181 - Regulatory regimes with Vincent Brannigan

Transcript

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Hello everybody, welcome to the Fire Science Show.

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What happens when two passionate engineers meet together?

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Well, of course, a discussion happens, and if those two engineers have strong opinions at the subject and have perhaps argued about the subject a few times online, you can bet that the discussion is quite interesting.

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And that's what happened to me.

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I've learned that Professor Rennigan is coming to Europe, and what I did?

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I booked a train, I went to Berlin and argued with him and recorded this argument.

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Well, actually it's a nice discussion and Vincent is a really, really nice guy.

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I loved discussing with him and I loved him as a person and experiencing a little bit of contrast from our LinkedIn interactions.

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But anyway, I of course, took my microphones with me and I've turned this into a podcast episode.

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This is not truly an interview, but more like a real discussion between two engineers, and the theme of this discussion are our regimes in how our building codes operate, from performance based, or how Vincent calls them, traditional design, to performance-based design.

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What is the technical validation, what is a political validation, what higher purpose those codes serve, and what's the relation to the society, to safety, to economic prosperity, trade, whatever.

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I think it's a very interesting discussion that brings out a lot of context of how our codes and laws were built and we, as fire safety engineers, were deemed to follow them.

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So not that we have a choice, but from this episode you'll learn why you don't have a choice.

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It's full of anecdotes, full of historical examples of fires, full of very interesting insight and it's just a fun episode.

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I love when you can talk about very serious, difficult topics and law in the construction industry is definitely not an easy topic to talk about in a fun and engaging way.

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So I am sure you will enjoy this episode a lot way.

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So I am sure you will enjoy this episode a lot.

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I would easily claim that spending five hours back and forth on the train was well worth this discussion and meeting Vincent in person, and I really hope you will enjoy this episode as much.

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Let's spin the intro and jump into the episode.

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Welcome to the Firesize Show.

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Hello everybody, I am joined here today by Professor Vincent Brannigan from University of Maryland.

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Hello, vincent, nice to meet you.

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Hello, hello Nice to have you on the show.

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Unusually for the Fire Science Show, we are live at Berlin.

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Vincent was kind enough to invite me to Germany while he's staying in here.

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So, vincent, what brings you back to Germany?

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Actually, that must be an interesting story.

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Well, I first lectured in Germany in 1982 at Humboldt in Berlin in essentially scientific evidence used in the law.

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I then was a visiting researcher at the University of Frankfurt in 1984.

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And I've been here a number of times ever since as a docent in Munich and so forth.

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All in the field of technology and law and some in the field of fire specifically.

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I'm born in 1985, so you have a longer track of a career in academic in Germany than I'm alive.

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Well, vincent, that's a hell of academic career.

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And I must say I know you most recently from our interesting interactions on LinkedIn and you are a person of very strong opinions and I kind of enjoy arguing with you on LinkedIn.

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Anyway, one aspect of these arguments that we are having comes back to your law experience.

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So maybe first you could introduce us like what's your background, because I know it's a very interesting background.

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My undergraduate degree was in the history of technology, with a thesis on the Nuremberg war crimes trials, where I studied the development of new technology and how the legal system captures it, in that case in international law dealing with submarine warfare.

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I then studied law at Georgetown, again focusing on technology and law.

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But I had the good fortune I'm second generation fire.

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My father was a fellow with the Society of Fire Protection Engineers, frank Rennigan, author of the well-known books on building construction for the fire service, for the fire service.

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So I was given an offer to work at the National Bureau of Standards, later NIST, as an engineering technician, because I'd worked in theater, I'd been a theatrical construction manager and then stage manager, and they asked me well, could I build things?

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I said I could build anything that only has to last three days.

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And Dan Gross said that's all right, we burn it on the second.

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And so they hired me and they assigned me to their newest faculty member, the newest member of the NIST crew, jim Quinteri.

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So I was James Quinteri's engineering technician and he taught me everything I know about engineering.

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But what a great teacher.

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So I ran the E162 radiant panel, I ran the smoke chamber, I ran a number of other tests and worked on the Armstrong what was then the Armstrong flooring radiant panel with Jim.

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Just basically I'm the technician he's doing all the thinking but learning a great deal about how standards were developed, test methods were developed and what the problems were from very good people and burning a lot of Christmas trees and other things along the way.

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They are still being burned as we speak.

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So that's a lovely tradition of EMD.

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I had Jim on the podcast.

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We were talking about the best era in this, the 1980s and all this stuff.

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So I imagine while he was having fun, you were in the back building this stuff and I'm amazed that a renowned professor takes pride of being someone's technician.

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But that's a statement to I have to say, as a law student, being an engineering technician for Jim Quinteri was an honor.

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So, I then was fortunate.

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I worked for the US Fire Prevention and Control Administration.

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I was the first legal person.

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I was the entire legal department when we had eight employees.

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I was the entire legal department when we had eight employees.

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And then I got my clerkship for the US Consumer Product Safety Commission doing fire safety cases for Judge Paul Pfeiffer At that time.

