Developing fire safety engineering as a practice in Canada

Abstract

The goal of fire safety engineering (FSE) is to design a strategy that meets human safety and property protection goals with an optimized solution. In comparison to international practice, Canada could be considered highly underdeveloped in a technical perspective of performance versus prescription. In Canada, FSE is a subdivision within civil and mechanical engineering, rather than treated as a profession in and of itself. With a requirement for more complex infrastructure to meet Canadian societal needs, there is stimulus that is fostering a demand to create professionals educated with FSE skill sets. This literary study therefore aims to present a state-of-the-art review of the design practice of FSE in Canada and abroad with explicit focus on performance-based fire design for the Canadian practitioner who seeks to develop their expertise in this subject.

Response to Vytenis Babrauskas “Comments on “The Historical Narrative of the Standard Temperature–Time Heating Curve for Structures” by Gales, et al.”

“…Dr. Babrauskas' letter which provides early context to modelling is useful for this endeavour as well. We believe, though not limited: such an endeavour will need to carefully consider the barriers to performance-based fire design as discussed above; that the history of structural modelling in fire is very intertwined with the standard time-temperature curve for their development, and not necessarily linked towards critical material changes that may occur in real fires; and that the slower uptake of performance based methodologies is not completely related to the high processing of a computer but also to the growth of competency of the profession (though a multitude of societal and professional educational programs are emerging today [25] to facilitate adoption, this is still a slow process and has limitations as explored above). For the last example, prominent fire scientist Philip Thomas once remarked in 1986, ''More and more people are using computer codes to make calculations and predictions of the possible outcome of a fire.…”