Sustainable Future And Burning Issues Episodes

A carbon budget can feel like a hard wall in modern building design, and once you treat CO2 as currency, everything starts competing for a slice of it. The problem is that fire safety systems often show up in those spreadsheets only as a penalty: extra embodied carbon for sprinklers, alarms, and protection. What gets ignored is the payoff. A serious fire can erase years of “sustainable” choices through demolition, replacement materials, repair labor, and lost building value, all with a very real...

A fire in an informal settlement is not just another small building fire. It can be the first domino in a fast-moving neighborhood event, and the little details like the wall material, roof material, door location, even a light breeze, can decide what happens next. I’m joined by Dr. Sam Stevens from Kindling to unpack a massive FSRI funded experimental program carried out in South Africa that burned twenty different informal and humanitarian shelter types to measure real heat flux, flame extensi...

Demand for the energy storage is as high as ever, and is about to triple-quadruple. The development of technology is at unprecedented phase, and even within a single project you may face different cell, battery or container generations. This pace reshapes how we think about battery energy storage safety, from enclosure design to emergency response. We sat down with Noah Ryder from the Fire and Risk Alliance to unpack how BESS has evolved from walk-in containers to dense, modular “refrigerator” u...

This week, in the Fire Science Show, we host a roundtable discussion on complexities in fire safety science and engineering. Most safety failures don’t come from a single mistake—they emerge when people, technology, and institutions misalign. In an ever-changing field in which complexities just go up, we open up a debate on how to cope with that so that the entire field goes in the right direction. For this podcast roundtable debate, I've invited Steve McGuirk, who represents Fire Sector Confed...

Episode 200! And for this special episode, I've travelled to London to interview Prof. Guillermo Rein and Dr Matt Bonner on a piece of research carried out at Imperial College London, with the experiments performed in our laboratory at the ITB. In this episode, we discuss the concept of flammability of the building facades and how this flammability is assessed with different testing methods available in the world. You could argue that every country has their own method, and in some case...

The devastating impact of waste and recycling industry fires costs approximately $2.5 billion annually in the US and Canada alone, with lithium-ion batteries causing roughly 50% of these incidents. In this episode with Ryan Fogelman from Fire Rover, we discuss: • Understanding the scale of waste facility fires and why traditional fire protection methods often fail in these environments • How lithium-ion batteries have created a "hockey stick" rise in fire incidents since 2015 • The "vape effect...

In this podcast episode, we host Rebekah Schrader, Joseph Willi, Daniel Gorham and Gavin Horn, all from the FSRI, to cover their recent experimental research on fire spread through external walls. This is part 1 of the interview - the background, rationale and context. In part 2, we cover the experiments themselves, findings and actionable guidance from the experiments. This research is conducted within the context of structure-to-structure fire spread, potentially in urban conflagration scenar...

In the aftermath of the LA Pacific Palisades Fire, I've decided that instead of inviting one expert to discuss the event, I will give a voice back to those who already participated in the Fire Science Show and explained this fire (months and years before it happened). In this episode, we recap Wildland-Urban Interface fires, with a focus on the "urban" part. We cover conditions in which such fires may happen and factors that contribute. We discuss the role of community preparedness and pathways...

I just drove 500 km to have a conversation with Professor Vincent Brannigan from the University of Maryland, a very unique expert who combines law with fire engineering. In this discussion, we go into the complexities of building codes and fire safety, comparing traditional design methods (prescriptive) with performance-based designs (and all the stuff in between them). Through anecdotes and historical fire incidents, we highlight the impact of these systems on societal safety, economic developm...

Wildfire modelling is quite complicated when you wish to integrate different fuel packages with different properties in 'real' environmental conditions while managing the transition to/from smouldering. We have a model for each, but how do we make them work in unison without relying too much on their users' skills? This is a subject for a good research grant... a very big one. And this is something 'we' just got! A fire scientist from King's College London, Dr Francesco Restuccia, has just secu...

Fires in the waste industry are not discussed much unless one sees a giant smoke plume in the media, followed by advice to close your windows. In these (rare?) cases, we remind ourselves of the massive industry related to storing, sorting and recycling garbage, and the obvious environmental hazards such fires pose. From 2017 to 2020, Poland experienced a challenging time with fires at landfills, primarily caused by arson or negligence. A bit later, when I was working on my chapter for the Handb...

In the everchanging world every now and then we get a new driver, that dictates most of our choices. In the current built environment and building industry, carbon dioxide feels like such a driver. We don't like it, we want to get rid of it... One way is to sequester or store large amounts of CO2 in our buildings. Ways to do that - more obvious is mass timber, but thats not the only thing. Let's talk bio-based insulation. In this episode I've invited Patrick Sudhoff, now from DBI but the resear...

