“It is sad to think that, in an earnest scientific work, in the year of grace 1861, we must still treat the fable of ‘spontaneous (human) combustion’, a thing that no one has ever seen or examined, the very proofs of whose existence rests upon the testimony of perfectly untrustworthy non-professionals.”From: Caspar, J L: “A handbook of the practice of forensic medicine based on personal experience” (The New Sydenham Society, London, 1861)
“It is now eleven years since this subject was brought before notice of the Institute in a distinct form. Since that time, fires of enormous extent have occurred…, and the loss of life and property has been immense; for with the extraordinary increase of trade and wealth, there have, day to day, arisen larger dwellings, larger workshops, of all kinds wherein goods may be made, stored or sold. New kinds of buildings too have been introduced, and acts of parliament controlling structures have been strained to the utmost to allow of works which never were contemplated when the acts were framed…. I shall have, I am afraid, in this paper but little novelty to tell. I can speak of no grand discovery - no dazzling invention - but the destructive fires which have occurred since the time at which the last discussion here took place, have tested to the utmost the strength of materials and the merits of construction; and I thought therefore, that it might be well reviewed what has passed in the time.”
- TH Lewis (Institute of British Architects, 1865)
In June 2009 the Fire Safety Engineering group from The University of
Edinburgh begun the challenge of scanning more than 40,000 documents previously
located in the BRE Fire Research Archive at the BRE headquarters in Watford. The
BRE Fire Research Archive contained documents published during the early and
mid-20th century, in almost every topic related to Fire Science, opinion
sheared by the few ones that have gone through some of the tens of thousands of
documents. A previous
description of this project was blogged at an earlier stage.
For me, this new collaboration with sociologists of science is fundamentally about making technology matter. It is about making me, my colleagues, and my engineering discipline maximize our impact.
I’m a structural engineer, or rather more specifically a structural fire engineer. My specific expertise – such as it is – is in studying the thermal and physical response of materials and structures to fire. I’m interested in the weakening of materials and structures during fire… the 9/11 scenario where fires cause buildings or parts of buildings to collapse.
So why then, has sociology become so important to me?
As explanation, I hope you’ll forgive me for recounting a rather self-indulgent story of intellectual atonement.
Sir Duncan Michael, Trustee of the Ove Arup Foundation, to whom I am eternally grateful (both personally and professionally) for his support and more importantly for his prodding, will tell one story of how it is that I’ve come to work at Edinburgh, in partnership colleagues at Arup. My version of the story is somewhat simpler than his. I’ve said many times that I came to Edinburgh simply to atone for my sins.
I’ll not bore you with too many details, but my PhD in Structural Engineering, performed at Queen’s University and the National Research Council of Canada, was concerned with collapse of innovative types of columns – vertical load supporting elements in buildings – during fire.
To study this issue we did what any self respecting structural engineer would do; we performed a number of very costly and time-consuming standard tests in large scale fire testing furnace. Essentially, you take a column, you place a load on it, and you heat it in a furnace until it collapses… and in doing so you “prove” that the column is safe in a building in a fire… don’t you?
We spent about half a million dollars and several years performing these tests… we spent further years building sophisticated computer models to accurately simulate the tests and predict their outcomes… and further years interpreting the results and developing simplified design guidance. We obtained underwriters’ certified fire resistance ratings for our industrial sponsors, enabling them to sell their products to architects and developers… they were very pleased… and of course being good academics we wrote lots of papers.
And I knew that none of it truly mattered.
The testing furnace wasn’t a real fire.
The test columns weren’t real columns.
They weren’t in a real building; they didn’t interact with the rest of the building.
Essentially everything in these tests was unrealistic in some fundamental and important way.
Worse than this, the important aspects of the test results could easily have been predicted using simple hand calculations.
My tests were unnecessary. My models were misguided. I was very, very clever; but I was meaningless.
So why did we do it?
We did it because the regulatory process in North America (and in most other places) for approving use of new materials in structures requires this standard furnace testing and is willing to sacrifice rational thought and scientific understanding for compliance with the “standard”. The regulatory tail was wagging the scientific dog. I saw this, and I began to feel that I didn’t deserve my PhD.
But not so in Europe… or so I thought. This was a North American problem. Europeans, particularly Scots, are much more enlightened. So when Jose Torero at the University of Edinburgh and Barbara Lane at Arup Fire, the most advanced and innovative fire engineers in the world, came knocking, how could I resist the chance to set things right.