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And then the university made me an offer, joint with fire engineering and consumer protection, to do consumer protection law and I was then appointed full-time in consumer law but I kept working in fire as one of the areas of consumer protection.

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So I published articles on retrospective codes and building regulation and a whole group of things on codes and code problems.

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In 1991, the university reorganized and my position was moved to engineering.

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John Bryan invited me to come.

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I was already a full professor to engineering.

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They approved me as a professor and that's how I ended up as a lawyer, as a professor in engineering.

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I always explained I was a professor in engineering, not of engineering, and that kept them happy.

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But they even the faculty of engineering elected me as chair of the promotion and tenure committee because they thought, since I knew nothing about engineering, I would be very fair to all the departments, I would not be prejudiced and I would write the rules and I could be.

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I was a fair chair.

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I thought it was a good arrangement.

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So that's pretty funny.

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Fair chair, I thought it was a good arrangement.

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That's pretty funny.

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But I've worked on codes and standards and law for all areas of technology, not merely fire, but it's all the same kind of questions.

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Starting with submarines and in fire safety systems and a hefty dose of medical stuff in the way.

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A very interesting background.

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I wish I can summarize my career in 20 years like that.

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I still have to do submarines, maybe copters, I don't know choppers.

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Oh, I do.

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The V-22 Osprey, the rotorcraft, yes, no problem.

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Nice.

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Anyway, you've mentioned the regulatory systems, and that's one thing that I really wanted to discuss with you.

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How do the regulatory systems work from the perspective of someone with a law background?

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Okay, fundamentally, we're dealing with social control.

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How does social control work?

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Regulatory law is about social control, and I taught courses in the interaction of regulation and product liability, because we do both social control through direct regulation and through holding people responsible afterwards financially and integrate those together.

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I actually taught one of the very first courses in the integration of these two areas, and that's what I built my career on was the integration of liability and regulation in social control, and my particular interest was new technology and innovation.

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How do we capture new tech?

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And the submarines in World War II were a new technology.

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World War I and World War II was a new technology, and so I developed a theoretical approach, which I refined over the years, as to how societies capture new technologies in the regulatory system, and it's a very sloppy, messy, difficult process, as we know repeatedly and we've seen it over and over again in fire as an example of where it's very difficult to get your hands on new technologies before they cause a great deal of problems.

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To use another one that we're having today lithium batteries on the one side and drones on the other side, that these are all new technologies that all of a sudden the legal system is confronted with and we're not quite sure how to deal with it.

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So I have explored this in every different technology that I can, trying to draw from one area into another to better understand how we deal with new technologies.

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We'll come back to the innovation later.

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I know you had this amazing talk at University of Edinburgh.

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That was like a long time ago and people are still discussing it, but here where I would like to go is a comparison of the performance-based regime and prescriptive regime, which is an interesting thing.

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You know I'm involved with SFP and introducing performance-based engineering is something that we largely support in here and I also like have to my understanding, a full performance-based regime in smoke control in Poland, whereas I'm fully prescriptive in any other aspect of fire safety, and it creates a lot of challenges which perhaps are differently understood by an engineer who's doing that and differently understood by authority, by firefighters, by the society at all.

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So first let's try to define the regimes of CBD and prescriptive base.

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I tend to use the word traditional rather than prescriptive.

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I realize because many traditional codes, particularly in the United States, were very flexible in certain areas.

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They did not prescribe the precise thing to be done.

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They required approval of a particular way of doing it.

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Best, very small example fire lanes for the fire department.

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There's no prescription, there's no rule.

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The fire marshal comes and says the fire lane will be here and that's it.

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They make a decision and an adjudication right there.

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So there's no prescription, there's no rule, it's just a decision made by the fire marshal.

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So I'm using the word traditional codes for these Prescriptive codes, for what most people call prescriptive codes.

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And again, many performance codes.

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Any performance code that has a deemed to satisfy solution, where someone politically says this will satisfy the performance code, that's a traditional code.

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That is not a performance code.

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Once the state says you can comply by doing this, that's a prescriptive or traditional code.

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There's nothing about it, that's performance.

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So we have this mix and poor language.

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That drives us crazy sometimes.

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Now to get to the critical difference between the two.

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Again, the language is very sloppy.

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You had a point yeah, I had a point that in some of your works I've also read an interesting thought that if you have a performance-based regime but you define what tests are you performing and what's the expected outcome of the test, that's a prescriptive regulation, just with additional points, right?

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Right, right, in other words.

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That's why it's very difficult to say this is a pure prescriptive code, this is a pure performance code.

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They have elements in both of them.

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The more important difference for my purposes as a lawyer is how we validate these as laws and traditional codes and I use the word traditional instead of prescriptive were laws.

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They were passed by the legislature and they were politically validated, that is, the legislature using its political power, which, and you know, in Europe, of course we can go back to monarchies, we can go back to the Roman Empire, doesn't matter, doesn't matter what generates it, but it's valid because the political structure says this is a valid law.

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And they're very German, very continental, but also in England.

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I mean, there's no question that the traditional codes were political decisions by the legislature using their power.

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Political decisions do not have to be technically correct, technically valid or even technically intelligent.

