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 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.
The prevention of fire and explosions in dusty occupancies has been studied for over a century and consequently, the mechanisms of fire and explosions are well understood. The key codes and standards set out good practices to prevent and mitigate the impact of fires and explosions in various processes but relatively few professionals are experienced in conducting a complete analysis of the actual conditions in real manufacturing plants. John Bachynski B.Sc. P.Eng. will present an overview of factors leading to dust explosions and summarise state of the art approaches to explosion prevention and systems to mitigate the damage that can otherwise result.
On Tuesday September 30, the BC chapter was graced with the presence of speaker Alexander Maranghides from NIST, and special visitor Vyto Babrauskas- formerly of NIST- who accompanied him from Seattle. The presentation drew many members, including representatives from the insurance community.
The effect of forest fires on fire risk in communities is rarely defined or assessed on a relative scale. While fire modelling of structural fires is reasonably well developed for certain fire scenarios, the modelling of wildfires is in its infancy. In his recent SFPE articles Alexander Maranghides presented a new indexing approach to assessing the wild fire risk to communities. The method takes the various parameters that determine fire spread in wild fire situations- such as topography, ground cover, separation, construction etc.- and assigned it a relative index.
