Although fire safety engineering is a growing profession, ‘fundamental’ academic research into the discipline has shrunk in the last 20-30 years, according to leading fire engineering academic, professor Jose Torero.
Speaking last month at a review of fire engineering projects carried out for the BRE Trust, professor Torero warned that the lack of fundamental research threatened to compromise fire safety in the future. Although in the last 20 years there has been a tenfold increase in fire engineering consultancy, this didn’t necessarily augur well for the effectiveness of the discipline.
He distinguished fundamental research from applied research projects which, though addressing specific needs, lacked the potential to deepen and widen our understanding of fire behaviour, and ultimately to make breakthrough findings.
In the aftermath of the collapse of the twin towers in New York after the 9/11 attacks, for example, scientists were unable to find substantive research into the behaviour of fires in tall buildings. “The research infrastructure was reduced and dispersed, so there was not enough of a basis on which to conduct fire modelling and forensic research,” he said. “The result is that nobody knows exactly why the towers collapsed.”
Consultants use fire modelling thinking the tools are robust, but they are not always based on solid data. “The risk is that technology overwhelms us and in the end we reach a situation where we don’t even know what we don’t know,” he concluded.
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