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There's no requirement at all that the political people make sense.

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So we're lucky if they did, but in many cases they didn't.

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But all prescriptive, traditional codes were politically validated.

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The proposal in the 1990s was that engineering had matured enough that we could move.

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Now where do we move to?

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Was that engineering had matured enough that we could move Now?

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Where do we move to?

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In the 19th century, first in medicine, then in certain other areas, they moved to what we will call technical validation.

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That is a group of technical people, physicians that could later be engineers in a certain area.

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It was just a term that a problem had technical solutions and we could trust a technical body of some sort to write the rules and regulations and society would enforce.

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They would delegate to the technical body the ability to control certain things, and this was a slow process.

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In medicine it all derived from medical guilds where to become a physician you had to satisfy the local physicians that you were a physician and finally the state, in about 1900, took it over and licensed physicians.

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But who did they license?

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Whoever the physician said were good physicians.

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So this was technical validation and it requires technical regulators and it requires a high level of technical expertise and a certain amount of uniformity in order to make technical validation work.

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So to license engineers to build buildings, for example, who did you ask?

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You asked other engineers, but the state put their stamp on the engineer and said you are qualified to build buildings, and that is technical validation.

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Problem with technical validation is it doesn't have the flexibility of political validation and in general, technical validation is expected to be right.

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The very first examples of technical validation in the United States were boiler explosions and the boiler code and giving the mechanical engineers the ability to come up with a code for boilers and technical validation.

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You have a very high level of expectation of technical correctness on the part of the field that is given this authority.

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So this is a constant stress back and forth.

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Airplanes were originally, there was a legal structure for them and then they went to technical validation very early because they were so complex.

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Technical validation can break down.

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The Titanic was technically validated and so that's no guarantee in a technical validation that you, if you think about it, they're very rarely correct.

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And anyway, I had this impression that the validation also comes from statistics or the collective experience of a group of people.

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We know that this solution is safe because we learned to live with it and it always has been safe.

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And this is the medical model, this is where this actually comes from medicine that the first licensed profession, where it was just handed over to them, were physicians and surgeons, because they were the ones who operated on people and either people lived or died and they were trusted to look at other doctors and say, yes, you're qualified to be a doctor, We'll trust your decisions.

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So, yes, this is empirical, developmental knowledge.

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There's no question that and I have actually other papers long ago on this particular problem, because this is what I lectured on at Humble in 82, is the difference between experiential and theoretical knowledge and how the legal system captures it.

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So, as they say, how do you become a gondolier?

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You're the son of a gondolier and all the other gondoliers say you're a good gondolier, that's how you become a gondolier in Venice as a practical matter.

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So, experiential knowledge the problem is in fire safety.

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Because of our risk structure, our experiential knowledge is very limited in certain areas, simply because fires don't occur that often and big fires don't occur that often and we can build 100 buildings before one burns down.

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So our experience is not very deep.

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To use an example that I routinely say people talk about oh, we have 1,500 reactor years of experience in the nuclear power program?

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No, we don't.

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We have 30 years of reactor experience, repeated 150 times or whatever In other words.

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we don't have 100 years experience on any reactor.

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We don't know what's going to happen 100 years down the line on reactor, so people lump kinds of experience together in a way that is not very useful from a regulatory perspective.

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So these two divisions once we try to say something is going to be technically correct rather than politically correct.

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It takes both statistical analysis.

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It takes technical analysis and it takes looking at the qualifications of the people out there who are making decisions.

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The argument over single stairways in buildings Excellent example of where I just don't think the people proposing single stairways and building have done the homework that they need to do to figure out whether or not the risk is the same.

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So they have instead tried to use political pressure and get it approved through the political side rather than through the technical side and rather than submitting it to a group of fire experts for their opinion, they get some politicians who are funded by builders to say, yes, we'll have single stairway buildings.

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And this is where it gets very interesting.

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If you submitted the issue to a group of high qualified fire people, what would they say?

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But you can revert the problem and we also have a lot of requirements that are just completely ridiculous, like why do we need four-hour firewalls in offices?

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Just because it's a skyscraper, like the fires will not know that it's on the 30th floor versus 12th floor and it's not going to burn twice longer.

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It's conservation of mass and energy.

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And you know we also have those stupid laws that don't lead you anywhere, but they're required because the political force enforced them.

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You have a fire extinguisher behind you.

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Yeah, but they're required because the political force enforced them.

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You have a fire extinguisher behind you.

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Yeah, what a useless piece of equipment that is Well.

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it's good to hold doors.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah Do you hold fire, doors open with the fire extinguisher?

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Yeah.

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In other words, I use fire extinguishers as an example of a ridiculous technology.

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We don't want unprotected people and the fire extinguisher companies go crazy whenever I say this yes, the question of four-hour rated walls in an office building deals with safety of firefighters.

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There's no question that if a fire gets away from them, they have to be able to evacuate the building.

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So firefighter safety is a separate and again very close to my father's heart.

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So sometimes things which look ridiculous from an occupancy point of view are really a firefighter safety point of view.

