Playing with Fire - Towers of Babel

One night over cocktails almost two years ago Dr Cecilia Abecassis-Empis and Jo Rush started talking about what they respectively do; Cecilia, an academic at the BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering; and Jo, a freelance theatre director.  The conversation, like many, quickly moved onto the causes of the 9/11 structural collapses of the World Trade Centre (WTC) towers. Cecilia’s and Luke Bisby’s (who over-hearing the conversation could not help but chime in) frustration that the scientific reasoning and underlying messages around these events were not being heard sparked an idea in the creative recesses of Jo’s mind: Towers of Babel was born.

Jo commissioned a play-wright friend to start coming up with ideas and plot lines around the research into the WTC tower collapses, and explore the reasons why the message was not being heard by engineers and the public alike. Conversations over dinner, skype, and at conferences kept the juices flowing and the more questions were answered about “whose fault was it?”, “why has nothing changed?”, and “what other risks are out there?”, the more the play took its initial form. 

However we needed to know whether the characters rang true and whether the message that we wanted to say was coming across. We gave to the play to the actors. At a read-through at the University of Edinburgh in July 2014 five actors along with the play-wright, Jo, and a few academics examined every nuance of story and character. It was a success, and with some final polishing off a final script would be ready.

This is where we are now, with the play-wright looking at the changes and editing the script, and the director looking to expose the play to the public audience.  We are hoping to be previewing the work sometime early next year – with plans to take it to a full production soon afterwards.  Watch this space.

Synopsis:

“Towers of Babel is an exciting new play that explores culpability, collusion, and the risks we take every day. It draws on specific research by the University of Edinburgh into why and how the World Trade Centre towers fell on 9/11, and asks why the engineering community, in general, is not acting upon the significant gaps in our understanding of fire exposed by this terrible event. Using this specific engineering failure as its focus, the play engages with wider questions about the blame culture in our society, the engineering choices made between financial cost and human cost, and how engineers quantify, manage and articulate risk to the wider public.”

For more details about any aspect of the show please contact David Rush: d.rush@ed.ac.uk

 

Letter to the Editor of Scientific American

(Email sent on Thur 15 Sep 2011 to editors@sciam.com) 

Dear Editor of Scientific American,

Your September issue included the piece "Castles in the Air" by Mark Lamster where the failed prophecy that the attacks of 9/11 were to end the age of the skyscraper is discussed. 

The article highlights that 2011 will be the single greatest year for the construction of tall buildings in history. That China is leading the skyscraper boom, yet their engineering design is dominated by American firms.

The article discusses design issues on evacuation. But the World Trade Center was designed to evacuate rapidly, and so both towers WTC1 and 2 did below the impact floors on 9/11. WTC7 was also evacuated in time.

The article also discusses design issues on aircraft impact. But the World Trade Center was designed to withstand the impact of a large aircraft, and so both towers WTC1 and 2 did on 9/11. They collapsed because of fire. WTC7 was not hit by an aircraft, but collapsed due to fire as well. 

The article goes to imply that the design of tall buildings for protection against terrorist attacks is mostly about aircraft impact and evacuation. It does not discuses fire. But WTC 1, 2 and 7 collapsed because of fire. So they only issue that is not addressed in the article is the one that brought World Trade Center down, and the one where design advances over the past decade have been most marginal. 

This is a thin favour to fire engineering and to the safety of tall buildings.

Sincerely,


-- 
 *Dr Guillermo Rein*
Senior Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering
University of Edinburgh
http://www.eng.ed.ac.uk/~grein

"so easy it seemed, Once found, which yet unfounded most would have
thought, Impossible!" J Milton  


UPDATE Sept 2011: This letter was followed by two more from Dr Bisby and Hilditch

UPDATE Dec 2011: The letter of Dr Bisby has been published in the December 2011 issue of Scientific American.

Call for papers: Fire Technology special issue on WTC Collapse

Fire Technology, the journal of the National Fire Protection Association published by Springer, is preparing an issue on the 2001 fire and collapse of World Trade Center.

The purpose is to collect research, forensic and engineering output of the highest scholarly standards synthesized in the 10 years passed since the event.

Multidisciplinary and international contributions are especially encouraged. Topics of interests include: WTC 1, 2, 5 and 7, the crash, fires, structural response, collapse, forensic conclusions, experiments, modelling, Fire and Rescue intervention, human behaviour, building design, post-collapse fires and recovery, previous attacks on WTC and related subjects.

Submissions will be accepted until 11th Nov 2011 at: http://fire.edmgr.com (choose article type "World Trace Center") .

The call for papers flyer can do downloaded here. Please spread the word, we are looking for a wide range of high quality submissions.

For further information, contact the Associate Editor of this special issue: G.Rein@ed.ac.uk, Dr Guillermo Rein, The University of Edinburgh.

