All,
Welcome to this year’s second issue. Our changes to management procedures and other systems have really paid off. We are still in an improvement phase, and will be during this first year of the new approach, but all involved – especially the staff working directly with the magazine – have noticed that we are more efficient. There will be no problem with keeping to our production plan.
As always, you will find interesting articles, most of them with direct implications for our day-to-day work as professionals in the fire safety industry. I would like to give special mention to the one focused on research. That article describes a research project, the 2017 Chief Donald J. Burns Memorial Research Grant of the SFPE Foundation, that is ongoing at the Main School of Fire Service in Poland. The idea is to develop a system that uses simple radio beacons attached to existing smoke detectors to identify the location of firefighters during an intervention.
This is one of many ways that building design can aid in the intervention process. This very specific example is to some degree “high tech,” but there are so many other ways that we as engineers can improve safety and make intervention easier for firefighters.
There is no doubt that we will still have fires in buildings, even if we gradually improve the ways we build and design buildings. As fire safety engineers, I believe we have an obligation to attempt to influence design to make the job a bit easier for the intervention team when a fire occurs. Such a “simple” thing as increasing the width of a door from 0.80 m to 1.10 m, even it is not required by code, will have a positive impact on an intervention. Numerous other “small” things can be done while still keeping the client’s best interests in mind. The next time you are the fire engineer on a project, try to speak to the authorities to understand what is important for them and how the building design can help them, and see what you achieve.
If there are readers out there who feel they have important information or projects to share with our industry, please do not hesitate to contact us. We can make that happen.
As always, our thanks to the people who have put in a lot of time and effort to make this issue a reality.
The next issue will come out in September.
Yours sincerely,
Jimmy Jönsson, Managing Editor