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I actually handled a code for agricultural buildings that was a firefighter safety code, strictly firefighter safety in agricultural buildings, because nobody cared if the building itself burned down, but they cared whether the firefighter died, but they cared whether the firefighter died.

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So that's the issue.

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But I'll fully agree with you that there are parts of codes that I stare at and I say what was in their heads.

00:21:38.430 --> 00:22:03.839
You may not have this experience in the US, but in the developing countries, which Poland has been some time ago, and now there are many other countries who have the same collective experience, where, when you try to develop a new safety system for your country starting from basically nothing or you maybe have a system that you want to entirely replace we tend to take, you know, some regulations from US, some regulations from Germany, some regulations from European Union, some British.

00:22:04.340 --> 00:22:07.878
We mix a hefty dose of safety margins on top of that.

00:22:07.878 --> 00:22:19.363
We end up with a ridiculous regulatory system where a collection of political decisions from different parts of the world becomes something that is believed to be a technical standard in here.

00:22:19.363 --> 00:22:38.933
Because when we took a law from Germany, nobody questioned the you know capability of German engineers to say that this is a good solution, like no one questioned whether this is a political decision or a technical decision.

00:22:38.933 --> 00:22:43.132
We just took it assuming it's a technical decision and it's going to lead us to safety.

00:22:43.132 --> 00:22:50.819
And this creates this Frankenstein of a system in which safety margins add on each other and you end up with very difficult.

00:22:51.069 --> 00:22:52.452
Even in political systems.

00:22:52.452 --> 00:22:56.061
A good political system relies on technical advisors.

00:22:56.061 --> 00:22:57.934
Yes, and there's no question.

00:22:57.934 --> 00:23:10.030
Our system in the United States very interesting because the political decisions rely on essentially officials and technical people like NFPA and their building codes.

00:23:10.030 --> 00:23:23.799
In other words, we have consensus standards, organizations which are well recognized as broad-based technical groups not perfect those issues, and then those are reviewed by the political people to say, well, did the technical people really take a hard look at this?

00:23:23.799 --> 00:23:30.037
And if they took a hard look at that, they adopt the code as a standard without a great deal of modification.

00:23:30.037 --> 00:23:38.016
The National Electrical Code of the United States is viewed as a the technical people write it, they send it to the states and say you want to do anything different.

00:23:38.016 --> 00:23:40.438
They say no, we'll take it that way.

00:23:41.832 --> 00:23:55.190
But does it mean that the state tells you for designing electrical system you're supposed to follow the electrical code, or it tells you the electrical system in the building shall fulfill this requirement?

00:23:55.510 --> 00:24:01.122
Okay, specifically, the National Electrical Code is a NFPA document.

00:24:01.122 --> 00:24:13.949
So when we talk about it, so the National Electrical Code is a recommended model code, virtually every state, with the exception of a few special hurricane problems, adopts the National Electrical Code unchanged.

00:24:13.949 --> 00:24:19.603
Okay, they don't put any changes in, but it becomes the political decision of the state To enforce the code.

00:24:20.853 --> 00:24:27.701
To adopt and enforce the code, and so that way you can go all over the United States and the electrical systems are the same.

00:24:27.701 --> 00:24:30.789
And so that way you can go all over the United States and the electrical systems are the same.

00:24:30.789 --> 00:24:39.559
So when we have a power failure, for example, we can import electricians from every other state to put the power back together.

00:24:39.559 --> 00:24:40.323
Because this is not the consumer side.

00:24:40.323 --> 00:24:41.930
The industrial side of power is essentially identical across the United States.

00:24:41.930 --> 00:24:55.542
So when we had a power failure in Maryland, for example, people came from eight other states power crews to repair the power systems and they were perfectly able to just slot right in and repair power systems because it's all the same.

00:24:56.131 --> 00:25:20.780
And what would you say about the European system where we have our own standardization body, cen, which basically standardizes everything, which basically standardize everything, but in the space of construction product market or buildings, because in Europe anything related to fire safety is in the end the market regulation those are not required until directly mentioned in your country code.

00:25:20.780 --> 00:25:32.839
So if there's like a standard for smoke control ventilators EN 1211, part three there's a code that tells you what the ventilator shall do, how do you test the ventilator, what are the characteristics?

00:25:32.839 --> 00:25:46.997
But until the characteristics are mentioned in the Polish code, which would say oh, the ventilators have to have class F400 two hours based on this standard, until this little clause is put into my law, it's just guidance.

00:25:47.832 --> 00:25:49.178
We have the same issue with states.

00:25:49.178 --> 00:26:01.262
I will say I was first traveling in Europe in 1977 when the trains didn't run on the same electricity in different countries and the only trains that could cross the border were diesels.

00:26:01.262 --> 00:26:05.211
That's a funny problem.

00:26:05.211 --> 00:26:16.786
In other words, when I first was in London, you bought an iron and then you went to the plug department of the department store to get the plug that would fit the electrical company that you worked with.

00:26:16.786 --> 00:26:17.652
We had no, there was no.

00:26:17.652 --> 00:26:26.778
I was astonished by this because the United States this was all standardized by 1915 and no state Now states in the United States adopt building codes and whatnot.

