Hello. My name is Chris Jelenewicz. And I am the Engineering Program Manager with the Society of Fire Protection Engineers. And today I'll be talking about the Profession of Fire Protection Engineering. Specifically, I'm gonna talk about why fire is a noteworthy problem and actually it's a much bigger problem than you probably even thought. And second, I'm gonna talk about how Fire Protection Engineers design ways to protect people, property and our environment from fire. During this presentation, fire departments across the United States of America will respond to about 12 structural fires. That's 12 legitimate fires where a building is on fire. We're not talking about false alarms where somebody pulled a fire alarm and tried to run out of the building. These are your homes. The place where you send your kids to school or maybe where you work. And unfortunately during our lifetime we will always have fires no matter how hard we try to prevent these fires. And it's the fire protection engineers mission, or their number one goal, is to make sure that when there is a fire, you get out alive and you're not injured. And their secondary goal is to ensure that damage to property and the environment is minimized. So what is a fire protection engineer? Well, fire protection engineers use science and technology to make our world safe from fire. The important parts of this definition is that we use science and technology. These are the things you learn in physics, chemistry, mathematics, thermodynamics, fluid mechanics. We take these theories of science and adapt them to practice and find new technologies. So that when a fire occurs, people will be protected. So, you ask, why do we need fire protection engineers? Well first of all, each year in the United States about 3,000 people will die as a result of fire. An interesting fact about this statistic is that about 80% of these fire deaths occur in our home. And the home is the one place where people feel the safest from fire. Additionally, thousands of people every year are injured as a result of fire. And a lot of times these injuries are very bad, where people will spend lots of time in a hospital, or a lot of times in a burn ward. Additionally, about 100 of our nations firefighters will die in the line of duty. They die responding to the fire, they respond operating at the fire, coming home from the fire, or training for these fires. And that's why fire protection engineers are important to protect people from fire. And once every several years, we see a catastrophic fire. When we're talking about a catastrophic fire, we're talking about fires where many people die, or a lot of firefighters die as a result of the fire. The one catastrophic fire I'm gonna talk about today occurred on February 20th, 2003. In a little town of West Warwick, Rhode Island at the Station nightclub. On the night of this fire, over 400 people came to see an 80s revival band called Great White. Unfortunately 100 people died in this fire. 100 people did not make it home that night as a result of the fire you're about to see. When I show this video, you're gonna see in the background, some indoor pyrotechnics. These indoor pyrotechnics called, Gerbs which are high-octane sparklers basically, ignited some flammable wall finish. Once the flammable wall finish was ignited you'll see a very fast moving fire. The fire moves so fast that 100 people could not get out alive. If you look, when the camera turns back to the band you will see the flames starting on that wall finish. Now it's fires like these that really can tear apart communities. Everybody in that community knew somebody who died that day. Whether it was their mothers or fathers, their sons, their daughters, their friends, their cousins, the people they work with, died in this fire. And, additionally, because there were so many people that died that night, people start to place blame. Was it the building's owner? Was he responsible for this fire? Was it the band that decided to ignite those indoor pyrotechnics? Or was it the fire marshal that was out, the coder who was asked to come out and inspect this building and make sure the building was safe from fire. An interesting note about this fire? Fire protection engineers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology we're asked to investigate this fire. They used the most complicated computer fire models. They went in to a laboratory and recreated parts of this building, and did fire tests to see how this fire burned. And what they found out was that if proper fire protection existed in this building at the time of the fire nobody would die. Specifically they said if an automatic sprinkler system was installed in this building, a simple system as an automatic sprinkler system, there would have been zero deaths. Additionally, there are other costs of fire. For example, every year about $11 billion in property damage results from fire. Another thing that a lot of people don't think about is business interruption. Can you imagine coming to work some day and the building you work in burnt down to the ground from a fire. That was the case on February 23rd, 1991, at One Meridian Plaza, a high-rise fire in the middle of downtown Philadelphia. 1991, we have a highrise fire that is so bad. The building was damaged so bad that they had to demolish a highrise building in the middle of downtown Philadelphia. Unfortunately, three firefighters also died in this building. They were operating on one of the upper floors. They ran out of air. They tried to tell the command center that they were lost, that they ran out of air, but unfortunately they told them the wrong location. And unfortunately three fire fighters died that night.