So I came to Scotland, began to atone for my sins, and for the past three and a bit years I’ve continued my efforts to truly understand the way that materials and structures respond to real fires in real buildings; and this is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
But all is not well. The problems I saw in North America exist also in Europe, and globally. I remain a very frustrated man. Read my letter to the Editors of Scientific American (below in the Blog) for an indication of my frustration.
These questions (and many others) can’t be answered by engineers alone, as much as I prefer to think we have all the answers and that rationality will always triumph. It’s my hope that engaging with sociologists of science, Robin and his colleagues, will help us to understand and influence our own playing field, leading to better, more rational and holistic design, and eventually to a safer and more sustainable built environment; and I hope that all of you will engage with us in this process.
My deepest thanks to the Ove Arup Foundation and the Royal Academy of Engineering for supporting this unique initiative. Thank you for listening.
The winning paper is "The Influence of Travelling Fires on a Concrete Frame"
(published in Engineering Structures 33), led by Dr Law and co-authored by Dr Stern-Gottfried, Dr Gillie and Dr Rein. The work argues that the trend towards open plan offices has changed the types of
fire likely to occur in modern buildings. It uses science to look
at ways to improve engineering guidelines and building design, reduce
the risk of travelling fires, and help insurers better quantify and
model fire risk. The presentation given by Dr Law at the award's ceremony built on the concepts of acceptable risk and the margin of error of design methods in the contextt of the engineering duty to use the world’s limited resources as efficiently as possible (see presentation here). The work was founded by BRE Trust and Arup.
| Prof Bart Merci (right) receives the award as coordinator of IMFSE |
| The award |
| During the ceremony at the Kolonienpaleis |
 |
| Members of the University of Edinburgh at the 10th IAFSS Symposium 2011. |
Researchers at the Universities of Edinburgh and Strathclyde have studied a burning Bing. A 30 m high waste heap at Bogside, North Lanarkshire, Scotland, started to smoulder (flameless combustion) in 2009, approximately 80 years after the closure of the pit. They are studying how the fires develop and spread, and hope their new understanding will enable development of a low-cost effective way to manage or extinguish the fires.
Angus Elliot - 4th Year MEng Student
Alastair and I split up for weeks 3 and 4 between Fire
Investigation and Fire Crew Operations. I did fire investigation first,
followed by a week following the watch crews at Tollcross fire station, and
Alastair vice versa. The Fire Investigation branch is based in Livingston,
shadowing the investigators whenever they were called to investigate the causes
of a fire. Unfortunately for me, Edinburgh was being very sensible and there
weren’t many call outs that week! I did however have the opportunity to
accompany them to re-investigate the cause of a fatal fire at a chip frying
factory in Duns. Picking through the wreckage of a completely destroyed
building certainly opens up your eyes to the power of fire and what it can do
to a structure.
Alastair Temple - 4th Year MEng student
Our final day with the
Service was the week after where we spent a day at The Fire Services
Training College in Gullane, this is where all new fire fighters in Scotland
go for their first 13 weeks of training after joining the Service. We got to
see quite a few new things here including our first backdraft done in the
back-yard of the centre which was really interesting to see. It also gave us
another chance to get use your newly found BA skills (something we were
definitely enjoying by this point!) in some more unusual situations as they
have a roll-over simulated gas fire to simulate flashover. This was also great
as it was the first (and only) time either of us had taken a camera down, and
getting some photos of us doing some things, was… well… definitely worth it.
Letter to the editors, September 2011
Dear Editors of the Scientific American
I am writing in response to the article “Castles in the Air” by Mark Lamster, featured in the September 2011 issue. I have struggled to find the word to describe how I feel, but I think the best would be to suggest that I am overwhelmingly disappointed.
Firstly, I am disappointed with the content and indeed with the approach Mr Lamster has taken in proposing to discuss the issues of tall building design that have apparently been addressed over the last decade as a result, or at least in part to the events on 11 September 2001. Secondly I am disheartened that this article, in my opinion, propagates almost completely the anecdotal approach the media seems to take time and time again with respect to issues of debate in engineering fields. Obviously, I don’t expect to open Scientific American and find myself faced with a selection of technical papers, however I would expect that an article designed to give readers of related or scientific fields some insight into another area, would at least be built upon the founds of the root problem to which solutions are being proudly presented.