Misconceptions in fire science are a strange thing. You present countless proof, publish research papers, and carry conversations, and yet… they live their own lives—spreading with no control and cluttering communication. One space is full of them—the fire safety of photovoltaic installations on flat roofs. In the Fire Science Show, we already had two very powerful episodes on PV—one with Jens Kristensen and one more recently with Reidar Stølen. In today's episode, we highlight a new guidelin...

Wind turbine fires - are they an issue, or are they not? In this episode, I am joined by Prof. Guillermo Rein of the Imperial College London, who raised this issue 10 years ago at the IAFSS conference, and I believe we still do not have a clear answer. In this episode, we discuss the fire safety of wind turbines using the layers of protection framework - from suppression, detection, and prevention to firefighting. We have discussed the challenges with evacuation and the subsequent fires trigger...

In this episode of the Fire Science Show we go in depth on the Building Integrated Photo-Voltaic systems (BIPV). It is a topic relevant to many fire engineers, and one on which it is very difficult to find a lot of information about. For this purpose I’ve invited Reidar Stølen from RISE and a PhD candidate at Norwegian University of Science and Technology – NTNU. Reidar has hands-on experience with fire testing BIPV façade, as he has performed such experiments with the Swedish test method for a...

In this episode, we discuss the stark realities of fire safety engineering in South Africa (and beyond) as we sit down with Professor Richard Walls from Stellenbosch University. Our journey through the recent history of devastating fires, from truck blasts to the fire that took down the SA Parliament building, lays bare the critical gaps in resources, awareness and education that have catastrophic consequences. Professor Walls's expertise guides us through the complexities of local building cod...

In this episode, I am joined by Dr. Carmen Górska from OFR Consultants, the recent IAFSS Phillip Thomas Award recipient for the best paper at the previous IAFSS Symposium. In this interview, we touch on preconceived notions about fire dynamics in timber compartments, and Carmen explains how she has learned the intricate physics behind it. The research discussed covers dozens of medium-scale timber (CLT) compartments with different amounts of exposed timber. The findings relate to the conditions...

Today we go deep into how statistical data about fires is gathered, processed, and used around the world, and what are the ideas on how to improve this in the future. My guests represent the EU FireStat Project - Dr Mohamad El Houssami from Effectis and Dr Martina Manes from the University of Liverpool. EU FireStat is a groundbreaking initiative that aims to fill data gaps and foster cross-European collaborations in the field of fire safety. The conversation takes a deep dive into the necessity...

In today's episode, I have invited dr Eleni Asimakopoulou from the University of Central Lancashire to discuss her extensive expertise on fire behaviour of facades. In the talk, we will go through Elenis' experiments on ventilated facades (and clear out what they are and why we use them). We do discuss the complexities of testing facade systems. We traverse through the global testing landscape, comparing diverse methods ranging from the German DIN4102 to its American NFPA counterpart. We discuss...

In the midst of horrible wildfire season around the globe, I have reached out to Prof. Albert Simeoni from Worcester Polytechnic Institute for some hands-on commentary on what is happening around, and why fires all over the globe are constantly on the front pages of mainstream media. I am not sure if I was ready for all the answers received (especially how media are biased to fires in certain parts of the world and pretty silent about others)... But they certainly are great food for thought in c...

Energy storage systems are vital systems in fuel transition and as a part of technology responding to the challenges of climate change. Not only for their capability to store energy but also for exploring strategies like peak shaving or allowing for more distributed energy generation. In this discussion, we consider them as fixed storage systems but also recognize that moveable load such as vehicles poses similar challenges. Even though fire safety energy storage is still a part of academic dis...

This time we try out something new! Instead of interviewing experts on subjects of their expertise, this time I took world-class risk specialists for a brainstorming session. And while sitting together, we discussed something out of this world - the fire safety of Mars habitats. This podcast episode is literally a recording of the conversation between the panellists, it is very unscripted and lightly edited. I really hope you will feel like a part of this conversation, and if you would like to ...

This week in place of a normal episode I would like to share an interview I gave to my friend Kevin Sofen in his podcast. In this episode I am interviewed by Kevin on the science of fire, how I understand the built environment and the challenges it brings. Kevin asks me some really tough questions, like what the fire-safe world is, and how to innovate in space of the fire engineering. I have highly enjoyed this discussion, and if you have not heard it at the Smart Firefighting Podcast, I hope yo...

Innovation is a big world. A digital innovation sounds even bigger. But it is in fact our reality - we live in a world of constant change and "improvements". Many of those come to us in form of digital technologies, information processing or simply computer codes and tools. And I would say more often than not, these are not very helpful... If you share this point of view with me, you will rejoice in this podcast episode. I have invited Michael Strömgren who is the Chief Innovation Officer at BR...