00:26:26.778 --> 00:26:29.558
No state in the United States would adopt a different electricity.

00:26:30.069 --> 00:26:39.503
It just wouldn't be done you know, and so we were used to a much higher level of industry-developed, government-bought standardization.

00:26:39.503 --> 00:26:40.813
Everybody you know so.

00:26:40.813 --> 00:26:42.940
And the life safety code is very similar.

00:26:42.940 --> 00:26:51.950
It's industry and government working together creating the life safety code and governments mostly adopting it pretty much the way it exists Now.

00:26:51.990 --> 00:27:04.039
Maryland other than the state of Maryland which is right outside Washington, just to the north, the same population as Austria, so you know it's five, six million people and we are a very fire safety-oriented state.

00:27:04.039 --> 00:27:06.196
So we have more sprinkler requirements.

00:27:06.196 --> 00:27:06.900
We have more.

00:27:06.900 --> 00:27:14.753
We had the first smoke detector requirements at houses, we had everything, for fire safety is just a little bit more advanced in Maryland than many other places.

00:27:14.753 --> 00:27:21.317
So people go to Maryland and look at how much it costs and what we did, and then they sprinkler other buildings and other things.

00:27:21.317 --> 00:27:23.123
For example, the university.

00:27:23.123 --> 00:27:24.291
All our buildings are sprinkler.

00:27:24.291 --> 00:27:27.517
We have no unsprinklered building at the university.

00:27:27.517 --> 00:27:31.765
Even the oldest ones are all retrofitted, and this is true through state buildings, throughout the state.

00:27:31.765 --> 00:27:39.554
We don't have unsprinklered buildings and so therefore we can be flexible on other code requirements because the buildings are sprinklered.

00:27:39.554 --> 00:27:50.877
As my father always said, sprinklers give you academic freedom at the university because no matter how stupid the professors are, they can't burn the building down, you know so there's something in that.

00:27:51.700 --> 00:27:55.012
Anyway, I would like to move this discussion further a little bit.

00:27:55.012 --> 00:28:05.487
So, in what you've described so far, you could have a political system that basically takes a technical system and makes it the system that you've pursued.

00:28:05.487 --> 00:28:11.712
So the political power can tell you OK, there's a national electrical code, there's an FPA code for this, for that life safety code.

00:28:11.712 --> 00:28:16.019
You just follow that, you're good, let's move to the fully performance-based design.

00:28:16.019 --> 00:28:29.948
Where you would not have an FPA code for performance-based design, you would have someone telling you like in Europe, we would have it defined the fire shall not spread between buildings or the evacuation routes shall be sufficiently free of smoke.

00:28:29.988 --> 00:28:35.644
in case of a fire, the goal for performance-based codes is written in the model code.

00:28:35.644 --> 00:28:38.653
There's a performance-based version of the life safety code.

00:28:38.653 --> 00:28:42.061
Some states don't adopt it, some states do, we did.

00:28:42.061 --> 00:28:50.670
The performance-based version doesn't say let's see, it varies from reasonably specific to more general.

00:28:50.670 --> 00:28:54.196
But, for example, garages and houses.

00:28:54.196 --> 00:29:03.022
Even in the performance based code there has to be a continuous firewall between the garage and the house to prevent a car fire from spreading to the house.

00:29:03.809 --> 00:29:17.173
What it's made out of, what it is, I mean it's like a one-hour rated wall, but is it a requirement that the wall of certain characteristics shall be there or you should provide there is no spread Like could you use?

00:29:17.173 --> 00:29:18.096
A water current instead.

00:29:19.191 --> 00:29:30.165
No, I'm saying that even in the performance code there are bits of it where they were not sure if they could show by performance, and this is just specific garages and single-family homes.

00:29:30.246 --> 00:29:35.715
you know, in order to protect people, they kept so even in the performance codes.

00:29:35.715 --> 00:29:49.196
It references certain parts of the other code, for example the width of stairwells, exit stairways, because there are things in which standardization is viewed as critical, that people have to recognize what exit signs look like.

00:29:49.196 --> 00:29:50.721
You know these kind of things.

00:29:50.721 --> 00:29:58.758
Anything that deals with consumer standardization of reaction to fire is much more likely to be traditional or prescriptive.

00:29:58.758 --> 00:30:10.000
We're not going to wander around on other things and, on the other hand, sprinkler systems, we're very flexible with systems as long as they meet certain basic standards.

00:30:10.000 --> 00:30:11.574
But there you know.

00:30:11.574 --> 00:30:14.109
So these are the plastic pipes and the copper pipes.

00:30:15.172 --> 00:30:21.904
I always felt that the sprinkler system is the most ridiculous end of prescriptiveness.

00:30:21.904 --> 00:30:30.275
Like I was contemplating then when I was recently in New Zealand, I was swimming in a swimming pool and above my head I had sprinklers and I'll tell you why.

00:30:30.275 --> 00:30:30.695
Yeah.

00:30:31.117 --> 00:30:34.051
I was in a hotel in Utah that was being renovated.

