All,
I really hope you are well and have enjoyed the summer holidays. It seemed for a while there that things were heading back towards a normal situation, but now it looks like we are heading into the second wave of Covid-19 and all that comes with that.
Anyhow, it is time for the third issue of the year and as always, we have some interesting articles for all of you. For this issue, we have put together seven high-quality articles, all with quite a spread regarding the technical level, applicability to projects and themes. Our technical articles have some hot topics such as facades and garage fires while others show us some great research data.
While all articles stand out as relevant and interesting there are two articles that I would like to highlight because it is two areas where SFPE plays a fundamental role as a provider of knowledge and information to our community. The first article I would like to mention is the one about developing fire safety engineering in Africa; our Core Competencies and our Model Curriculum will make a difference. The second article is about our RTM (SFPE’s Standing Committee for Research, Tools and Methods (the so-called ‘RTM’) and the work being done to make performance-based design a recognized and useful tool for our discipline.
The SFPE mission is not limited to our members, the real value is what we can do for all people affected by fire safety. Our activities and initiatives are applicable to engineering but the overall objective behind them it to make the world a safer place. This is something that we forget sometimes, we think more about specific issues than about the why, we cannot allow ourselves to lose focus of our vision and our mission statement “To define, develop, and advance the use of engineering best practices; expand the scientific and technical knowledge base; and educate the global fire safety community, to reduce fire risk”.
If there are readers out there that feel that you have an important subject that you would like to share with the industry do not hesitate to contact us, we can make that happen.
As always, a great thanks to the people who have put in a lot of time and effort to make this issue a reality; especially to our Editorial Board members and SFPE staff.
The next issue will come in December.
Yours sincerely,
Jimmy Jönsson, Managing Editor