with this thinking because in my world, in the world of fancy buildings and tunnels, everyone knows that safety costs and no one would go out and say, oh, we should save some money on safety.

00:28:29.585 --> 00:28:34.616
You know, because it's so expensive, those fancy fire doors, perhaps we don't need them.

00:28:34.616 --> 00:28:37.645
Two hour, maybe 60 minutes would be enough because they're cheaper.

00:28:37.645 --> 00:28:42.426
Like you know, we are willing to spend, or investors are willing, well willing.

00:28:42.426 --> 00:28:47.936
They are forced to spend so much on fire safety features of their buildings and they're just doing that.

00:28:48.076 --> 00:28:58.646
And I would put a claim that it is societally acceptable that a big chunk of your newly built apartment comes from the fire safety features that have been included in the building.

00:28:58.646 --> 00:29:08.634
So in some way in built environment I'm not talking about single residential houses where you're doing your own engineering judgments.

00:29:08.634 --> 00:29:14.167
There are no overlapping laws that tell you that this has to be this minimum characteristic of a product.

00:29:14.167 --> 00:29:22.546
But in large developments we are paying a hell for safety and if money is the only issue, then let's find the money.

00:29:22.546 --> 00:29:41.521
I mean, I wonder if we are at the point where we could showcase a net gain on fireproofing or retrofitting buildings, because if you have fires, that cost you $50 billion or whatever.

00:29:41.521 --> 00:29:44.272
If you have fires that shut down LaGuardia in New York, I mean, costs are unimaginable.

00:29:44.272 --> 00:29:49.567
Of those, if you have $50 billion, you could protect quite a few houses in the US I guess.

00:29:50.335 --> 00:30:06.164
Yeah, it's really interesting and that's, I think, the argument that we at NFPA, as advocates for fire and life safety and people in the industry, I think we need to be very vocal about that, because I get frustrated with and we've seen it happen.

00:30:06.164 --> 00:30:08.278
It's a very weird dynamic.

00:30:08.278 --> 00:30:11.532
So I'll give you the example of the Marshall Fire in Boulder, colorado.

00:30:11.532 --> 00:30:14.836
That happened at the end of 2021.

00:30:14.836 --> 00:30:21.559
They were all in a county called Boulder County, but there were three municipal jurisdictions, if you will.

00:30:21.559 --> 00:30:26.103
So there was two towns and then there was one part of the county that they call unincorporated.

00:30:26.103 --> 00:30:34.147
So the county has jurisdiction and one of the towns had already put in the books that any new construction will have residential fire sprinklers.

00:30:34.147 --> 00:30:37.028
Great, any new residential construction has fire sprinklers.

00:30:37.088 --> 00:30:41.511
Well, immediately, because they knew all these homes burned to the ground, there's nothing left.

00:30:41.511 --> 00:30:52.190
It's not a retrofit anymore, it's a new build, it's a rebuild they said, oh, we're going to waive that requirement, we're going to take that requirement away for these poor, poor people so they can rebuild their home and it won't cost so much.

00:30:52.190 --> 00:31:00.820
So, immediately, that decision putting that out there makes people think, oh, my God, it costs so much to build a home with fire sprinklers, and we know it is not.

00:31:00.820 --> 00:31:03.247
You know it costs something, but so much.

00:31:03.247 --> 00:31:06.242
And I said to one of my colleagues I said this is crazy.

00:31:06.242 --> 00:31:10.500
What's the next thing they're going to say we don't, we're not going to require proper electrical.

00:31:10.500 --> 00:31:11.622
He said, oh, they tried that.

00:31:11.622 --> 00:31:13.423
They tried that all the time.

00:31:13.423 --> 00:31:16.930
They don't want to come up to the electrical code because it was just good enough.

00:31:16.930 --> 00:31:23.539
You know the way we were doing it and I'm like what century am I in?

00:31:23.539 --> 00:31:24.563
So they waived this and I thought so.

00:31:24.563 --> 00:31:26.769
Now you're putting people frankly, it's substandard housing.

00:31:26.769 --> 00:31:29.818
It's substandard, it is no longer meeting a standard.

00:31:29.818 --> 00:31:35.980
You're putting people into housing that's less safe than their equivalent neighbors who are building new.

00:31:36.441 --> 00:31:48.454
I found that remarkable and, ironically, about a year later we found out there were people taking advantage, people who were having to rebuild a home, many people who did not have enough insurance to cover the total loss of their home.

00:31:48.454 --> 00:31:59.582
They were rebuilding taking advantage of some grants that were for what they call passive construction, meaning it was sustainable as well as safe, thick walls, etc.

00:31:59.582 --> 00:32:02.423
So less heating and cooling for the structure, etc.