A New York City fireman calls for 10 more rescue workers to make their way into the rubble of the World Trade Center. Photo form Wikipedia, United States Navy ID 010914-N-3995K-01

The Twin Towers: 10 years – 10 Lessons on Sustainable Infrastructure

On Monday 14 March 2011, Prof Jose Torero (University of Edinburgh) delivered the public lecture:

The Twin Towers: 10 years – 10 Lessons on Sustainable Infrastructure

Joint event of The Royal Society of Edinburgh and The Royal Academy of Engineering.

The collapse of the World Trade Center towers represents one of the most dramatic failures of modern structural engineering. One of the most exhaustive and expensive failure analyses in history was conducted in the midst of speculation, controversy and conspiracy theories. In parallel, the world has seen an extraordinary evolution of the super-tall building. Seven of the ten tallest buildings in the world have been built after 9/11. These not only include the tallest four, but eight of these buildings are outside the USA. Furthermore, a strong drive towards sustainability has driven tall building design to levels of innovation never seen before. This presentation will extract, from a decade of questioning and innovation, ten lessons on what is sustainable infrastructure.

A summary of the lecture and the 10 lessons can be read here

Towards the forecast of fire dynamics to assist the emergency response

A recent journal paper titled "Forecasting Fire Growth using an Inverse Zone Modelling Approach" has published in Fire Safety Journal. We are happy that the work has been widely featured in the media and many people is being exposed to the novel idea:

• Interview for Scottish TV News (go to minute 19 here). Aired on 29 Nov 2010.
• Interview for BBC Radio Scotland (or go minute 42.20 here).  Aired on 29 Nov 2010.
• Articles in The Scotsman, CORDIS-EU and Xinhuanet (in Chinese).

Effective control of a compartment fire saves lives and money. When fire fighters manage to put out a fire before it grows out of proportions, live safety is greatly increased and significant damage can be avoided. Moreover, the affected building can be re-occupied without major investment of resources. But when a fire passes a certain size, the building might collapses as a consequence of the fire damage to the structure (eg, 2001 WTC or 2005 Windsor Tower) or might have to be demolished due to irreversible damages.

Due to a lack of the required technology to support emergency response, fire fighters often have to follow their intuition when it comes to attacking the fire instead of basing their decisions on knowledge of the actual fire. This lack of information can lead to lost opportunities or unnecessary risks.

Prediction of the ongoing fire development ahead of time under different possible conditions based on the current events taking place would give fire fighters insight into the dynamics of the particular fire being flighted. With this extra knowledge, they could weight other options and feed more information into the emergency management. However, fire dynamics follow complex physical processes closely coupled to one another, which makes current tools not able to accurately forecast fire development in real time.

Figure: Conceptual representation of the data assimilation process and the sensor
steering of model predictions even when critical events take place in an evolving fire scenario.

This emerging technology has been called Sensor Assisted Fire Fighting. The FireGrid project, to which this paper belongs together with the recent PhD thesis of the lead author, aims at providing physics-based forecasts of fire development by combining measurements from sensors in the fire compartment with a range of computational modelling tools. The sensor measurements can provide essential lacking information and compensate the accuracy lost, and thus overcome the shortcomings of current modelling tools and speed them up. The proposed methodology is to collect measurements in the fire compartment, and to assimilate this data into the computational model.

When enough measurements are available to characterize the current fire, a forecast is made. This forecast is then constantly updated with new incoming data. If, for example, a door is opened or glazing breaks, and the ventilation conditions change drastically, the sensor measurements will steer the computational model towards capturing the new conditions. With this technology, fire fighters could act upon forecast behaviour.

This paper presents one of the first steps in this direction. Data is assimilated into a simple zone model, and forecasts of the fire development are made. Positive lead times are reported here for the first time. These results are an important step towards the forecast of fire dynamics to assist the emergency response. Together with the application to CFD within the same PhD thesis, the previous thesis of Cowlard on flame spread predictions and the most recent paper by Koo et al. on probabilistic zone models, these establish the basis for technology for sensor assisted fire fighting. The envisioned system is not yet fit for operational purposes and further research is needed. The investigation of the effects of adding further realism in the fire scenarios will be the focus of future studies.

The paper can now be read at the website of Fire Safety Journal.

Note: A related paper is discussed in "FireGrid: An e-infrastructure for next-generation emergency response support"

"The best part? He is an academic"

Prof Torero is featured in The Times of India and The Bangalore Mirror after he gave the talk "Economics, Fire Safety and Sustainability in the Built Environment: are they Compatible?" at The Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore invited by the British Deputy High Commission Bangalore.


Tex from Timesofindia,com:

Professor/investigator plays with fire, literally

BANGALORE: He has participated in investigations into the World Trade Center fires post-terror attacks, Texas City and Buncefield explosions and Madrid Windsor Tower fire. He has also helped design landmark projects like the Nasa space shuttle hangars in Florida, the 80-storey Heron Tower in London and much more. The best part? He is an academic.

Professor Jose L Torero delighted an academic audience at IISc during a lecture on Monday as part of the UK-IISc lecture series. He is the BRE/RAE chair in fire-safety engineering, head of the Institute for Infrastructure and Environment, and director of the BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. Torero spoke on ‘Economics, fire safety and sustainability in the built environment: Are they compatible?'