00:30:34.051 --> 00:30:42.638
They drained the swimming pool, filled it full of carpets and other things for the renovation built the biggest fire hazard I ever saw, but it was sprinkler.

00:30:42.638 --> 00:30:48.480
So it's because, because people can drain a swimming pool and use it for something else.

00:30:48.480 --> 00:30:50.154
That's why it's sprinkler.

00:30:50.656 --> 00:30:52.676
Okay, well, that kind of makes sense.

00:30:52.676 --> 00:30:57.142
When I was discussing this with my colleagues at New Zealand, they told me ah, wojciech, you know what?

00:30:57.142 --> 00:31:01.095
It's sometimes not worth the argument, it's cheaper to put it.

00:31:01.609 --> 00:31:06.713
Because they might use it for something else, and this may be what we get to later, but I'll give it a moment right now.

00:31:06.713 --> 00:31:10.077
One of the things about performance codes is they take more regulation.

00:31:10.077 --> 00:31:37.519
In other words, in prescriptive codes the assumptions are built into the code traditional code but performance codes, if you say this is our fire load, then you have to specify the fire load in a way that it can be enforced and people come in and do the enforcement and that's why you know there was sprinklers over the or sprinklers in any other unusual Like okay, it kind of makes sense what you say, but my experience is different.

00:31:37.538 --> 00:31:53.150
In Poland, the performance-based code for, or the performance-based requirement for, smoke control is literally one sentence you should have sufficiently free of smoke escape exits and then it's open to anyone who wants to pursue that and we'll get to the competency of people in a second.

00:31:54.412 --> 00:31:55.054
And when?

00:31:55.054 --> 00:32:06.473
Let me ask you the question when you put in a proposal, then that gets if you will stamped and approved and you have to build according to that proposal and that says what the fire load will be.

00:32:06.473 --> 00:32:16.982
And then you have to have a fire load, fuel load discussion and then that has to be competently regulated to make sure you don't exceed the fire load.

00:32:17.530 --> 00:32:19.250
Yeah, and then that's a challenge.

00:32:19.250 --> 00:32:24.834
It goes further, because you also have to define what are your tenability criteria, what's your exposure, what's?

00:32:24.855 --> 00:32:25.597
your evacuation.

00:32:26.391 --> 00:32:28.672
It's an entire process which is unregulated.

00:32:28.672 --> 00:32:33.911
It's just based on on, it's just based on the best practices, whatever the best practices are.

00:32:33.911 --> 00:32:37.760
So I, I I kind of resonate what you say, because I see that in my own country.

00:32:37.780 --> 00:32:39.073
If you, think of a theater again.

00:32:39.073 --> 00:32:41.584
Yeah, think of the venting of a theater in the old days.

00:32:41.584 --> 00:32:46.420
You know, we had the theater that I was stage manager of was built in 1912.

00:32:46.420 --> 00:32:57.413
And we had a fire curtain and we had a water curtain backing up the fire curtain and we had roof vents so that what burned on the stage would go up and people could exit out when they went to open theaters.

00:32:57.413 --> 00:33:06.731
The question of how much combustible material you're going to have on the stage became really important and it was unregulated, as you say, and it was unregulated, as you say.

00:33:06.771 --> 00:33:37.019
But the question I had in mind is, like we often, even in this space of performance-based design in smoke control, but more commonly in Poland, when you would be designing a building that's like very innovative or very big, beautiful, large building that escapes the code, you would have to show that your performance-based solution does not work worse than the code solution, some sort of equivalency of safety and I know in the UK they would do it a lot with the smoke control.

00:33:37.019 --> 00:33:44.674
They would show that the smoke control solution is not worse than the BRE system and because the original solution was a political decision.

00:33:45.076 --> 00:33:48.040
I find that approach to be nonsense.

00:33:48.381 --> 00:33:57.009
That's the full circle in my head, like, okay, if I was comparing to a technical system where a group of scientists would come up with a solution.

00:33:57.009 --> 00:34:04.815
We knew throughout the history and numerous examples of real fires that it actually provides a level of safety, I'm game with that.

00:34:04.815 --> 00:34:10.177
But if it was a king's order that the wall shall be?

00:34:10.818 --> 00:34:11.360
Euroclass B.

00:34:11.360 --> 00:34:13.293
This was the Titanic.

00:34:13.293 --> 00:34:15.697
I've gone through the Titanic in great details.

00:34:15.697 --> 00:34:25.773
The interesting point was they said we don't need so many lifeboats because we have wireless and we can call for help to another ship.

00:34:25.773 --> 00:34:30.382
The only problem was they did not require that the Titanic know where it is.

00:34:30.382 --> 00:34:36.182
There was no requirement that the Titanic's wireless or any other ships be manned 24 hours.

00:34:36.182 --> 00:34:39.619
There was no requirement that the Titanic know its exact location.

00:34:39.619 --> 00:34:47.940
So when the Titanic hit the iceberg, they didn't know where they were within close enough distance at night for a ship to come rescue them.

00:34:47.940 --> 00:34:49.932
They were at least 25 miles off.