00:32:02.423 --> 00:32:06.507
More energy efficient, because that was one of their values that they held dear was.

00:32:06.507 --> 00:32:10.729
I'd always hoped I could afford to live in a home that had these kinds of features.

00:32:10.729 --> 00:32:16.573
Now I'm getting some help and, yes, I'm going into debt over this because I didn't have enough insurance when my home burned down.

00:32:16.573 --> 00:32:18.682
But I want this and I thought, wow.

00:32:19.143 --> 00:32:28.027
So when industries come out, I'll just say the building industry as a whole comes out and says it's too expensive to build these safety features in.

00:32:28.027 --> 00:32:30.356
I don't think they're listening to their customers.

00:32:30.356 --> 00:32:32.460
People actually want safety.

00:32:32.460 --> 00:32:33.540
They want sustainability.

00:32:33.540 --> 00:32:38.145
They want these homes that are taking up so much resources to be around for a long time.

00:32:38.145 --> 00:32:42.310
They don't want a disposable house okay, they want this to be around for a long time.

00:32:42.310 --> 00:32:44.414
They want to save energy.

00:32:44.414 --> 00:32:48.436
They want to live as lightly on the land as they can reduce their carbon footprint, however you want to say it.

00:32:48.436 --> 00:32:53.279
So I get very frustrated when we isolate oh, sprinklers, that costs too much.

00:32:53.279 --> 00:32:55.941
Or proper electrical utilities cost too much.

00:32:55.941 --> 00:33:00.883
Or now it's oh, it costs too much to put a second staircase in.

00:33:00.883 --> 00:33:03.743
A bit as well is we need to combine with other trends.

00:33:03.743 --> 00:33:04.904
That's going on.

00:33:04.924 --> 00:33:27.744
So we see that there's been a huge interest and for good reason and there should be in making our homes more energy efficient and more sustainable, et cetera.

00:33:27.744 --> 00:33:31.965
Why don't we have fire safety as part of that as well?

00:33:31.965 --> 00:33:33.881
Why do we not?

00:33:33.881 --> 00:33:44.057
When we see that different states where I live here in Massachusetts there's all kinds of incentives to make your home more energy efficient, I have had them come out here.

00:33:44.117 --> 00:33:52.961
Look at my home and some of the solutions that they offered me on the installation side, I said no, thank you, I do not want that.

00:33:52.961 --> 00:33:54.601
Like, why don't you want that?

00:33:54.601 --> 00:33:56.339
This is really great for energy efficiency.

00:33:56.339 --> 00:33:58.445
I said, yeah, of course I'm a fire person.

00:33:58.445 --> 00:33:59.797
I don't want that in my home.

00:33:59.797 --> 00:34:03.324
So you got to come up with a different solution for me.

00:34:03.324 --> 00:34:19.947
Why are we not thinking making homes safer at the same time as we are making them more sustainable and more energy efficient and safer not just from the fire from within, but definitely the fire from outside?

00:34:19.947 --> 00:34:35.543
Then we could have more incentives towards people actually taking the action that they need to do at the homeowner level, because we cannot expect that people can go out and replace a lot of their structural materials on their own.

00:34:35.543 --> 00:34:37.603
There need to be incentives to do that.

00:34:38.074 --> 00:34:39.340
But where do people get that knowledge?

00:34:39.340 --> 00:34:44.442
Like, okay, you're a trained fire professional, you know your stuff very well.

00:34:44.442 --> 00:34:49.059
Let's say someone offers you combustible external cladding, you're going to say no thank you.

00:34:49.059 --> 00:34:50.961
But how does a layman know that?

00:34:50.961 --> 00:34:54.721
How does a layman build a foundation to make an informed decision?

00:34:54.721 --> 00:34:58.467
I know NFPA is big on that to share that knowledge.

00:34:58.467 --> 00:35:05.947
But how can we democratize fire safety engineering to populations so they know they can use it and benefit out of it?

00:35:06.436 --> 00:35:09.222
So I think this is not just a WUI problem.

00:35:09.262 --> 00:35:22.239
I think that's a fire safety problem in general, how do we get people to understand the role that the building, the actions, the surrounding play in the safety and how can we make them make safer choices?

00:35:22.239 --> 00:35:31.985
And there's a lot of public education in that, which we do a lot of at NFPA, and I think that's something everybody has to commit to.

00:35:31.985 --> 00:35:45.623
But I also think that we as an engineering community need to talk more about it in a way that regular people understand, so we don't make it so complicated that people go oh my God, no, I can't do this.

00:35:45.623 --> 00:35:46.385
It's too much.

