Welcome to the Web page for the British Columbia Chapter of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers. This webpage is for members of the chapter and for those interested in fire protection engineering in British Columbia.
The reconstruction of fire scenarios using modelling and other techniques is not new. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has been employed for some years now in the design of fire protection systems as part of the fire and life safety design of buildings, in particular smoke control. Property protection is also an important consideration, where large fires can have a devastating impact on business continuity and be the result of long and expensive legal enquiries.
CFD is now also used routinely in fire forensics, where knowledge of the fire risks and fire protection systems in such situations is essential in the analysis of the fire, and the forensic team has to bring different skill sets to the production of the forensic report. In these often detailed and complex cases, CFD may be but one component of the overall analysis, fitting into a wider probabilistic analysis. Here, event tree modelling can play a very important role, allowing the relative importance of various factors, e.g. sprinkler system failure, to be quantified. CFD may be employed as a ‘calibration’ tool, examining a sub-set of critical scenarios in detail.
Mike van Geyn of Firestance Professional Services Ltd and John Ivison and Associates have spent almost 3 years working on two vintage wood frame buildings in the lower mainland. The first building had property use issues, rodent infestations, mould, plumbing leaks and remediation issues associated with asbestos containing materials. The decision by the Owners was to replace the plumbing systems and the building boilers/plumbing fixtures, kitchen and bathroom cabinets etc. Existing patches in fire separations had to be fire tested.
The risk of transformer loss due to fire and explosion have been studied for over half a century; however, failure to fully address transformer risks in underground, transportation and other networks, in commercial -and also existing building projects- continues to be a concern. Recent losses have shown the impact and subsequent damage that can occur. While transportation network fires for instance are often the subject of CFD modelling, this tends to focus on different fire scenarios that can understate the risk arising from fires originating in transformers in the system.