00:34:50.875 --> 00:35:06.503
And so this was the problem was a political decision was made based on totally inadequate technical basis, but anyway if you want to assume some level of equivalency between two solutions, how do you first define a level of safety of a solution?

00:35:06.503 --> 00:35:07.373
How do you demonstrate it?

00:35:07.474 --> 00:35:08.117
Of the existing one.

00:35:08.117 --> 00:35:09.329
You have to do the risk analysis.

00:35:09.329 --> 00:35:10.516
This goes to our risk question.

00:35:10.516 --> 00:35:18.880
You have to do a thorough risk analysis of code-compliant buildings and what are the possible failure modes, because that's what you're looking for.

00:35:18.880 --> 00:35:21.778
Where could the code-compliant building go bad?

00:35:21.778 --> 00:35:23.516
And this is what I'm saying with the Titanic.

00:35:23.516 --> 00:35:28.764
The Titanic was a code-compliant building but it wasn't safe.

00:35:28.764 --> 00:35:34.641
So you can have a code-complying building that's not safe because that particular damage has not occurred yet.

00:35:34.641 --> 00:35:48.492
And so look at the Kobe earthquake, where earthquake Japanese know more about earthquake codes than anybody and code-compliant buildings and highways and everything collapsed because this earthquake was different from the others.

00:35:48.492 --> 00:35:49.422
Look at Fukushima.

00:35:49.422 --> 00:36:02.306
At Fukushima they said we have a code-compliant tsunami wall which was not big enough and they put the generators in the basement rather than up in the air, which brought the entire nuclear power plant down.

00:36:02.306 --> 00:36:14.951
I mean, this is the problem with saying, well, we're equivalent to code compliance, maybe we're equivalent to stupidity, yeah, but if someone wants to design, is it the engineer that should seek that?

00:36:15.291 --> 00:36:18.005
or you would still argue that it's the regulator.

00:36:18.005 --> 00:36:19.570
Ajj, Whose role is it?

00:36:19.570 --> 00:36:19.911
It's?

00:36:19.990 --> 00:36:20.512
both ways.

00:36:20.512 --> 00:36:35.733
The engineer has to show that they have done state-of-the-art risk analysis, real risk analysis that really complies with the state-of-the-art, and then the regulator, who's operating for the state, has to decide whether we should take that risk.

00:36:35.733 --> 00:36:37.425
And that's Brandenburg Airport.

00:36:37.425 --> 00:36:39.572
That was the issue at Brandenburg Airport.

00:36:39.572 --> 00:36:41.768
The design was terrible.

00:36:41.768 --> 00:36:46.722
Brandenburg Airport the design was terrible.

00:36:46.722 --> 00:36:50.108
The design was, I mean, the fundamental design was we will suck smoke down and blow it out down.

00:36:50.108 --> 00:36:51.231
We will suck smoke down.

00:36:51.231 --> 00:36:54.766
Now, what building has ever been built that sucked smoke down?

00:36:54.766 --> 00:37:09.831
Maybe in Australia, and this was a gigantic building and so therefore, it was all blue smoke and mirrors, it was all faking it and finally, at the end of the day, without tests that showed it worked, the regulators wouldn't take it.

00:37:09.831 --> 00:37:15.873
Because the weakness in the German system was they didn't have to have code approval when they built the building.

00:37:15.873 --> 00:37:18.527
They could go for code approval when the building was built.

00:37:18.527 --> 00:37:19.731
We never allow that.

00:37:19.731 --> 00:37:21.224
That's something we never do.

00:37:21.704 --> 00:37:23.891
Yeah, in Poland you would also have to have.

00:37:23.891 --> 00:37:28.400
Like depends how strictly you follow the code and how complicated the building is.

00:37:28.400 --> 00:37:34.268
So if you go a complicated building adhering to the code, the process would be a simple approval of the expert.

00:37:34.268 --> 00:37:41.983
But if you want to derogate, there would be a very extensive process of negotiating with the authorities how much you can derogate.

00:37:42.184 --> 00:37:55.630
Right, and if your building is a novel building, a truly novel building that's not contemplated by the code, we'd have the same problem, even if you're in technical compliance, if your building just doesn't look like anything we've seen before.

00:37:55.630 --> 00:38:01.871
These were the first covered football stadiums and you have 40,000 people in a football stadium, 50,000 people.

00:38:01.871 --> 00:38:07.945
They said we're going to have to take a deep look at this one and they did simulations.

00:38:07.945 --> 00:38:13.679
In some cases they built quite large models to see if the air smoke control would work and things like that.

00:38:13.820 --> 00:38:17.550
But I would tell you a funny story of where this goes also very wrong.

00:38:17.550 --> 00:38:26.987
So we had buildings in Poland, so every time you wanted to deviate from some requirement, you would have to give something in exchange to provide this equality.

00:38:26.987 --> 00:38:38.804
Like, let's say, you would not want to have four-hour firewalls, instead you would do some sort of higher spec sprinkler system or voice alarm or whatever you know.

00:38:38.804 --> 00:38:45.289
You would just, you know, compensate one deviation from the requirement with some additional system.