00:35:46.385 --> 00:35:54.483
Even just recognizing what is a fire classification of something that I'm going to go and buy, I'm going to put it on my house.

00:35:54.483 --> 00:35:56.579
I want something that's fire safe.

00:35:56.579 --> 00:36:00.188
A regular person would not know what should they look for.

00:36:00.188 --> 00:36:01.597
They have no idea.

00:36:02.119 --> 00:36:04.083
But even here we fail.

00:36:04.083 --> 00:36:06.608
Because you tell me you put something very good.

00:36:06.608 --> 00:36:09.199
I tell you okay, I'll put Euroclass B on my wall.

00:36:09.199 --> 00:36:10.202
Is that great?

00:36:10.202 --> 00:36:15.425
If that's a combustible material, I mean it's solving part of the issue, not the whole.

00:36:15.425 --> 00:36:24.983
Even within our community, even within what we talk, we are very specific, even like simple things like Euroclass fire resistance.

00:36:24.983 --> 00:36:28.764
You know, for fire professionals these are very specific definitions.

00:36:28.764 --> 00:36:31.302
For laymen they mean something completely different.

00:36:31.302 --> 00:36:32.385
What a challenge that is.

00:36:33.315 --> 00:36:43.467
Very, very true, and that's what we need to be better at communicating what we're talking about and put it in layman's terms as well I think too it's.

00:36:43.628 --> 00:36:56.702
It's getting to the market for the materials, whether it's the new, new construction or retrofit materials that we're using is one key element, and most typical consumers aren't going to know the difference for something tested and listed.

00:36:56.702 --> 00:37:01.860
You can tell them with electrical equipment, light bulbs and things like that.

00:37:01.860 --> 00:37:03.704
Look for the UL listing right.

00:37:03.704 --> 00:37:06.619
I think people kind of get that and that's a good.

00:37:06.619 --> 00:37:19.079
But I think there's a lot of assumption that anything I buy must be okay or they wouldn't sell it right, when our market is flooded with goods from countries that could care less about whether it's been tested or listed.

00:37:19.079 --> 00:37:28.742
They're just making something to make money and new technologies and new fashions and trends that are really stupid and very unsafe that people are bringing into their homes.

00:37:28.742 --> 00:37:54.887
But we can get there, I think, at least on the industry level, professional level, with things like roofing materials, like you said, testing and listing those, and one of the biggest losses that we see I'm just going to give you an analogy with a different hazard One of the biggest insured losses in the United States year after year after year, is hail, and that's often from vehicles, because you really can't drive the car if the windows are smashed in and it's all dented and things.

00:37:55.394 --> 00:38:00.387
So that's a huge loss, because most property casualty insurers are covering vehicles as well as homes.

00:38:00.387 --> 00:38:07.780
But with homes, yeah, roof tile damage, whatever kind of shingle from hail, is a significant loss year after year after year.

00:38:07.780 --> 00:38:14.623
And so one of the research groups for the industry is called the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, ibhs for short.

00:38:14.623 --> 00:38:17.143
They have a lab where they've been testing roofing.

00:38:17.143 --> 00:38:22.085
They actually make their own hail, which is so cool, but anyway they shoot the hail at the panel and so forth.

00:38:22.085 --> 00:38:23.983
They age roofs out in their property.

00:38:23.983 --> 00:38:26.222
So they test for the age and all that.

00:38:26.675 --> 00:38:33.809
But they came up with a rating for the hail-resistant shingles, which is a big deal because insurers really want to push that.

00:38:33.809 --> 00:38:45.795
And so everybody, all the companies that had this good shingle, could say so, and one company that had a good new shingle wanted to say so but didn't want to pull their old shingle off the market.

00:38:45.795 --> 00:38:48.467
So people are getting told oh, this shingle beats.

00:38:48.467 --> 00:38:50.355
Oh no, the old shingle doesn't.

00:38:50.355 --> 00:38:56.034
They said no, you cannot have this rating until you pulled that old shingle off the market, and they did so.

00:38:56.054 --> 00:38:58.284
The pressure was there because of that.

00:38:58.284 --> 00:39:00.181
You know the science backed it up.

00:39:00.181 --> 00:39:08.746
And then the insurance industry basically said no, we're not going to If we know that you put an inferior shingle on that roof, that's going to affect claims.

00:39:08.746 --> 00:39:10.275
That's, it's going to affect everything.

00:39:10.275 --> 00:39:16.202
So so there's a system that worked really, really well to start to get an improvement, to start to drive down those losses.

00:39:16.202 --> 00:39:23.228
Now, arguably, from a safety perspective, hail is nothing right.

00:39:23.228 --> 00:39:32.722
It's a big pain in the butt, loss eventually causing problems down the road, but it's nothing like fire.

