2008 Symposium

by Kathleen Almand
Executive Director of the Fire Protection Research Foundation

On November 17 and 18, 130 leaders from the research, engineering, fire service, facility fire protection and manufacturing fields gathered in the Rotunda of the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, DC, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Fire Protection Research Foundation.

James Shannon, President of the National Fire Protection Association, described past accomplishments of the Foundation including research to support the use of alternatives to environmentally harmful halon fire extinguishers, new sprinkler technology, and detection systems. He announced the creation of a $6 million endowment for the Foundation which will ensure its future role in facilitating research in support of enhancing the technical basis of NFPA’s codes and standards. He challenged participants to focus on the problems for the next generation.

The symposium consisted of a series of keynote speakers from outside the fire protection community who set the stage with anticipated major changes in the societal, technological and environmental context; panels of industry leaders then presented their views on the impact of these changes on fire safety.

Dr. Kevin McCarthy, Senior Social Scientist at the RAND Corporation provided the demographic context for future fire safety. The U.S. population will grow by 1% or 3 million people per year for the next 25 years; immigration will account for 40% of that growth. Population increase will primarily occur in six southern and western states and will increasingly concentrate in urban areas. The median age of the population will grow from 35 to 38 years with a corresponding shrinkage in the working population and growth in the senior population from 12.5 to 20%. These factors together will result in more single person households with consequent changes in housing type. The Asian and Hispanic proportion of the population will grow from 22 to 34%; they will comprise 70% of immigrants.

What are the impacts for fire safety? Symposium panelists agreed that the aging and consequent increasingly disabled population will impact needed building fire protection features. Concentration of population will result in demands for fire protection services and the infrastructure (for example water, roads) needed to support them. Public fire safety education programs will need to adjust to the change in demographics, including cultural and language changes. Finally, the decline in the labor force as a percentage of the overall population will require that we effectively use our human resources for fire safety – through, for example, targeted allocation and collaboration.

Dr. Philip Anton, Director, Acquisition and Technology Policy Center at the RAND Corporation, provided the changing technological and materials context for future fire safety. He focused on information availability and utility, biotechnology, and smart materials and nanotechnologies as areas where big technological leaps are expected. Symposium panelists agreed that with these new developments come new concerns for society at large which will also affect fire protection – for example privacy and ethics concerns related to information access and unknown fire and health hazards associated with new materials. However, these new technologies also provide great promise for fire safety. Firefighting will benefit from robotics, decisions support and communications technologies, and advanced sensors. The ability to “design” materials and fire protection systems will lead to hazard mitigation and more efficient use of fire protection resources.

Shere Abbott, Director of the Center for Science and Practice of Sustainability at the University of Texas at Austin, challenged participants with the threats to a sustainable global environment in the future. Three global trends are impacting our ability to sustain our quality of life on the planet: the global population is growing (25% in the next twenty five years); we are increasing our consumption on a per capita basis (for example our consumption of energy in the past fifty years is twice the growth of our population); and we are having an impact on our environment. Climate change is one visible symptom of this impact. The earth is getting hotter and weather patterns are disrupted, resulting in an increase of catastrophic storms, uneven precipitation patterns, and consequent habitat changes. Strategies must be implemented to reduce the impact of man on the environment to move toward a sustainable ecosystem.

Symposium panelists agreed that there is a complex interaction between fire safety and sustainable development. New hazards, such as the increased frequency and size of wildland fires, and emerging alternative energy and fuel sources will need to be addressed. Concurrently, the environmental impact of traditional fire protection strategies, such as fire retardant chemicals and water usage for fire suppression will be challenged. Life and property loss from fire must not be compromised in a world of competing demands for limited resources.

As the participants in the symposium reflected on future trends and their impact for fire safety, Dr. Craig Beyler, Technical Director, Hughes Associates, Inc., presented a retrospective on the vision of the 21st century from one of our professions leaders – the late Dr. Howard Emmons, Harvard University professor and one of the fathers of the field of fire safety science. Twenty-five years ago, Dr. Emmons predicted the future state of our ability to evaluate fire risk and associated mitigation strategies. He was optimistic about our continued abilities to move toward performance based design but reflected that modeling and engineering enhancement will not have nearly as much impact on safety as other external issues, such as those discussed in this symposium.

In her concluding remarks, Kathleen Almand, Executive Director of the Foundation, challenged participants to work with the Foundation to address fire safety in the context of the grand challenges and opportunities facing our society and to shape the Foundation’s research direction as it begins its second 25 years.

Symposium Panelists

Paul A. Hough, Armstrong World Industries, Inc
William E. Koffel, Koffel Associates, Inc.
Larry McKenna, U.S. Fire Administration
Azarang (Ozzie) Mirkhah, City of Las Vegas Fire Department
Kathy Notarianni, Department of Fire Protection Engineering, WPI
Stacy Welch, Marriott International
Robert Boyer, GE Security
John Dean, Maine State Fire Marshal
Russell Fleming, National Fire Sprinkler Association
Anthony Hamins, Building and Fire Research Institute, NIST
Bob Khan, Chief, Phoenix Fire Department
Ian Stronach, Rio Tinto Alcan
Ed Altizer, Virginia State Fire Marshal
James Golinveaux, Tyco Fire Suppression and Building Products
Jonathan Hall, FM Global
Jim Pauley, Schneider Electric/Square D
William Stewart, Chief, Toronto Fire Services
Ian Thomas, Victoria University, Australia