"Fire safety is a complex problem that encompasses issues as diverse as structural behaviour, toxicology or water management. The specific problems involved require time and length-scale resolutions."

Urban development and accompanying infrastructure, he pointed out, should be designed and maintained in a sustainable way.

"Much effort has been made on understanding energy management, life cycles, environmental sustainability and the economic drivers and deterrents to these policies. In contrast, the role of safety (in specific, fire safety) as a threat to the sustainability of communities has been largely ignored," the professor explained.

MORE ABOUT HIM
Torero's research works were on fire dynamics, flame spread, microgravity research, smouldering combustion, suppression systems and contaminated land among others.

He was elected fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and awarded the Arthur B Guise Medal by the Society of Fire Protection Engineers (USA) in 2008, for recognition of eminent achievement in advancing the science of fire protection.

He is also chair of the Fire & Safety Working Group at the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) and vice-chair of the International Association for Fire Safety Science (IAFSS).


 Tex from Timesofindia,com:

Tear down a building if you must. Wouldn’t you rather save lives?

Manasi Paresh Kumar
Posted On Tuesday, August 17, 2010 at 04:59:58 AM

Jose Torero, who was on the investigating team of the WTO collapse and is a consultant to many govts on fire safety, tells us how we can make the city more safe. Two other civil engineers give his global views a local spin

With fire safety now a raging topic, the visit of Jose Torero, professor of fire safety engineering at the University of Edinburgh, to the Indian Institute of Science is timely. Torero who was on the investigating team of World Trade Center collapse, has been a consultant to many governments on fire safety. We engage him in a tete-a-tete along with two other civil engineers from the Association of Consulting Civil Engineers – M S Sudharashan and M U Ashwath – who put his global views in an Indian perspective.
BM: How safe is Bangalore when it comes to fire safety?Jose Torero: Well, I haven’t been around Bangalore that much during this visit so it would be difficult to give a number. But let me put it this way – when technical growth exceeds the city’s ability to respond to it, it will create a problem. This certainly is the case in Bangalore which has a simple history and a very innovative future.
M S Sudharshan: For example, the two tallest buildings in Bangalore, Utility Building and Visvesvaraya Towers, did not have a decent fire exit plan till a few years ago and neither did the city have the expertise to deal with a fire in either of them. Now, with every building competing to be better technically, we are not really sure if we can respond to this demand for better safety facilities. How safe Bangalore really is is anybody’s guess.

Since prevention is better than a cure, how can we plug the loopholes during construction?JT: In an ideal situation, you have a fire safety expert on the panel of engineers when a building is being built. But since that is not possible, the only other way to do it is to ensure that the city administration has the expertise. You have experts to ensure that the building by-laws are followed and another set who do regular checks to ensure they are working. There is no other way.
Ashwath M U: A Carlton Tower could have been avoided if the administration checked repeatedly on safety measures. Now, after the fire department’s NOC (in the case of highrise buildings) you don’t go back to check if they are working after six months. You ask the BBMP or the BDA and they say, they don’t have the expertise to do these checks. The fire department says they don’t have the authority to do these checks. Who then is to be held responsible for the nine people who died in the Carlton fire?

So with no expertise, how do we address this situation? Can international consultants help?JT: First, the city cannot shrug off its responsibility. If you are giving permissions, you better have the ability to check. Second, I don’t think that foreign consultants are the answer because they cannot give you tailormade solutions to local problems. You would only make them richer. Have your inhouse experts to deal with the issue so you can rely on them during the administration’s periodic checks. Third, you currently have the fire department giving NOCs for fire safety. While they need to be involved, they are essentially trained to put out a fire. You need to have an engineering wing to deal with this issue.
AMU: Explain to me how a safety expert from the UK will be able to give you solutions for the cramped quarters of Avenue Road, where commercial activity of every kind takes place.

Talk of implementing the law is all very well but how practical is this solution in the Indian scenario where the builder lobby is so powerful?JT: Well, you need to have the will to change what is wrong. There was a fire in Peru, which killed 600. The situation was worse than what you tell me of your city. It was a disorganised city that had more powerful land mafia. Yet, the government drew up rules to take them on as safety was important.

MSS: If you want to keep your people safe, you need to make decisions. The rules allow the fire safety department to get involved if the building is over 15m tall. What about schools, hospitals or even smaller apartment blocks?

So, the occupancy intent should be the base of fire safety?JT: Absolutely. How can you not bring schools in the gambit? Understand this, everything can be made safer. If the building is old, you can modernise its structure, if the building is new, look into the future. If it absolutely cannot be changed, you have to tear it down. Weigh your options: Who would you rather save – human lives or bricks and mortar?

 

Prof Torero interviewed by Beacons for Public Engagement

Edinburgh Beltane interviewed Prof Jose Torero on his views about public engagement and research in fire safety. Read the inreview here.

Edinburgh Beltane - Beacons for Public Engagement are funded by the UK higher education funding councils, Research Councils UK, and the Wellcome Trust