Surely before explaining the “new” measures that have been adopted in tall building design in response to the collapse of three such buildings, one might consider, as a premise for the article, alluding to why the buildings did collapse in the first place? I find it odd that one might present answers to a problem when the problem has not actually been defined. Indeed, how is it possible to present “answers” in this circumstance?
As a professional in Fire Engineering and research, my immediate reaction was one of outrage, followed by disappointment, followed by despair. Three buildings collapsed that day due to uncontrolled fires and as a function of how the steel structures subsequently performed under such conditions. I feel that the omission of at least an acknowledgment of this fact seriously undermines any arguments or conclusions drawn in the article.
Unfortunately I feel that the inadequate definition of an accurate premise further hinders the article throughout and in fact, after reading for a while, I feel that for me, all meaning becomes lost. Certainly, I lose faith halfway through that I will find some definitive, purposeful and inspiring reports of meaningful developments within tall building design for life safety.
Mr Lamster opens with the Les Robertson remark: "I espoused… that the responsibility was to keep planes away from the buildings and not to design the buildings for that circumstance". On one hand, I fully understand this philosophy and agree that it would be impossible to design every building for an “imagined future worst case scenario”, but one has to ask at this point, if fire is not noted as a issue, and we are ignoring the attacks by hijacked planes, then what are the problems with the buildings that we will seek to address during the rest of the article?
As Fire Engineers, we do hope that fire will be kept out of buildings, but to assume that it will be so would be to miss the point entirely. Dynamic, performance-based solutions and cost effective fire engineered designs are sought to minimise the effects should an unlikely event such as a fire occur. Is it not realistic to hope rather, or at least suggest, that we will be able to design buildings where life safety will not be so severely impacted because of intuitive design and advancement of materials science in the future, as opposed to what seems to be assumed here, that buildings would need to be made “sturdier” in the traditional sense with more materials and more expense? Perhaps this is a question for engineers and persons whose sound bites appear in this article rather than the author.
"One safety-enhancing design feature that is only beginning to be
implemented is the use of sky-bridges between buildings"
Certainly, access between buildings at high levels provides more safety through increased egress options, but I struggle to agree on the appropriateness of highlighting this as one of the "new", main safety design features in response to WTC 1 & 2. A poor choice given the context.
I could go on, but I think at this point it would not be constructive to do so. In fairness, Lamster does not have much to work with. Perhaps the lack of formal examples presented here of lessons we have learned from 9/11 with respect to all aspects of tall building design, is so because, frankly they are few and far between. Certainly, with regards to fire safety, no direct changes can be cited since the problem of fire safety was never defined in the first instance. I would certainly hope that the inclusion of “radio repeaters in stair towers” [to improve fire fighter communication] does not define the evolution of fire and life safety measure development over the past decade.
The problem on that day was the subject of the accumulation of numerous independent events, however the final trigger for the catastrophic outcome was one of inadequate performance of the building structures under fire conditions. Subsequently egress was compromised due to the nature of the attacks and how these impacted on the specific design of WTC 1 and 2.
I felt disappointed mostly because I was excited to read a summary of meaningful progression in design ideas and technical thinking about a difficult and sometimes misunderstood issue, but instead was presented with an anecdotal article whose main purpose seemed to be to continue the overarching theme of the September 2011 issue that [from cover] “We have seen a brighter future, and it is urban”, and very little else.
A purposeful consideration of steps needed in order to incite meaningful changes to the way we design for fire and life safety can be read here:
http://www.ctbuh.org/Publications/Journal/911_10yrson/tabid/2684/language/en-US/Default.aspx
Article entitled “Challenging Attitudes on Codes and Safety”.
The author, Prof. Jose Torero, is Co-chair of the CTBUH Fire and Life Safety Working Group. Mr Lamster does include comments from several CTBUH members in the article, so perhaps this may be of interest?
Thank you for your time
Kind Regards
Ryan Hilditch
PhD Researcher
BRE Centre for Fire Safety Engineering
The University of Edinburgh
A group photo, taken on 28th September 2011. Includes a few new faces, a few visitors and there are quite a few people missing as well, but you rarely get everyone in the same place at the same time. Visit our Facebook page to see the tagged people.
