183 - Innovation and fire safety with Vincent Brannigan

Transcript

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Hello everybody, welcome to the Fire Science Show, welcome to 2025,.

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Happy new year, everybody.

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Thanks for starting your year with me.

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

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So here I am delivering this.

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

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

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I've learned about the passing of Professor Jim Quintiere.

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That's very sad news for fire science overall.

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

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

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We had three episodes.

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It was such a joy to be able to talk and meet Quintiere for for those brief moments.

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

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

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Other than that, the time was very nice and calm.

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

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Professor Branigan he's an expert on innovation.

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He did his master thesis on submarines as an innovation.

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

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And actually this unique perspective is brought in the context of fire safety in this podcast episode.

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

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Talk was a lecture vincent gave like 15 years ago at edinburgh.

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

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

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

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

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Let's just 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 Wegrzyński and I will be your host.

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

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Established in the UK in 2016 as a startup business of two highly experienced fire engineering consultants, the business has grown phenomenally to eight offices across the country, from Edinburgh to Bath.

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Colleagues are on a mission to continually explore the challenges that fire creates for clients and society, applying the best research experience and diligence for effective, tailored solution.

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2025, there will be new opportunities to work with OFR.

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

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Get in touch at ofrconsultantscom.

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And now back to the interview on innovations.

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Hello, I'm joined today once again by Professor Vincent Brennigan.

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Hey, Vincent, good to have you back on the podcast once again.

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

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And this podcast episode actually cannot start in any other way than mentioning our late Professor Jim Quintiere.

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Jim has passed away recently.

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It saddened me a lot.

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

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

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Well, I have to say everything I know about fire testing that I use in my work in fire regulation.

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Fundamentally, I learned the basics from Jim Quintero.

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I had the good fortune.

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Fundamentally, I learned the basics from Jim Quinteri.

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I had the good fortune I was a law student at Georgetown and I got a job at the National Bureau of Standards.

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

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I said well, I was a stage manager.

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I can build anything that only has to last three days.

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And he said that's okay, we'll burn it on the second day.

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

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He had a law student as an engineering technician.

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But he found out I was not a complete idiot and I would learn anything and do anything he needed.

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

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

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

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

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He checked the programs that I had them right and we got the results much faster.

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But I would make anything he needed.

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I would go down to the machine shop and work with the people there and produce any device.

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

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And then we kept in touch and eventually I got appointed in fire protection.

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I was first a adjunct faculty member in fire protection engineering.

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

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So of course I couldn't even approach his expertise, but it was kind of fun.

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And then we later were both professors emeritus.

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

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You read his papers.

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You read his marbles models, everything MQH so on.

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That's the person I know.

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

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He actually applied to my summer school this year.

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That was hilarious.

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

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What a guy that was.

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

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Oh, there's lots more good stories All right?

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

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So I wanted to talk about innovation blind spot innovation gaps.

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I'm not sure if it was you who came with the term innovation blind gaps.

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I've learned it from Guillermo Reyn.

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He's using it a lot.

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He also has a nice lecture on innovation and this terminology sticked with me.

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I like it a lot.

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Anyway, I know you've been researching submarines as an innovation, as an innovation tool.

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Was that your PhD master's?

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Well, I can start from the beginning.

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When I was an undergraduate, I was a major fundamentally in the history of technology and very interested in law.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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They had a very simple test that would essentially distinguish between cotton carpet and wool carpet.

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Cotton carpet failed, wool carpet passed, no problem.

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Then nylon carpet was invented and nylon carpet failed if there was low-density nylon and passed if it was high-density nylon.

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Now nylon burns.

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So how is it that more flammable material made you pass the test and less flammable material made you fail the test?

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

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Now you can think of the single burning item.

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It turned out there was a threshold effect.

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

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So the nylon was melting and it consumed the entire heat input, and then the nylon did none.

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

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

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

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And this is what I later put in the article that you were referring to.

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That was the Edinburgh conference article in 2010.

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

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

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

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

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

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And it was just a paper.

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

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And I'm like, wow, that's exactly the problem with fire safety today.

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Oh yeah, Like we're passing a test, not doing fire.

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

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And I said, gee, can I do that?

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Yeah, I was just a kid looking at that.

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He said sure.

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So I took out of my pocket.

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

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I struck one of them, threw it on the mattress and it exploded into flames.

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Danny Gross had to pull the sprinklers.

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We had a mattress in the mattress to put the fire out and he said get that crap out of here.

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So we this was.

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This is one of the examples.

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I've used it in class and so forth for years, so it's nothing new.

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

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And the exact thing that we're discussing here can be very well explained by fire science.

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There's a chemical reaction that has an energy of activation which is like a threshold value.

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Like you said, it's a threshold value.

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You pass the threshold, the reaction accelerates, just goes on.

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

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

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

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

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It's the exact same thing.

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Oh yeah, oh yeah.

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It shows up in other areas.

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

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

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If you put them a centimeter apart and ignite them, they fail.

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In other words.

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So it isn't just the stuff, it is in fact the configuration of the stuff that can generate the failure.

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So this is where fire testing is incredibly and absolutely critical.

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

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This is why it's so terrible.

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

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And this has to be an absolute formal stipulation on every fire test that you can only test the materials that were in the designer's mind.

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This flips over to a different area.

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Let's take Mont Blanc, the Mont Blanc tunnel, for just a moment.

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They used essentially the ignitability of flammable liquids to determine what you could put through the tunnel, rather than the effective heat of combustion of a truck full of the stuff.

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This was idiotic by any technical grounds.

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There's simply no technical rationale on which you can justify it, because once you have a small fire going, it's the heat of combustion, not ignition point, which is the hazard and this is in the article, of course.

