Welcome
Dear SFPE Europe members,
The SFPE Europe Chapter’s presidents met in Lisbon on June 7 in conjunction with the SFPE Portugal Chapter conference.
Each chapter was invited to report on its activities, best practices and difficulties.
Nicole Boston provided feedback from conferences in Rotterdam (February) and Hawaii (performance-based conference, April).
We had some discussions on how best to prepare and organise future SFPE European conference in Valencia (Spain) for the benefit of as many of our members as possible, both local and international.
The last part of our meeting was dedicated to SFPE’s strategy in Europe. A quesk8tionnaire to assist in determining priorities of SFPE in Europe has been sent to the president of each European chapter. I hope that it will be possible to share it within chapters.
I will attend the annual SFPE conference in Nashville (USA) in October. I hope that I will have the opportunity and the pleasure to meet some of you there.
Best regards,
Armelle Muller
SFPE Europe President
Chapter News
Benelux
The Benelux Chapter has worked extensively on its website and, as a direct follow-up from the Rotterdam conference, launched a technical visit to the largest building in the Netherlands — “the Rotterdam”, which full of technical fire safety innovations. On behalf of SFPE Europe, we have also been in close contact with the European Commission in regards to fire safety engineering as a relevant topic for further extension of the European Fire Information Exchange Platform, initiated by the European Commission.
France
The chapter’s general meeting was held in Paris on June 25.
We expect most of our members to attend this meeting, where the activity report and financial report (profit and loss accounts, balance sheet, budget for next year) will be presented.
The mandate for 10 out of 15 of the directors of the board will end in 2018. A ballot has to be organized during the general meeting.
The French chapter is still working on the organization of upcoming events:
- October 2018 — Breakfast conference on the Grenfell tower disaster
- January 2019 — Seminar on fire risk in the nuclear industry
Norway
SFPE Norway held its first general assembly and elected a new board. Members agreed upon the plan for the coming year, focusing on more collaboration between the chapter members. Norwegian building regulations have a category of buildings for which there are no pre-accepted solutions (brannklasse 4), and performance-based design is mandatory. This is a topic on which SFPE Norway sees need for guidance, and therefore agreed to set up a task force.
Poland
2018 was already very intense in terms of international cooperation, with conferences in Rotterdam, Honolulu and Lisbon, along with many meetings. At home, 2018 started for us with our second seminar dedicated to fire protection in shopping malls. During this seminar, Polish FPEs learn about legislative issues, make-up air strategies and problems associated with “kids-play” areas. Our seminar format includes a two-hour discussion session with invited professionals. For the next workshop, we will focus on topics associated with sprinklers. In the third quarter of the year, we are going to publish a Polish translation of the NFPA 13 standard and will use the workshop event to promote it. We hope to attract an international audience, as well as promote the NFPA approach among Polish designers.
Portugal
In March 2018, we held a roundtable in Oporto (north of Portugal) about fire risk assessment in the Portuguese fire code. Just one week after we opened registration, this event was already sold out.
In April, we organized a debate in Coimbra (centre of Portugal) about Wildland-Urban Interface fires. we had two tragic wildland fires in Coimbra in the last year, with more than 100 deaths. In this debate, speakers included the Regional Civil Protection commander who was in charge of the firefighting operations in those fires and the leader of the Inquiry Commission that is investigating the fires.
In May, we went to Portimão, in the Algarve (south of Portugal), to hold a workshop about fire safety fundamentals (fire chemistry, thermodynamics, human behaviour, etc.). This workshop took place during “Algarvesafe”, the major fire safety event held in Algarve.
In May, we also had elections for the SFPE Portugal board of directors for the biennium 2018–2020. The new board is very similar to the previous one; most of the members were reappointed for the same positions
June was an intense and fulfilling month. On June 7, SFPE Portugal hosted the SFPE Europe meeting. We had the pleasure of welcoming representatives from Benelux, France, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the USA. It was an important meeting in moving SFPE Europe forward!During this meeting, we held the inauguration ceremony for the new BoD of SFPE Portugal.
On June 8, we had the 3rd International Conference on “Fire Safety Performance-based Design”, of which we were co-organizer. We had 15 speakers from nine countries, mostly Europe, but also Hong Kong and Singapore. Some of the attendees came from very distant countries such ad Australia, Portugal’s antipode.
On June 9, we held the course “Active fire suppression — a performance-based design approach” with Luciano Nigro (Italy) and Pedro Maia (Portugal) as tutors.
On June 15, the SFPE Portugal president was one of the featured speakers in the two-day conference “Fórum Segurança”, the major fire and security event in the north of Portugal, held in Braga. It was a great opportunity to spread the word about SFPE Portugal and the performance-based design approach.
W\e are now in the final countdown for our July event: another roundtable about fire risk assessment in the Portuguese fire code, this time in Lisbon. At the same time, we are preparing our second-semester events: one debate in Lisbon, one seminar in Madeira (one of the Portuguese archipelagos), two courses and one more roundtable.
Spain
The Spanish chapter is preparing activities for the upcoming six months. We are also heavily involved in the next SFPE Europe Conference, to be held in Valencia in May 2019.
We have recently started with our Technical Committees, an initiative we believe are going to be very important for the chapter.
Sweden
SFPE Sweden held our conference on “BIV-dagarna 2018” from May 2–3. The conference, with a focus on future development, included keynote speeches from NFPA and Lund University. Birgitte Messersmith of NFPA showed new and innovative ways of collecting and using statistical data. Patrick van Hees, Lund University, gave an overview of the fire research area and thoughts regarding what we ought to focus on. Other subjects presented during the conference included challenges for the rescue service during fires in high-rise buildings, environmental effects from using different fire protection systems, new energy carriers in tunnels, the development of BIM and results from a CFD Round Robin arranged by SFPE Sweden.
United Kingdom
The main news from the UK is the introduction of the GDPR, which means that members now have to opt into receiving communications. Those who didn’t respond have been removed from the members and chapter supporters list. This appeared to halve our membership overnight!
We have reminded all members and they are helping in pushing lost members to report in, as well as encouraging new members to join. This will form the focus of activities for the next few weeks. We often found that one member was passing information over to more people within their organisation, for example.
We are also in the process of commencing elections for a new president, since my second term ends in August.