00:39:32.722 --> 00:39:38.143
But I think that the analogy is the testing, listing, marketing, incentives, disincentives can all work in our favor in the fire safety.

00:39:38.614 --> 00:39:46.360
I'm going to pick that one up because I agree with you, michelle, but here we have a problem in the fire area and that is that, the testing that.

00:39:46.360 --> 00:39:54.166
So what you're talking about here is we realize a hazard from the hill, we invent, we look at what is the right way to test it so we can list, etc.

00:39:54.166 --> 00:40:01.489
When it comes to the wildland, urban interface fires and fires from outside, what are the tests that we have?

00:40:01.489 --> 00:40:28.675
Oh, we are using a flame spread test over here in the US Steiner Tunnel, invented in 1947, I believe, and invented or developed for dealing with fire on the inside, there's some codes that have fire resistance requirements to the outer walls which is a test for a flash or a fire inside and originally developed for non-combustible construction.

00:40:28.675 --> 00:40:31.184
It has nothing to do with the way we build today.

00:40:31.184 --> 00:40:39.128
So we are using fire tests that are irrelevant for the hazard we are trying to mitigate.

00:40:39.128 --> 00:40:47.710
So how can we then trust the resulting classification and teach people which products to choose based on that?

00:40:48.135 --> 00:41:00.574
And another aspect is that, no matter how you build your house, it's not going to make hail 10 times bigger right, whereas in fire, the way how you build it, there's going to be an interaction.

00:41:00.574 --> 00:41:08.108
I think what you need, or what we need, is a scalable solution for fire safety engineering.

00:41:08.108 --> 00:41:14.568
Like you've mentioned, you did your energy audit for your house and let's look at this industry.

00:41:14.568 --> 00:41:22.969
At least in Poland or in European Union, they've introduced this annoying law of making your energy passport for your buildings.

00:41:22.969 --> 00:41:33.846
You know, and you have to get a certification for every single goddamn building, and you think it's unimaginable because there must be hundreds of millions of buildings that need the passport.

00:41:33.846 --> 00:41:34.927
And guess what?

00:41:34.927 --> 00:41:35.489
They have it.

00:41:35.489 --> 00:41:50.612
They have it because they've grown a big industry of energy auditors who have found out clever ways how to scale up and do those evaluations very quickly at moderate costs and has just provided this service.

00:41:51.094 --> 00:41:55.085
Perhaps a fire passport is also something that we need for buildings.

00:41:55.085 --> 00:42:13.199
You know, in some way enforcing people to use a qualified fire safety engineer who can tell from the materials and the way how a building is built, where it is located and what their neighbors are doing, what's the strategy for this particular property and where it lands on the asset scale.

00:42:13.199 --> 00:42:23.389
But that would require such a tremendous acceptance from the governments, people, local communities, insurers.

00:42:23.389 --> 00:42:25.190
But perhaps that's the only way.

00:42:25.190 --> 00:42:25.851
I don't know.

00:42:27.375 --> 00:42:30.344
I love that idea and I think that's where my hope has been.

00:42:30.344 --> 00:42:38.307
You know we joked at the beginning about we hope it doesn't take us 50 more years to figure out what, what is the WUI from the definition in 1974.

00:42:38.827 --> 00:42:46.034
My hope has been, because what I've seen over my career in in this area is we're waiting till things already get built.

00:42:46.034 --> 00:42:50.463
Then we're putting it all on the homeowner to say, oh, you're in the wildland, urban, or you're at risk.

00:42:50.463 --> 00:42:53.748
I'll just say that you're at risk, you need to do all these things, you need to work with your neighbor.

00:42:53.748 --> 00:42:57.163
We're chasing we're always chasing this right.

00:42:57.163 --> 00:43:01.715
Or to the fire service Well, you've got to do more here to get in and educate, blah, blah, blah.

00:43:01.715 --> 00:43:05.967
We have not really truly yet it's starting to happen.

00:43:05.967 --> 00:43:16.081
I think we have not got the private sector engaged in this at all.

00:43:16.081 --> 00:43:16.583
It is not on their radar.

00:43:16.583 --> 00:43:22.967
It is like, okay, and then when we get the interest from people who are hungry to learn more, like we have a certification now at NFPA, credential for certified welfare mitigation specialists.

00:43:22.967 --> 00:43:37.009
So, on the idea of what you're talking about with professionals, they don't necessarily have to be engineers because we're working, as Brigitte said, with things that are pretty old, I won't say necessarily outdated, but we need to be building the new science and the new findings into this.

00:43:37.009 --> 00:43:38.398

159 - The WUI Problem with Michele Steinberg and Birgitte Messerschmidt

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