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And it wasn't until after the fire that someone suggested anything.

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The heat of combustion of a load of the material to design the tunnels and they found the stuff they could put on a truck was unbelievable.

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It was up into the you know gigawatts of fire and and the no system would hold that so clearly.

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In that case, I believe that designers were attempting to get a test through, for whatever reason that would allow all kinds of highly combustible material in the tunnels.

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Now, whether with political pressure or otherwise, I have no idea.

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I wouldn't even say it could be just like knowledge.

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You know, because, to be honest, fire science is often obvious after the disaster.

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Like look at the facade in Grenfell.

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Like how many people studied the flammability of vertical materials?

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It has been known for 50 years and yet it was put on a building and the fire science did not stop it.

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So I'm just saying fire science is sometimes not powerful enough to convince people they are doing things that are stupid.

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Well, we can get to what I'll call the underlying political question a little later.

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But, very simply, the regulatory system failed because it allowed things which were not well understood to be put on buildings.

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So that's a regulatory failure that I pointed out when I was teaching in Scotland in the 1990s.

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In other words, that England was allowing things, under their guise of performance-based design, that nobody understood.

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There was a reward for industry to be blind and stupid, and even today people are claiming oh well, how could we have known?

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Let me go back all the way to the Titanic to do a parallel.

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I'll go all the way back.

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I'll just stop you for a second.

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I need to make a comment to the listeners because you want to go to Titanic.

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I really like interviewing Vincent because he's investigating not just the problem of innovation in fire safety.

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He's researching the problem of innovation overall like a human technology problem, and it, of course, reappears through the course of history.

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It reappears all the time, and all the time we're dealing with innovation, all the time we're dealing with new technologies that exceed previous knowledge, hence creating these innovation gaps, and that's exactly what I wanted to bring you, vincent, in the podcast.

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Now give me Titanic, please.

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Okay, the Titanic was permitted to have fewer lifeboats than the number of people on board on the grounds that it had radio and could call other ships for help if it had trouble.

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That was the theory Fair thing, yeah.

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Unfortunately, there were several things that are required to make that work.

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One is that the other ships have to man their radios 24 hours.

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There was no such requirement.

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The other thing is that Titanic has to be required to know its position at all times.

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There was no such requirement.

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So when Titanic hit the iceberg, the radio starts signaling the wrong position.

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Because they didn't have to keep track of their position.

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It happened by chance that Carpathia was coming on a course that would make it cross the actual position earlier.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

00:22:47.162 --> 00:22:48.855
It was an innovation.

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

00:22:52.650 --> 00:22:55.955
If the trusses fail, the walls fail.

00:22:55.955 --> 00:22:57.398
Okay, by buckling.

00:22:57.398 --> 00:22:58.401
Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

00:24:19.883 --> 00:24:23.378
So that was an innovation.

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

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

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

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

00:24:45.871 --> 00:24:47.237
But how do we deal with that?

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

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

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

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

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

00:25:08.361 --> 00:25:09.102
There's nothing in it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

00:26:28.896 --> 00:26:30.601
And I have two daughters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

00:27:18.182 --> 00:27:19.406
You will have a disaster.

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

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

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

00:27:38.955 --> 00:27:40.160
The competencies are difficult, right.

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

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

00:27:51.179 --> 00:27:52.963
That's a well-understood thing.

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

00:28:00.863 --> 00:28:02.130
We do that all the time.

00:28:02.130 --> 00:28:03.351
They botched this.

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

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

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

00:28:25.026 --> 00:28:26.768
But it was a private regulator.

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

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

00:28:40.839 --> 00:28:42.972
You have to prevent underpaying people.

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

00:28:49.355 --> 00:28:51.582
That's a totally separate question.

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

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

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

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

00:29:18.011 --> 00:29:19.760
They're not government elevator inspectors.

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

00:29:23.615 --> 00:29:26.181
But you have to have the regulatory system.

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

00:29:34.536 --> 00:29:36.378
Cannot have fire and forget.

00:29:36.378 --> 00:29:39.284
Must regulate the building cradle to grave.

00:29:39.284 --> 00:29:41.294
Regulate the building cradle to grave.

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

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

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

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

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

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

00:30:08.203 --> 00:30:09.888
They get overcrowded and so forth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

00:31:08.375 --> 00:31:11.583
Then they invented the recumbent bicycle.

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

00:31:18.273 --> 00:31:20.699
That's an entirely new hazard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

00:34:21.436 --> 00:34:23.501
And how can you justify?

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

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

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

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

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

00:34:53.039 --> 00:34:54.416
Can you give a fire example?

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

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

00:35:03.260 --> 00:35:04.083
That's the frame.

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

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

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

00:35:14.820 --> 00:35:16.637
You get a small fire.

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

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

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

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

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

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

00:35:39.579 --> 00:35:40.201
All right.

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

00:35:43.132 --> 00:35:44.273
We can find the same thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

00:36:05.231 --> 00:36:06.653
Absolutely nothing works later.

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

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

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

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

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

00:36:40.054 --> 00:36:41.038
Do people do that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

00:37:18.557 --> 00:37:19.702
They have to detach it.

00:37:19.702 --> 00:37:21.076
If the horses can walk, fine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

00:38:03.842 --> 00:38:05.556
Now we can go to wooden buildings.

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

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

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

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

00:38:14.637 --> 00:38:15.619
I got no problem with wood.

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

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

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

00:38:39.536 --> 00:38:40.942
We just don't have it.

00:38:41.282 --> 00:38:42.648
And I was in the South Hampton.

00:38:42.648 --> 00:38:47.119

183 - Innovation and fire safety with Vincent Brannigan

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