00:38:45.289 --> 00:38:49.289
But you know what happened They've run out of the systems to put into the building.

00:38:49.289 --> 00:38:58.746
The building had everything you could put, like every single technical solution you could have in the building already had, and they wanted to do another deviation and we've run out of solutions.

00:38:58.940 --> 00:39:00.385
This is the issue of wooden buildings.

00:39:00.385 --> 00:39:02.661
Okay, this is an issue with wooden buildings.

00:39:02.661 --> 00:39:03.501
This is the issue of wooden buildings.

00:39:03.501 --> 00:39:04.443
Okay, this is an issue with wooden buildings.

00:39:04.443 --> 00:39:10.166
The question is, if you put in every state-of-the-art fire safety system in a wooden building, is it still safe?

00:39:10.166 --> 00:39:15.692
And there are some buildings where we don't think so and we just decide that's a risk we're not going to take.

00:39:16.431 --> 00:39:19.494
But when is it safe enough?

00:39:19.494 --> 00:39:20.476
Is it ever safe enough?

00:39:20.856 --> 00:39:22.476
Eventually, that's a regulatory decision.

00:39:22.476 --> 00:39:30.030
Yeah, in other words, no one has a right to build a building and so, therefore, every building has to satisfy the.

00:39:30.030 --> 00:39:35.085
Now, if you think the regulator is being unreasonable, we have ways to appeal that, and, yes, we do do that.

00:39:35.085 --> 00:39:44.134
And if you think but, for example, I'm just trying to We've just had buildings where they just sat down and said, no, you can't do that.

00:39:44.134 --> 00:39:52.208
Whatever you're doing there and here's the most common that we argue with right now these are wooden buildings on top of a concrete platform.

00:39:52.208 --> 00:39:57.972
All right, so you build a four-story garage and then you build a wooden building on top of it.

00:39:57.972 --> 00:40:00.228
Now, the question is how does the fire department get there?

00:40:00.228 --> 00:40:10.568
And the fire department just said we can't fight the fire in that wooden building, so you have to have a wooden building that completely fights its own fire, which nobody can have.

00:40:11.141 --> 00:40:15.188
There's a question of a very, very long discussion of burnout.

00:40:15.188 --> 00:40:27.108
You know that the building shall survive burnout and I had this funny discussion with colleagues that the more you try to define burnout, the more stupid it becomes, because burnout is burnout.

00:40:27.108 --> 00:40:36.688
The moment you start to define it, oh it's when temperatures decrease or where flaming ignition stops, or you know that's not burnout, that's just burnout with additional clauses that makes you comply with it.

00:40:36.688 --> 00:40:38.722
It's kind of funny.

00:40:38.722 --> 00:40:48.896
But still again, the question, like at the higher level, is is burnout necessary for us or for the society to accept the risk?

00:40:48.896 --> 00:40:50.867
And the society was never asked about it.

00:40:51.240 --> 00:40:58.652
Well, actually they have, and the Supreme Court has wrestled with the case in different ways.

00:40:58.652 --> 00:40:59.860
We don't always call it burnout.

00:40:59.860 --> 00:41:01.282
I understand that we don't always call it burnout, I understand that.

00:41:01.282 --> 00:41:12.556
But for example, until the World Trade Center building number seven not the Twin Towers, the other building we'd never had the collapse of a high-rise building in the United States due to fire.

00:41:12.556 --> 00:41:15.086
So we're pretty good idea.

00:41:15.086 --> 00:41:17.989
We might have been overbuilt but we knew what burnout was.

00:41:17.989 --> 00:41:25.333
And the Twin Towers were a unique problem because they were the world's largest load-bearing walls.

00:41:25.333 --> 00:41:31.353
So we're very sensitive to collapse and fire in those kind of buildings.

00:41:31.353 --> 00:41:33.786
Homes and wooden you know we have lots of.

00:41:33.786 --> 00:41:34.949
I have a wooden building, you know.

00:41:34.949 --> 00:41:36.545
We know they collapse already.

00:41:36.545 --> 00:41:40.510
When the fire starts you just want to get the people out, there's no question.

00:41:40.510 --> 00:41:48.489
But the famous Ash Building that was the Triangle Shirtwaist fire back in 1912, the building still stood.

00:41:48.489 --> 00:41:50.012
They rebuilt the building.

00:41:50.012 --> 00:41:52.065
You know it was no great problem.

00:41:52.726 --> 00:41:55.594
Within those technical systems, those regimes.

00:41:55.594 --> 00:42:04.514
Either it'd be performance based design regime, either it'd be performance based that just calls clauses of codes, either it be a prescriptive system.

00:42:04.514 --> 00:42:07.288
How do you feel the competencies play a way?

00:42:07.288 --> 00:42:18.855
Because I also feel that we sometimes regulate how things should be done, but we leave a massive blank space in who should do them and what the quality of those people should be.

00:42:19.016 --> 00:42:26.038
Oh yeah, Well, of course, being at the University of Maryland, we were the producer of fire protection engineers in the United States.

00:42:26.179 --> 00:42:26.579

181 - Regulatory regimes with Vincent Brannigan

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